The Central American Tourism Promotion Agency (CATA) has launched a campaign to attract digital nomads to the region. The European market is the target of a new regional initiative recently launched to attract digital nomads to Central America and the Dominican Republic.
The Central American Tourism Promotion Agency (CATA, for its acronym in English) has launched a campaign with the slogan “Live, travel and connect”, with which it seeks to promote the region as an ideal multi-destination for overnight tourism prolonged, with the necessary installed capacity for digital connectivity and tourism infrastructure.
According to CATA, European travelers are characterized by combining their work time with their tourist interests, motivating them to move their office to different cultural and natural environments, but with the guarantee of always being connected to the world.
A very promising market niche
“With the acceleration of the digitization of the tourism industry, recorded in recent years, this sector has gained more strength, positioning itself as a very promising market niche for the industry,” he said.
In this sense, the Agency announced that it will be showing the most emblematic destinations of Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama and the Dominican Republic to those who decide to take their office to another place and can explore destinations close to the natural environment. To this end, CATA has implemented the Visit Central America campaign on social networks, while launching a website to publicize famous places in each country.
Digital nomads in Costa Rica
In Costa Rica, where there is a type of visa for digital nomads, there are between 3,000 and 4,000 of them and each one generates 15 million colones per semester, equivalent to US$21,793.92, according to the Costa Rican Tourism Institute (ICT).
“Nomadic work is totally viable in Costa Rica, first of all due to the conditions of connectivity, infrastructure, and the services that are available, and it is an enhancer of the tourism ecosystem for the country,” said Adriana Oviedo Vega, coordinator of the Teleworking and Transformation Digital Program at the State Distance University (UNED) of Costa Rica.
The specialist spoke during the thirteenth International Relations Congress of the UNED about the findings of a study she did on digital nomads together with the Profesor Nancy Vásquez Flores.
In the report, the authors made some recommendations. “Hopefully the law, along with its regulations, does not become something bureaucratic and cumbersome where people who come to Costa Rica say ‘that was terrible and the experience was super exhausting, I will not return.’ So, quite the contrary, we would like the regulations to be agile and to provide the rights that are mentioned in the law, without further administrative procedures”, said Oviedo Vega.
The ICT has estimated, according to figures from the specialized site ABrother Abroad, that Costa Rica can capture 0.25% of the global market of 35 million digital nomads of various nationalities by 2022.
