Different venue. Different market. Same story. The message from last week’s inaugural Caribbean Hotel & Resort Investment Summit in Miami closely echoed the themes everyone heard at the Americas Lodging Investment Summit last month in San Diego. Despite the lousy operating and financial environments, most speakers and attendees at CHRIS struck a note of optimism that business will improve this year and, more importantly, the logjam of expected transactions will soon break.

“The region faces a long upward climb,” said Simon Townend, managing director of KPMG Corporate Finance, “but the general view is the Caribbean is resilient. There are many high-desirable resort locations in the area. The hotels are much more efficient than they once were, and the region is next door to 900 million people who live in the Americas.”

A lot of attendees and speakers are unsure of where the region’s tourism industry is headed in the short term. A pre-conference survey showed 38 percent of attendees believe a turnaround in the Caribbean won’t come until 2011. Another 31 percent said better times will arrive by the third quarter of the year. About 40 percent of attendees think Caribbean hotels will have flat RevPARs this year.

While times have been tough in the region, it performed better than the rest of the world, reported several speakers. Jean-Claude Baumgarten of the World Travel & Tourism Council said air arrivals to the Caribbean were down 2.4 percent last year, exactly half of the worldwide average. “And a few of the Caribbean countries, notably Jamaica and Dominican Republic, posted higher arrival numbers than the average for the region,” he said. And while he predicted a flat year for Caribbean hotels and resorts this year, Baumgarten believes tourism’s contribution to the region’s GDP will rise from the current 10.8 percent to 12 percent or higher by the end of the decade.

Mark Lomanno of Smith Travel Research was less cheery in his assessment of the region’s hotel performance. Occupancy fell 4.1 percent last year, following a 3.9-percent drop in 2008. Rates took a beating, too, sinking 13.5 percent last year and 11 percent in ’08. Even more telling, according to Lomanno, occupancy in the Caribbean is off 10 points and rates are down $45 from pre-recession peaks.

For 2010, STR forecasts a slight uptick in occupancies, continued pressure on rates and RevPAR declines of between three and six percent.

The news isn’t much better on the transactions and development front. Townend of KPMG said foreign investment in the Caribbean is down 40 percent since 2008, and 20 proposed resort projects had been cancelled through the third quarter of 2009.

Saying it will take five years for values to rebuild in the Caribbean, David Larone of PKF Consulting still thinks deals will happen soon. “There’s a lot of cash ready to enter this market, but most of it is waiting for owners to blink,” he said. “They’ll be more product to market and more equity in play in 2010 than there was last year.”

Not all the action is confined to big-box, beachfront resorts. Marta Seal, vice president of the Caribbean Property Group, said one of the company’s opportunity funds produced 15 percent cash-on-cash returns largely through investments in select-service properties in the Caribbean.

“There are a lot of opportunities in this arena,” she said, “particularly in commercial centers like San Juan, Trinidad and a few other locations.”

On the other hand, David Brillembourg, chairman & CEO of Brilla Group, believes the action remains in the luxury sector, in particular the several proposed projects in the region that were abandoned before completion.

“The most bang for the buck will be in these half-baked projects,” he said. “For a variety of reasons, they can be difficult to finish but worth it if you can pull it off.”