Tourism in Uruguay: South America’s fastest-growing country, despite being the most expensive

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – A significant number of tourists entered the country during the first fifteen days of January 2022. This year’s summer season was particular because it allowed the entry of foreigners since the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic. The first fortnight was marked by an influx of tourists from the region, Argentina and Brazil, followed by Paraguayan and American citizens.

In this sense, this Sunday, Uruguay became the South American country that grew the most in numbers of accommodation bookings for the next three months, according to the accommodation booking platform TravelgateX.

Specifically, Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia are the three countries that generated more reservations for the next three months and accounted for 91.1% of the demand. However, there is a downward trend in Brazil of 35%, compared to the same months in 2020. Meanwhile, in Argentina, the trend increased by 62.3% and in Colombia by 35.8%.

So far, everything seems normal; however, the next step is the one that underwent changes and has Uruguay as the protagonist. According to TravelgateX, Uruguay displaced Chile from fourth place in absolute numbers of lodging reservations due to an inter-annual increase of 132.7%.

They indicated that Uruguay concentrates 2.8% of South America’s bookings compared to 2.7% for Chile, which suffered a 17.6% reduction in bookings. “It is necessary to specify that these figures include national tourism reservations, not only international since in cases such as Argentina and Uruguay, periods of closed borders (February/April 2021) are compared with the current period, of open borders and retreating restrictions that begin to facilitate travel,” says the specialized page Hosteltur.

The platform highlights that “surprisingly” our country has climbed so many positions in the ranking, despite the “large increase in the cost of stay”. “On the other hand, we see that (the price increase) is a generalized trend, except for Chile, where they remain practically the same,” it points out.

Finally, TravelgateX reports which are the most expensive destinations in South America to visit in the coming months. These are:

1. Uruguay US$146.65 (79.9% increase vs. 2021);
2. Chile US$127.77 (4.1% increase vs. 2021);
3. Brazil US$115.35 (32.9% increase vs. 2021);
4. Argentina US$107.65 (32.9% increase vs. 2021);
5. Peru US$105.52 (26.2% increase vs. 2021).