Through El Sur I discovered a column by Andres Oppenheimer about tourism in Latin America, published by The Miami Herald (it requires free registration or Bugmenot, of course). Oppenheimer states that despite its growth, Latin America still concentrates a small fraction of the world’s market and it’s growing slower than in Asia Pacific and the Middle West. One of the reasons he points out is the “overregulationâ€? of airlines, which makes tickets expensive in the region. Add to this the lack of marketing policies to promote tourism in the area and the famous insecurity. I’m afraid Oppenheimer’s analysis it’s quite incomplete. It’s not only about visitors; it’s about the fraction of the total income that our countries receive on internation tourism. This phenomenon is known as leakage, and I wrote about it some time ago in this blog.

Nobody doubts that airlines’ high rates and the lack of policies about tourism have a negative impact on the movement of tourism in Latin America. But the factor that causes the biggest impact on our countries, when speaking about tourism, is the poor development of the local market, which is not a result of “overregulationâ€? issues or anything like it. It’s, simply, a consequence of the lack of better economic incomes of the people who live in this part of the world. Without a strong local market, without a strong local consumption of local touristic offers, we’ll remain in this problem for a very long time. In any case, if we’re basing all of the market’s development on foreign tourism, then we’ll have to count on policies aimed at making the foreigner spend as much as possible, as has been the case, for a long time now, in Cuzco.

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