LBC’s latest Latin Tourism Index shows Peru experienced the strongest y.o.y. growth in tourist arrivals in 2013.
By Mark Keller
Latin America – with its diverse natural beauty, pristine beaches, world-famous cuisine, and lively nightlife – continued to attract record numbers of tourists last year, contributing some $72 billion to the region’s economy – or 1.2 percent of GDP. Of course, there was large diversity between countries – with some countries attracting tens of millions of tourists, while others received only a few hundred thousand.
The Latin Tourism Index is an annual index published by Latin Business Chronicle that looks at several factors relevant to the tourism industry, such as number of arrivals and tourism receipts. It also measures the relative effect of tourism on a given country’s GDP, and how the number of arrivals compared with a country’s overall population.
Due to insufficient data, statistics from Bolivia and Venezuela were not included in this year’s ranking, which may make comparisons with past rankings difficult. These omissions were however taken into account for calculating year over year change.
The largest recipient of foreign tourists in Latin America remains Mexico, which last year received 23.7 million visitors – more than one quarter of the 81.5 million that visited the region last year, and represented 1.4 percent year-over-year. These tourists brought in $13.8 billion to the economy, or roughly 1.1 percent of Mexico’s GDP.
The number of arrivals in Mexico is almost quadruple that of second-place Brazil, which received an estimated 6 million visitors last year, who brought $6.7 billion to the economy, or 0.3 percent of GDP – making Brazil the Latin American country least dependent on tourism. Neighboring Argentina received 5.7 million tourists, who spent $4.4 billion, or 0.9 percent of GDP.
In terms of spending, Mexico tops the list, followed by Brazil – but the Dominican Republic comes in third place, with 4.6 million tourists spending $5.1 billion last year. The Dominican Republic is the country most dependent on tourism in Latin America, with the industry accounting for 8.4 percent of GDP. Panama and Costa Rica round out the top 3 for most tourism dependent countries, with tourism accounting for 8.2 and 5 percent of their GDPs, respectively.
In terms of arrivals, Peru saw the largest growth year over year, with tourism arrivals up 11.2 percent to 3.1 million. Ecuador also saw significant growth with arrivals up 7.4 percent to 1.3 million. These two countries also saw the largest year over year increases in tourism receipts. Ecuador led the way with receipts up 20.6 percent to $1.2 billion, with Peru in second place, up 13.2 percent to $3 billion. This increased growth in Peru coincides with a recent ranking by Mastercard – the Global Destination Cities Index – which placed Peru’s capital Lima as the number only Latin American city to make it in the top 20 by number of international arrivals.
Both Argentina and Uruguay were the only countries in our index to see declines in arrivals, though both were slight: Argentina was down 0.3 percent, while Uruguay was down 0.4 percent. Both declines probably owe themselves to domestic instability and inflation in Argentina. For Argentina, currency controls and the domestic situation drew fewer tourists. In turn, the difficult economic situation in that country led fewer Argentines to travel to Uruguay. Both countries also saw the largest declines in tourism receipts: Argentina saw them down 9.7 percent, while Uruguay’s fell 7.5 percent. This is particularly difficult for Uruguay, where tourism counts for 3.4 percent of GDP.
The only other country to see a decline in tourism receipts was Nicaragua, where they were down 1.2 percent, even as the number of visitors to the country grew 4.2 percent.
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