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Costa Rican Tourism Minister Forebodes Double-Digits Growth for own Sector |
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Costa Rica's Tourism Minister Rodrigo Castro said his country's travel industry will grow at least 12 percent this year, a similar figure to 2003 when the Central American nation chalked up $1.3 billion worth of hard-currency revenues.
Costa Rica is marching strong on its way to crack the three-million-tourist plateau by the year 2012, according to the original plan sketched out by this administration a couple of years ago.
Speaking in a press conference, Mr. Castro warned that after a decade of steady growth, the sector must now begin a planning process aimed at preventing a disorderly growing pace that could eventually affect the nation's resources and hurt the quality of the tourist product.
Mr. Castro went on to explain that every vacationer visiting Costa Rica spends an average $110 a day, by far one of the world's highest ratios according to international standards, and added that each foreign traveler averages an eleven-day stay in the country.
Another major feather in the local leisure sector's hat is its contribution to the democratization of the national economy by fostering the development of formerly distraught rural areas.
The Central American Institute of Entrepreneurial Management indicates that, in that sense, eighty cents out of every dollar spent by foreign trippers in Costa Rica remain in the country.
Mr. Castro concluded that this new "better-planned" development stage has just begun with the division of the country in ten regions in an effort to find out what kind of tourism can be carried out in them and whether a certain region is fit to assimilate a particular modality.
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