Argentinian tourism is one of the sectors that suffered the most due to the restrictive sanitary measures applied during the pandemic, but over the last months, it has recovered remarkably.
According to a report on international tourism by the National Institute of Statistics and Census (Indec), between January and November 2022, 1,496,800 visitors from abroad arrived in the country by air, which represents a growth of 975.7% compared to 2021.
In turn, there were 2,163,400 Argentines who took a plane to travel abroad during the first 11 months of 2022, which translated into a year-on-year tourism rebound of 297.7%. The growth percentages are unusually high due to the fact that in 2021 activity was very close to "zero" due to the pandemic.
The negative point is that in both arrivals and departures, there is still a long way to go to recover the levels of tourism activity that existed before the outbreak of Covid. In the case of inbound tourism, statistics published by Indec show that between January and November 2019, 2,760,800 people entered the country by air; that is, 71% more than in 2022.
Regarding outbound tourism, the 2019 figures indicate that 3,707,200 Argentines traveled abroad in the analyzed period, 84% more than in the 2022 season.
According to Indec, between January and November last year, one out of every five foreign tourists visiting Argentina came from Europe. However, those with the longest average stay were from the "rest of America", with an average of 17.4 nights per person.
Tourists from Brazil (20.7%) and those from the United States and Canada, with 17.4%, also had an important share of the total.
In turn, the destinations preferred by Argentines are Europe (25.2%), "the rest of America" (20.5%), Brazil (20%) and the "United States and Canada" region (19.6%). The longest stays are in Europe, with an average of 37.4 nights.
The November of 2022 followed the same trend as the rest of the season. Both outbound and inbound tourism registered remarkable interannual growths.
According to Indec, adding up all access routes to the country, 438,000 foreign tourists were recorded in November. Most of them arrived by plane, but there were more than 230 thousand people who crossed the border by other means.
As can be seen, the second most used type of transportation by international visitors were buses, and in third place were boats.
Another interesting aspect of the tourism rebound is the percentages by country and how they change when boats and buses are added to the statistics. Considering only November, it is observed that 19.6% of foreign tourists arriving in the country were Uruguayan, followed by Chileans (17.2%) and Brazilians (16.4%).
In outbound tourism, on the other hand, the main destination for Argentines was Brazil (17.7%), closely followed by Chile (17.2%) and Uruguay (16.2%).