Inbound tourism volume in Panama 2010-2022

The number of international visitor arrivals in Panama was close to two million in 2022, after having plummeted in the previous two years due to the COVID-19 impact on tourism worldwide. Before the pandemic, the country had more than 2.5 million arrivals by foreign visitors.

On the right path

Panama received a Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index (TTCI) score of 4.2 out of seven points in 2019. The Central American country ranked fourth in Latin America and the Caribbean, shortly trailing Mexico, Brazil, and Costa Rica. The index measures how attractive a country is to developing business in that sector. In that year, the travel and tourism policy and enabling conditions were the country’s highest-rated sub-index, with a score of 4.9. However, the overall Panamanian 2019 TTCI score was the lowest recorded since 2013.

Cash cow

As a small but highly international travel hub, Panama’s tourism sector is mostly driven by foreign visitors. In 2019, the four-million nation ranked for the third largest expenditure generated by international visitors in the region, outperforming other major destinations like Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia. Inbound tourism spending represented around 11 percent of the country's GDP throughout the 2010s —an economic activity that was nonetheless severely affected by COVID-19. As an early-2021 forecast projects, the entire Panamanian tourism sector would need around five years to recover from the effects of that global health crisis.