The Costa Rican Tourism Board (ICT) is in the process of designing a new indicator to measure the arrival of tourists to the country. For this, ICT signed a cooperation agreement with the General Directorate of Migration (DGME) that will allow them to receive every month a higher level of detail of the international migratory flow of people in Costa Rica.

Since 1958 and to date, ICT has estimated the tourism activity through an indicator of ¨number of international arrivals by port of entry¨. This calculation is based on a table of information that is provided every month by DGME and that historically has been added by country with three reference variables: month of entry, nationality, and migratory control point.

Now, the DGME is sharing other variables with the Costa Rican Tourism Board, on the migratory condition of each person that enters the country. the new information now gives the institution the possibility of calculating or estimating indicators that had not been available for the country before.

Minister of Tourism, María Amalia Revelo is a statistician, and considers that it is the perfect opportunity for a methodological advance in order to build a new and robust indicator that is consistent with the international standards of quality of the information produced.

¨Given the volume of information that the DGME is now sharing with ICT after the signing of the agreement, we are facing the responsibility to improve the quality of the tourism statistics, taking advantage at the same time of the facilities offered by the technology options available to handle and process big data¨, explained Revelo.

This also obeys to the requests of the private tourism sector that has requested to refine the monitoring of the tourism activity in the country.

The Minister of Tourism also requested the technical collaboration of the World Tourism Organization to provide assessment to the Information Unit of ICT .

In 2018, following information given by current indicators, Costa Rica received a total of 3,016,667 arrivals through all entry points, an increase of 1.9% in comparison to the previous year. 2,314,888 people arrived through the two international airports, Juan Santamaría in Alajuela and Daniel Oduber in Liberia, Guanacaste.

Press Release: ICT