How Should We Measure the Success of Tourism in Costa Rica?
- tadeomg
- 11 hours ago
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Beyond growth in international arrivals, tourism performance can also be assessed through its territorial distribution, its capacity to generate opportunities, and its contribution to community well-being.
On September 2, Mario Mikowski, a member of the Advisory Committee of the Centro de Estudios del Turismo (CET), raised a particularly relevant question for Costa Rica’s current tourism landscape in his column published by El Observador: How do we truly measure success in tourism?
His reflection begins with a common feature of the public debate. Whenever a competing destination records significant growth in visitor arrivals, announces new air routes, or reports favorable results, comparisons with Costa Rica quickly follow.
Benchmarking is necessary. It helps us understand the competitive environment and identify changes in markets, connectivity, investment, and demand. However, as Mikowski points out, there is a risk of defining Costa Rica’s success exclusively in relation to the performance of other countries, even when those countries may be pursuing different tourism models and objectives.
Traditional metrics are essential, but they do not tell the whole story
Costa Rica has access to widely used indicators for assessing tourism performance: international arrivals, average length of stay, visitor expenditure, foreign exchange earnings, air connectivity, and economic contribution, among others.
These indicators allow us to understand how much tourism is growing and facilitate international comparisons. But there is a second, equally important dimension: determining where the benefits are generated and how they are distributed across the country.
Two scenarios may produce similar national figures while generating very different outcomes at the territorial level.
An increase in tourism expenditure, for example, may be concentrated in specific destinations or establishments, or it may be distributed among accommodations, restaurants, tour operators, transportation providers, guides, retailers, producers, and other participants in local economies.
Understanding tourism performance therefore requires complementing national aggregates with territorial data.
Territory matters
Costa Rica has developed a significant part of its tourism offering around local communities, small and medium-sized enterprises, and local entrepreneurs. Destinations such as La Fortuna, Monteverde, Tortuguero, Puerto Viejo, Nosara, and many other communities demonstrate how tourism can become deeply integrated into local economies.
This characteristic raises an additional question beyond how much tourism grows:
To what extent can that growth generate economic and social opportunities in the territories where it takes place?
Answering this question requires information that is not always available today with the necessary level of detail, frequency, and coverage.
Indicators that could strengthen this analysis include occupancy and average daily rates by destination, visitor length of stay and territorial mobility, tourism activity operations, employment, participation by small and medium-sized enterprises, and the geographical distribution of tourism expenditure.
National aggregate analysis would remain essential. The difference would be our ability to also understand what is happening within the country.
From tourism performance to social progress
Mikowski’s column also introduces a particularly relevant dimension: the Social Progress Index for Tourism Destinations, developed through initiatives promoted by the Costa Rican Tourism Institute (ICT) in coordination with INCAE and subsequently updated.
This type of instrument does not replace traditional tourism statistics. It answers a different question.
While arrivals, expenditure, or occupancy provide insight into the performance of tourism activity, social indicators help us examine conditions in the communities where that activity takes place.
This distinction is important because a correlation between tourism development and improved social conditions does not, by itself, demonstrate causality. However, combining economic, tourism, territorial, and social information allows us to formulate better questions and conduct more precise research into the mechanisms through which tourism may contribute to local development.
A broader dashboard for Costa Rica
The discussion raised by Mikowski points to an opportunity: progressively expanding the set of indicators Costa Rica uses to assess tourism performance.
This does not mean replacing international arrivals, foreign exchange earnings, expenditure, length of stay, or connectivity. It means complementing them.
A more comprehensive system could simultaneously monitor:
Tourism performance: arrivals, length of stay, expenditure, foreign exchange earnings, connectivity, occupancy, and rates.
Territorial distribution: where tourism expenditure occurs and how activity evolves across destinations.
Economic participation: employment, entrepreneurship, small and medium-sized enterprises, and local economic linkages.
Sustainability: the condition of the natural and cultural resources upon which much of Costa Rica’s tourism offering depends.
Territorial well-being: changes in social indicators within host communities.
This would allow us to move beyond a predominantly quantitative question — How much did tourism grow? — toward a more comprehensive assessment: Where did it grow, who participated in that growth, and what outcomes did it produce?
Measuring success according to the country’s objectives
Perhaps one of the most important points raised in the column is that Costa Rica should evaluate its performance according to its own objectives.
If the goal is to expand opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises, their participation must be measured. If the objective is to distribute the benefits of tourism more broadly across territories, we need to understand where tourism expenditure is generated and captured. If sustainability is an essential component of Costa Rica’s tourism model, the condition of the resources that support that model must also be monitored.
And if tourism is expected to contribute to community well-being, that dimension must also become part of the assessment.
For CET, expanding the availability and granularity of data is an important condition for moving in this direction. Better territorial measurement would make it possible to identify differences among destinations, investigate their causes, and generate evidence to inform both public and private decision-making.
The success of Costa Rica’s tourism activity does not have to be summarized by a single figure. It can be understood as a combination of growth, value creation, territorial distribution, sustainability, and opportunities for the people who live in tourism destinations.
The question raised by Mario Mikowski therefore deserves to remain open: What outcomes do we want tourism to produce, and do we currently have the indicators needed to determine whether we are achieving them?
Reference article
This analysis by the Centro de Estudios del Turismo (CET) is based on the column “¿Cómo medimos el éxito en turismo?” (“How Do We Measure Success in Tourism?”), written by Mario Mikowski, a member of CET’s Advisory Committee, and originally published by El Observador on September 2, 2026.
Credit: Mario Mikowski / El Observador. The original content and opinions expressed in the column are those of its author. This article constitutes an editorial reflection by the Centro de Estudios del Turismo based on the issues raised in the original publication.
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