Fewer Argentines and Brazilians to visit Uruguay this season, compared to pre-pandemic?

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Center for Economic Research (CINVE) stated that “behavior of the tourism services sector in Uruguay has been significantly affected by the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, with the subsequent declaration of the state of health emergency decreed by the government in mid-March 2020.”

From that date on, activities directly related to tourism services were reduced to a minimum, as occurred in most countries. Now, and despite the significant progress of the vaccination program, the international mobility of people is still disrupted,” CINVE noted in its “Perspectives and Projections of the Tourist Season. Neither old nor new normality” report.

CINVE recalled that as of this month, “fully immunized tourists from all over the world can enter Uruguay, although some restrictions persist, so for Uruguay the next summer season will probably be atypical.”

“The reopening of borders restoring the entry of visitors from Argentina and Brazil has been interpreted by tour operators as encouraging news. However, there is still uncertainty as to how inbound and outbound tourism flows will behave,” it warned.

Therefore, CINVE stated that “the reference period selected, which could be considered as the last season with no regional mobility restrictions, is the period from December 2019 to February 2020.”

The report projected that “during the 2021-2022 season, the number of Argentine tourists visiting Uruguay should decrease by 26%, while the drop in the number of Brazilian visitors would be slightly lower, at 16%, in both cases with respect to the pre-pandemic period.”

“The main explanatory factor for the projected drops in inbound tourism flows is that Uruguay is expensive compared to neighboring countries, particularly in relation to Argentina,” it added.

In turn, “the return to a situation close to ‘free-mobility’, would imply an incentive for Uruguayans to travel abroad, especially to Argentina and Brazil during the first quarter of 2022, either at the beginning or during the summer season,” CINVE pointed out.

“For outbound tourism flows to neighboring countries, only quarterly data is available, so projections relate to the comparison of departures from Uruguay between January and March 2022, with respect to records for the first quarter of 2019. Our projections indicate an expected increase in the number of Uruguayans traveling to Argentina, at 37% (almost 3 times more than Uruguayans visiting Brazil in the first three months of the year, on average), while the number of Uruguayans who might choose Brazil as their summer vacation destination would be 26% higher than in the same period in 2019,” it said.