Costa Rica grew 0.8% in 2025: what a hotel does when volume stops rising

Costa Rica received 2,943,991 international visitors in 2025. That is 24,508 more than the previous year: growth of 0.8%, the lowest in a decade. And while volume flattened, the colón appreciated to its strongest level in more than twenty years.

For a hotel that charges in dollars and pays its wages in colones, those two sentences together describe a hard year. With volume flat and the exchange rate working against them, almost everything still movable sits inside the property: which channel each booking comes through, and how much of it stays.

The year Costa Rica stopped growing

Figures from the Costa Rican Tourism Board (ICT), reported in January 2026, leave little room for interpretation:

Context matters here, to understand why this is bad news rather than neutral news. Costa Rica was coming off a decade of far stronger growth. In a sector where fixed costs rise every year, +0.8% means doing the same amount of work for less margin.

And most of the year was worse than that final figure. Over the first eleven months, visitor numbers were actually down 0.4% against 2024. What rescued the year was the final quarter: October grew 5.3%, November 12% and December 13.4%.

Three markets, 81% of arrivals

The breakdown by origin explains much of the fragility:

Together they account for 81% of arrivals. And the United States alone contributes more than half the country's total.

That concentration has a very concrete operational consequence: when the United States and Canada issued security advisories about the destination, there was no fourth market to turn to. Lost air connectivity compounded it — GOL cancelled the San José–São Paulo route and Wingo suspended San José–Bogotá — although new operators such as Viva Aerobus and Porter entered the market.

A destination dependent on three markets has little say over how much demand reaches it. The room to manoeuvre sits further down, in what happens to each booking that does arrive.

The colón, or why a commission hurts twice

This is the point small hotels in the region raise most often, and the one least understood from outside.

The Central Bank reported that 3,087 million dollars came in from tourism in the first half of 2025, 71 million less than the same period in 2024. But falling dollar income is only half the problem. The other half is that the colón hit its strongest level in more than twenty years, below 500 colones to the dollar.

A property billing in dollars with costs in colones takes that appreciation twice over: it earns the same dollars but they convert into fewer colones, and its local costs do not fall to compensate.

Now add an intermediation commission to that equation. An online travel agency's commission is calculated on the gross booking value, not on margin. When margin narrows because of the exchange rate, the commission does not narrow with it: it comes to represent a larger share of what is actually left. The same commission that was bearable with the colón at 600 stops being bearable with the colón at 490.

It is worth saying what we do not know here. We have not found reliable public data on the split between direct and intermediated sales in Costa Rica. It exists for Europe, where the HOTREC study puts OTAs at 29.6% of overnight stays, but extrapolating that to a market with a different supply structure and a different visitor profile would be making it up. What is structural, and holds in any country, is how the commission is calculated.

What you do when you cannot grow by volume

When arrivals grow 0.8%, the "sell more nights" route is closed. What is left is management:

Recover bookings you had already won. A guest who finds the lodge on an OTA, visits the property's own website and hits a contact form instead of a booking engine goes back to the OTA and books there. That booking was already won, and commission was paid on it anyway. It is the cheapest loss on this list to fix.

Stop giving away nights out of caution. A property loading availability by hand into each channel holds back a buffer of unsold rooms to avoid overbooking. In a high-occupancy year that buffer barely registers. In a flat year, those are the only nights left to sell.

Charge for what you actually offer. Costa Rica competes on nature tourism and sustainability, through a Sustainable Tourism Certification programme the ICT has run since 1997. A certified lodge has a real pricing argument. If its only sales channel is an OTA listing where it competes on price against properties with no certification, that argument never reaches the customer.

None of this requires a year-long project. A booking engine that works and synchronised inventory are a matter of weeks.

What the rebound teaches

The end of 2025 and the start of 2026 suggest the down cycle was cyclical: between January and April 2026, 1,195,271 tourists arrived by air, up 10.5% on the same period a year earlier.

It is worth not reading it only as relief. When demand returns, the temptation is to stop watching margin because rooms fill on their own. Properties that used the flat year to connect their inventory and build direct sales reach the rebound earning more for the same night; the rest meet it with the distribution cost structure they already had.

At Creanimund we work with properties much like Costa Rica's: small, independent, with an offer worth more than their sales channel manages to convey. If that sounds familiar, get in touch.

Sources

• Costa Rican Tourism Board (ICT), 2025 visitor figures, reported by La Nación on 15 January 2026.
• ICT, official migration movement statistics.
• Central Bank of Costa Rica, tourism foreign currency for the first half of 2025 and exchange rate movement, reported by El Financiero on 30 December 2025.
• ICT, Sustainable Tourism Certification (CST).
• January–April 2026 visitor figures, published by CRHoy.