Tourism Sector Addresses
Infrastructure Issues
By Leland Baxter-Neal
Tico Times Staff
lbaxter@ticotimes.net

At the ICT year-end press conference held yesterday, Rodrigo Castro, Tourism Minister and head of the Costa Rican Tourism Institute (ICT), proclaimed 2005 to be a “very good” year for tourism with a record number of visitors and growth in the sector. Despite serious challenges such as deteriorating roads and other infrastructure problems, Castro added he expected 2006 to be “even better.”

However, in a separate event held earlier that day, a group of 40 businessmen and women from the tourism industry less optimistically grilled Public Works and Transport Minister Randall Quirós on the state of the country's infrastructure, and the National Chamber of Tourism (CANATUR) expressed dissatisfaction with the minister's response.

“Although the (meeting) lasted for two and a half hours and it was a total opportunity for concrete answers, (Quirós) did not manage to fulfill the expectations of the business representatives who expected concrete solutions and not just answers,” CANATUR said in a statement released yesterday.

CANATUR gave the Ministry of Public Works and Transport a vote of no-confidence in late November, criticizing the “deplorable state” of the nation's roads and the government's lack of attention to the major issues affecting the tourism industry, the statement said.

Tourism Minister Castro, at the ICT press conference, classified the infrastructure issue as “the only thing that we could see as a problem” for Costa Rica 's rapidly expanding tourism. Citing a 15% growth in the number of visitors since 2004, for a total of 167 million tourists this year, and adding that this represents a 60% growth since 1999, Castro explained that, “as a poor country without resources… it is very hard for us to adjust our basic infrastructure to this demand.”

Castro said he would be worried about the tourism sector's future “if we weren't doing anything about this and if we weren't working on this.” However, he expressed faith in the government's ability to better the situation, and said he did not expect these problems to slow either the amount of tourists arriving or the investment in the country.

Foreign investment in Costa Rica 's tourism sector rose to approximately $95 million last year, a figure nearly double that of the year before and one that shows international confidence in the country, Castro said.

“The principal means of communication that (draws) tourists who visit Costa Rica is word of mouth,” Castro said. “It has been shown scientifically that every positive comment generates an additional visit. However, each negative comment represents seven potential visitors who aren't going to come. The moment that the recommendation of the tourists who visited us, instead of being positive, is negative, then it is going to hit us.”