Costa Rica is looking to build its nautical tourism offering, as part of its efforts to return to 2019 visitor numbers.
Costa Rica’s new tourism minister William Rodriguez told Travel Weekly about the country’s plans to use new areas of the market to drive visitor numbers back to 2019 levels, a key priority by 2023, at World Travel Market.
“My perception is that we are going to end this year in about 2.3/2.4 million visitors, which is not that far away from 2019 – 700,000 less than 2019. So we have to use new tools, and new segments of the market that we haven’t tried yet,” he said.
“We are well known in adventure, we are well known in biodiversity, we are well known in beaches, sunshine and all that stuff. But we have to develop some other niches that permit us to create new sources of income to Costa Rica. We’re working on that. One of them is nautical tourism and the other segment is digital nomads.”
Rodriguez said the focus will be on smaller vessels, mostly yachts, rather than larger cruise ships. The country is also hoping to increase its flight capacity.
Costa Rica continues to attract a similar type of customer – high-earning individuals aged 40-60, living in suburban areas – however the country is also beginning to attract a younger demographic.
“We have seen especially in one area of our country that profile is changing to younger people – groups, not necessarily families but groups of friends. It’s very clearly changing in the northern part of Costa Rica where beaches are the main attraction,” added Rodriguez.
Rodriguez said that the country works to promote tourism across the country to prevent overtourism, adding that the government was planning to invest in the less-developed Caribbean coast.
The Costa Rica Tourism Board (ICT) recently announced that the UK was its largest European source market, and encouraged travel agents to take its online training course at puravidauniversity.co.uk to learn more about the country’s sustainable tourism.