SAN JOSE: Tourism to Costa Rica will likely stagnate this year at the sharply reduced levels of 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, weighing on the economy of the Central American country, a top government official said on Saturday.
Tourism Minister Gustavo Segura said Costa Rica will in 2021 probably receive about one-third of the 3,139,000 international tourists it had in 2019, on a par with last year, when some 1,011,000 foreign visitors arrived, official data shows.
In an interview, Segura said around 75,000 tourists came to Costa Rica in December, down from 327,000 a year earlier, underlining the challenge facing the popular tourist destination and the industry as a whole in Latin America.
“Though the figures are better than those of some competitor nations, many companies can’t get going again,” Segura told Reuters, noting that the extent of recovery would depend on how the pandemic developed and how vaccination efforts progressed.
Battered by the loss of tourists,…