Travel + Leisure has named Costa Rica one of ten places it recommends for Generation Z travelers to visit right now, in a list assembled from travel-industry advisors. The premise of the list is that younger travelers are moving away from the destinations social media has already saturated. The Costa Rica inclusion recommends Manuel Antonio, Arenal, Monteverde, Tamarindo and Peninsula Papagayo.
That gap between the list’s stated criteria and the specific places named under Costa Rica is the most interesting thing about the recognition, and it says something about where Costa Rica now sits in the global tourism market. The magazine grounded its selection in data from Kayak’s 2026 What the Future Report, which found that 69 percent of Generation Z travelers want to visit places they have never been, and that 84 percent would rather explore a rural area or a smaller city than a major tourism hub.
Tara Cappel, founder of FTLO Travel, which runs group trips for solo travelers between 25 and 39, told the magazine that while the conventional European summer trip retains its appeal, younger travelers are increasingly after destinations that are less crowded and more adventurous, and she framed her recommendations around getting away from the familiar.
Most of the list follows that logic closely. Dominica leads it, described by Fora travel advisor Kris Weir as one of the Caribbean’s last genuine hidden gems, a place with, in her words, “no packed beach clubs, no influencer crowds, and no filter needed” — though she noted that a new international airport due to open in 2027 may change that. Hilo appears as the quiet counterweight to Hawaii’s resort corridors.
Punta Gorda, on Florida’s Gulf Coast, is included partly on affordability, with Kayak data putting average round-trip airfare there near $262. La Paz is recommended explicitly as the Baja alternative for travelers skipping Tulum and Los Cabos. Belize is praised as refreshingly affordable next to the rest of the Caribbean. Morocco, Vietnam and Sardinia round out the selection, though Sardinia complicates the undiscovered framing considerably, having been voted the top island in Europe in the magazine’s own 2026 World’s Best Awards.
Costa Rica’s entry does not follow that pattern. Cappel described the country as the ideal combination of jungle adventure and unhurried beach time, and the specific recommendations that follow are Arenal Volcano, the Monteverde cloud forests, wildlife viewing at Manuel Antonio National Park, surfing at Nosara, the beaches of Santa Teresa, sunset at Tamarindo and the resorts of Peninsula Papagayo.
Every one of those is a mature destination. Manuel Antonio is the most heavily visited national park and operates under a capacity-controlled entry system precisely because demand exceeds what the park can absorb. Tamarindo and the Arenal hot springs corridor carry the hotel density, tour-operator concentration and high-season traffic of places that arrived long ago.
Peninsula Papagayo is a master-planned luxury enclave anchored by Four Seasons, Andaz and Waldorf Astoria properties, which is a defensible recommendation on its own terms but an unusual one for a list organized around travelers who want to avoid tourism hubs and who are frequently described as budget-conscious. Nosara and Santa Teresa are the closest the entry comes to the brief, and both have been absorbing steady development for a decade.
The pattern is worth reading plainly. On a list whose other entries are chosen as alternatives to established destinations, Costa Rica is the established destination. It appears not because it is undiscovered but because its reputation is strong enough that a recommendation requires no argument, and the destinations named under it are the ones a first-time visitor would already know. Dominica and Punta Gorda occupy the discovery slots. Costa Rica occupies the reliability slot, which is a different and in commercial terms probably more valuable position, but it is not the one the list’s framing suggests.
The parts of Costa Rica that would actually satisfy the criteria go unmentioned. The Osa Peninsula and Corcovado National Park remain among the most biologically dense and least-visited protected areas in Costa Rica, reachable only with real effort. The southern Caribbean around Puerto Viejo, Cahuita and Manzanillo carries a distinct Afro-Caribbean cultural identity and a visitor volume that has never approached Guanacaste’s.
Bijagua de Upala, the gateway to RÃo Celeste and Tenorio Volcano, has built a small lodging sector on exactly the community-scale model the list praises elsewhere. The Nicoya interior, the Sarapiquà lowlands and the Turrialba valley offer the same rainforest, wildlife and volcano landscapes that anchor the country’s global reputation, without the shuttle traffic.
Those places would have made Costa Rica a natural fit for the premise. Their absence suggests that when international travel media reach for Costa Rica, they reach for the circuit that markets itself, and that the secondary destinations still lack the visibility to be named alongside Dominica or Hilo.
There is some evidence however that the visibility gap is closing on its own. In December, Skyscanner’s global trends report identified Limón area as the fastest-rising destination in the world for 2026, based on flight-search data showing interest up roughly 300 percent year over year, with Travel + Leisure separately singling out the area for its rainforest trails, calypso bars and clear water. Whether that translates into arrivals, and whether the Caribbean coast retains the qualities that generated the interest once they do, is the open question for the coming seasons.
The recognition arrives alongside a run of awards pointing in a different direction. In the 2026 World’s Best Awards, Travel + Leisure readers placed three Costa Rican properties among the world’s 100 best hotels, with Nayara Tented Camp in La Fortuna reaching number 28 globally, and named a substantial share of Central America’s leading hotels and resorts in the country. Forbes recently included the Waldorf Astoria Costa Rica Punta Cacique among five luxury resorts it called essential worldwide. Those are recognitions of high-end hospitality, aimed at a market that overlaps only partially with travelers in their twenties.
For the tourism industry here in Costa Rica, the useful signal is not the placement but the mismatch. Costa Rica’s arrivals have trended toward visitors who stay fewer nights and spend more per night, a pattern that concentrates revenue in the resort corridors. A genuine shift toward younger travelers looking for lower-cost, longer, less-trafficked trips would push demand toward the small lodges, community tourism operators and secondary destinations that have captured a thin share of tourism income.
Being named on a list built for those travelers is worth something. Being named for Tamarindo and Papagayo suggests our country is still being sold to them on the strength of what it already has rather than what it has yet to show them.
