LatinNews Daily - 26 October 2023

* Costa Rica’s tourism institute (ICT), a government body, has released new figures showing that 1.85m tourists visited the country in the first nine months of 2023 via air (which accounts for 90% of tourist arrivals), up 16.4% on the same period in 2022. The ICT is forecasting between 2.3m and 2.5m tourist arrivals via air for 2023. It says that this is approaching the figures of 2.31m tourist arrivals in 2018 and 2.42m in 2019, the years prior to the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic which struck in March 2020. The ICT highlights that the US remains the main source of tourists, accounting for 1.09m of arrivals in the first nine months of 2023 while Europe accounted for 319,691 tourists. According to the ICT, 2.35m tourists visited Costa Rica in 2022, of which 2.12m arrived via air. According to the ICT, the 2022 figure, which represented 75% of tourist arrivals registered prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, was over a million more than in 2021 and was higher than the 2.02m figure forecast for 2022 by the authorities.