Tourism’s high season is off to an encouraging start in 2011, according to a survey by the Costa Rican National Tourism Chamber (CANATUR).
During the first week of January, CANATUR found that the average occupancy rate for the 112 hotels participating in the survey was 68 percent. Hotels in northern Guanacaste reported the highest occupancy rates, at 79 percent. The lowest rates were in the northern Caribbean, where only 36 percent of rooms were filled.
The survey’s 68 percent occupancy rate is a positive sign for members of the tourism sector.
The number of tourists who visited Costa Rica in 2010 topped 2 million, a 9 percent increase from 2009.
According to CANATUR, the average hotel occupancy rate from 2003-2010 was 62 percent. The sample size for the survey,112, is only about 4 percent of the 2,461 hotels in the country.
