81% of Colombia's foreign tourists fit into Bogotá, Antioquia and Bolívar
4,677,267 non-resident foreigners arrived in 2025, up 3.8%. But the split by destination barely moves: three territories take 81% and the rest of the country shares out around 11%. Meanwhile domestic tourism, which is what a hotel outside those hubs lives on, has shrunk by six points.
Colombia received 4,677,267 non-resident foreign visitors in 2025, 3.8% more than the year before. It is a good figure. It is also a figure that never reached most hotels in the country, because the growth in Colombian inbound tourism lands almost entirely in three places.
Bogotá, Antioquia and Bolívar account for 81% of foreign visitors. A hotel that is not in Bogotá, Medellín or Cartagena competes for the remaining 19% against the whole rest of the country.
Where the growth lands
The breakdown by destination is published by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Tourism using Migración Colombia data. There are two cuts of the year and they agree with each other, which gives some confidence in the order of magnitude:
| Destination | January–May 2025 | January–October 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Bogotá | 34.84% | 36% |
| Antioquia | 25.65% | 26.3% |
| Bolívar | 20.56% | 18.7% |
| Valle del Cauca | 4.71% | — |
| San Andrés y Providencia | 3.35% | — |
The first three add up to 81% in both periods. Adding Valle del Cauca and San Andrés takes it to almost 90%. Everywhere else — the coffee region, the Caribbean coast beyond Cartagena, the Santanderes, the Amazon — shares out around 11% of foreign visitors between them.
Part of that concentration has a logistical explanation: Bogotá is the country's air gateway, and a good share of those counted there are passing through on their way somewhere else. Even so, for a property outside those hubs the practical effect is the same, which is that the national tourism figures describe a market it has barely any access to.
Why 2025 gets reported two different ways
One confusion from the year-end coverage is worth clearing up, because depending on the headline Colombia either grew or fell in 2025. Both readings come from the same data:
| Non-resident visitors | 2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Total | 6,496,458 | −8.1% |
| Non-resident foreigners | 4,677,267 | +3.8% |
| Colombians living abroad | 1,498,600 | −33.7% |
| Cruise passengers | 320,591 | +4.3% |
The aggregate falls because the component made up of Colombians living abroad and coming home collapses. That group also generates the fewest hotel nights: someone visiting their family usually sleeps at their family's house.
A warning about that −33.7%. A one-third drop in a single year is too abrupt to accept without an explanation, and the source offers none. It could reflect a change of criteria in the migration register, a real phenomenon, or some mix of the two. We have not been able to verify it, so we leave it noted for what it is: a figure to treat with suspicion until someone explains it.
The market that really did shrink
For a hotel outside the three hubs, the foreign tourist was never the main support. Colombians travelling within Colombia were, and there the signal is worrying: the share of the population taking a domestic trip went from 16.3% to 10.1% between the figures El Tiempo reports for the second quarter of 2023 and the fourth quarter of 2024.
That comparison needs care, because the two quarters are not equivalent: domestic tourism is seasonal, and putting a second quarter against a fourth introduces noise. A six-point gap is larger than that noise would explain, but the exact size should not be taken literally.
Against that backdrop, Cotelco estimated 2025 would close with national hotel occupancy at around 56.7%.
What is left to do outside the three hubs
In Bogotá a hotel's problem tends to be rate management. In Salento, Palomino or Barichara there is an earlier one to solve, which is simply being found at all.
When 89% of foreign demand stays in five territories and the domestic market is contracting, occupancy does not depend on how many people enter the country. It depends on the distance between the moment someone decides they want to visit the area and the moment they manage to book a specific room. Every step in that chain that does not work turns into a booking that stays with the online agency, or that never happens.
In practice those are things you can check one by one: whether the site can take a booking and a payment without the guest leaving it, whether the availability the guest sees is the real one, whether the property shows up when someone searches for the area rather than for the hotel by name, and whether that search today happens in a search engine as much as by asking an AI assistant, which answers with whatever it finds written down and structured.
If you run a property in Colombia away from the major destinations and want to review where your bookings come in today, write to us.
Sources
- Ministry of Trade, Industry and Tourism and Migración Colombia, breakdown of foreign visitors by destination for January to May 2025, reported by El Colombiano on 3 July 2025.
- January to October 2025 breakdown, domestic tourism figures and Cotelco's occupancy estimate, reported by El Tiempo on 19 December 2025.
- Full-year 2025 non-resident visitor figures and their breakdown, on MinCIT data, reported by Infobae on 19 February 2026.