Ken Research announced its latest publication on, “Travel and Tourism in Colombia to 2020”, offer insights on the changing trends and key issues within the Travel & Tourism Sector in Colombia. The publication includes an insightful analysis of demand-side dynamics, tourist flows, expenditure patterns, tourism related intermediate industries along with emerging growth opportunities and challenges inthe Travel & Tourism Sector in Colombia. The analysis of the aforementioned trends has been done across key categories within the sector: domestic tourism, inbound tourism, and outbound tourism. The report also includes analysis of trips by purpose, mode of transport and customer type-leisure and business travellers.
Brief Overview of Travel & Tourism Sector in Colombia
Colombia’s Travel & Tourism sector is crucial to its economy. The sector has consistently increased its contribution to the GDP. Presently the sector contributes around 2.2% to the GDP. The spectacular growth of the Tourism sector in Colombia has even outpaced the global tourism growth rates as well as the average tourism growth rate of all the South American countries. With rich and diverse geography as well as unique biodiversity, Colombia has a great potential for eco-tourism as well. Some of the popular places to visit in Colombia include:Bogota, Cartagena, Medellin, Amazon and the Andean regions; the Caribbean & Pacific Coasts; the desert of La Guajira etc.
Looking at the present scenario, Colombia’s tourism sector is growing with strong growth rates. Two key events influencing the tourism sector in the country are: Home currency depreciation &improved safety on account of signing off ceasefire agreement between the govt. and the FARC rebels. Improved safety has positively affected the growth of the sector. While weakening of the peso has significantly changed the consumer preferences over domestic, inbound & outbound trips. Due to weak peso Colombians are turning to domestic trips over outbound trips. Also, as a result of weak peso, inbound tourism has witnessed remarkable growth over last few years: 8.2% in 2013, 7.4% in 2014, and 16.3% in 2015. International arrivals, largely from US and Venezuela, totalled 2.3 million in 2015. Outbound tourism has been suffering as a result of falling value of peso. Outbound trips declined by -1.3% in 2015 while expenditure declined by -0.6%.
Government also plays an important role in the tourism sector. As for example, introduction of the new tax policy which exempts foreign tourist from paying sales tax on tourism related services; construction plan of new airports while renovating and expanding the existing ones; are totally government efforts for developing the tourism sector in Colombia. However, high congestion at airports urging the immediate construction and expansion of the airport capacity will be a serious challenge to the government as well as for the overall tourism sector.
Key Factors Driving Growth in Colombia’s Travel & Tourism Sector
The strong performance of the Travel & Tourism sector in Colombia over the last several years is due to various factors influencing the demand-side dynamics offering vast growth opportunities to the market players and encouraging them to strategize their business actions accordingly. This ultimately leads to expansion and development of the overall tourism sector. Since, Tourism sector is a crucial part of a country’s economy, hence, government participation through increased investment in tourism related development plans has also played a crucial role in the growth of the sector.