More Canadians are flying to Costa Rica this year than at any point on record, and the gap between them and every other market is widening fast. New figures from the Instituto Costarricense de Turismo (ICT) show that from January through July arrivals from Canada up 25.1% compared with the same seven months of 2025. No other country came close.
The Netherlands ranked second at 16.5%, and Spain third at 13.9%. The North American market as a whole, which includes the United States and Mexico, grew 7%. Across every source country, 1,853,430 travelers arrived by air in those seven months. That is also a 7% increase on last year, which tells you how much of the growth is being carried by a handful of markets rather than spread evenly.
The tourism institute credits a targeted advertising push in Canada aimed at filling seats on direct flights. On its own numbers, the campaign is working and that matters more than a marketing win. Where visitors come from decides which airports get new routes, which months fill up, and what you end up paying for a rental car in February.
Canadian travelers skew heavily toward Guanacaste and the northern Pacific coast, arriving through Daniel Oduber International Airport in Liberia rather than Juan SantamarÃa in San Jose. Liberia has been growing faster than the San José terminal for most of this year.
Adding tens of thousands of visitors to the Liberia roue puts pressure on a narrower set of beach towns, hotels and roads than the same number spread across the country would. If you live or travel in that part of Costa Rica, you will feel it first in the things that run out — parking at popular beaches, restaurant tables at seven o’clock, and short-notice accommodation over Canadian school holidays, which fall at different times than American ones.
A separate set of tourism institute figures released earlier in August counts arrivals by every route of entry, including land borders and cruise terminals. On that wider basis, just over two million visitors came between January and July, a 6.4% rise, with the United States supplying roughly 57% of them.
However, the two sets of numbers are not interchangeable. Air arrivals are a smaller, cleaner figure that shows what airlines and airports are actually handling, while the all-routes total captures the fuller picture of who is here. Read together, though, they point in the same direction and that is the United States remains by far the largest single market and is not going anywhere, but its share is slowly thinning as other countries grow faster from a smaller base.
The European numbers are worth watching for that reason. Dutch and Spanish growth in the mid-teens suggests the long-haul European market is recovering rather than simply holding steady, and European visitors tend to stay longer and travel further from their arrival airport than North Americans do.
None of this is guaranteed to hold. Tourism figures respond quickly to airline route decisions, currency swings and weather, and a single carrier trimming a winter schedule can undo a year of growth in one market. For now the trend line is clear enough. The high season starting in November will bring more Canadians through Liberia than any season before it, and the country’s tourism map is quietly redrawing itself around that.
