The price of hotel rooms in the Caribbean is in freefall, with hoteliers slashing upwards of 20% from the cost of a stay in a desperate bid to attract visitors. Bookings for breaks in the region have plummeted by as much as two-thirds against last year.

The hefty discounts should be great news for cash-strapped, sun-starved British families, but there’s a problem: the hotels have negotiated the deals with tour operators, some of whom are still considering whether to pass on the saving to consumers.

At a private briefing to bankers, the holiday giant TUI, which owns Britain’s biggest tour operators, Thomson and First Choice, said it felt no obligation to pass the savings on.

Asked by an executive from Morgan Stanley whether the company would reflect the reduced hotel rates in its prices, TUI’s chief financial officer, Paul Bowtell, was noncommittal. “There is no hard and fast rule,” he said. “If we want to use some of that supply of funding to generate a little bit of demand, then we will do that and we will pass it through . . . as the rate of sale improves, then we will hold some of it back.”

Hardly lovable; and somewhat irksome for increasingly desperate Caribbean hoteliers, who offered the discounts precisely because they wanted to generate demand. The slump has already led to a wave of lay-offs in the region, and simmering discontent in tourism-dependent communities. Belize’s prime minister, Dean Barrow, warned that unless immediate action is taken to reverse the region’s tourism disaster, “a large proportion of our populations will regress into poverty”.

Fortunately, not all tour operators are waiting to see how bad it can get before passing on the savings. Carrier (carrier.co.uk) is offering a week for a family of four at Barbados’s swanky Sandy Lane for £5,775pp, a staggering saving of £7,050 – or 55%. The deal is valid until September 20, but must be booked by May 13.

Harlequin Holidays (0845 277 3397) has knocked £870pp off a week at the haut-luxe Raffles Canouan, in the Grenadines: the price, valid until June 30, then from September 1 to December 10, is now £1,616pp.

Kuoni (01306 747002) has a week at the Almond Beach Club, in Barbados, for £1,074pp, saving £622pp, and one at the Sandals Royal Bahamanian all-inclusive, in Nassau – not strictly in the Caribbean, but it’s sunny – for £1,729pp, saving £623.

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