Costa Rica is taking in more tourists and more foreign currency than it ever has however, its hotels and restaurants are not doing well. That contradiction sits at the center of a warning now coming from three of the main tourism business chambers, which say the colón’s continued strength against the dollar is eating the gains that record arrivals should be producing.
The Central Bank’s Monthly Index of Economic Activity shows the problem in the data. Growth in food service and lodging activity slowed to 2.6% year-on-year in June 2026, the weakest reading in five months and part of a steady deceleration. The mechanism is that hotels, restaurants and tour operators earn in dollars and pay in colones — payroll, rent, utilities, taxes, suppliers. When the dollar buys fewer colones, the same volume of business covers less of the bill.
Economist Alberto Franco laid out how much has changed. The strong recovery years were 2022 and 2023, and to a lesser extent 2024, when rising visitor numbers more than offset the exchange rate’s drag on colón earnings. That no longer holds. In the first quarter of 2026, Franco said, the appreciation neutralized the effect of higher arrivals entirely.
His comparison is stark since tourism generated more dollars in the first quarter of 2026 than in the same period of 2024, when the exchange rate averaged around ₡514. The colón equivalent rose by less than 2%. The Central Bank’s reference rate now sits at ₡452.02 to sell and ₡447.24 to buy, roughly 12% below that 2024 average.
Arnoldo Beeche, president of the Costa Rican Hotel Chamber, said occupancy has drifted slightly but consistently downward over recent years. High season still tends to beat targets at year’s end, he said, but low seasons are running below normal — and that combination, together with rising costs and the exchange rate, is what is hitting the business.
Mauricio Rodríguez, president of the Costa Rican Restaurant Chamber, described a second pressure that has nothing to do with foreign visitors. A cheap dollar makes it easier for Costa Ricans to travel abroad, and Rodríguez said that shift moves spending overseas and builds up debt, much of it on credit cards, leaving households with less to spend at home. He acknowledged that higher arrivals and greater visitor spending have helped part of the restaurant sector, but said results across the industry remain weak.
Hernán Jackson, president of the Costa Rican Association of Travel Agencies, made the distinction the headline numbers obscure. Higher revenues have not yet covered the losses from the currency effect, he said, and growth in dollar earnings should not be confused with company profitability.
Not everyone agrees the picture is settled. Félix Delgado, former general manager of the Central Bank, urged caution before quantifying the real effect. Establishing it would require knowing when firms actually received the bulk of their dollar income and at what rate they converted it — details that vary widely across businesses and that aggregate figures cannot capture.
The appreciation itself is not a short-term fluctuation. The dollar peaked near ₡697 in mid-2022 and has been declining for four years since. The Central Bank attributes the trend to an abundance of foreign currency driven by free-trade-zone exports, foreign direct investment, tourism earnings and a narrower trade deficit, set against a broader weakening of the dollar relative to several Latin American currencies.
That abundance is measurable since through August 13, the surplus in public foreign-exchange operations reached $4.827 billion, up $450 million from the same point in 2025.The effects split along predictable lines as anyone earning colones benefits, particularly on imported goods and foreign travel. Anyone earning dollars — exporters, tourism operators, and households living on income from abroad — absorbs the loss.
What the chambers are describing is a industry that looks healthy in the arrival statistics and increasingly thin in the accounts. Whether that gap narrows depends less on how many people visit Costa Rica than on where the exchange rate settles, and the Central Bank has given no indication that the four-year trend is about to reverse
