Inbound tourism volume in Chile 2010-2023

In 2023, Chile received more than 3.7 million international tourist arrivals, showing an increase of 84 percent versus the previous year. In 2020, the South American country experienced an annual drop in international tourism volume of 75.2 percent. However, 2021 had the lowest number of visitor arrivals in years, with only 190 thousand. Chile’s inbound tourism reached the peak of the past decade in 2017, at more than 6.4 million arrivals.

Impact of COVID-19 on the Chilean tourism economy

As a logical consequence of the decline of international tourism volume in Chile, the receipts generated by this sector’s segment in the country went down by approximately 70 percent in the first pandemic year and are not expected to bounce back to pre-coronavirus levels up in the 2020s. Though not only the Chilean international tourism economy was significantly affected by this crisis. The contribution to GDP of the entire tourism sector in the South American nation decreased six percentage points in 2020 and could only fully recover by the mid-2020s.

Chile’s competitiveness in the travel and tourism sector

With an overall score of 4.3 out of the seven possible points in the Travel and Tourism Development Index (TTDI) of 2021, Chile managed to place itself third in the TTDI ranking for the Americas that year. Five of the 14 pillars evaluated to measure the country’s competitiveness in this sector received five or more points. Of these indicators, information and communications technology (ICT) readiness as well as price competitiveness performed the best. On the other hand, Chile exhibited the weakest score in the area evaluating its cultural resources.