Bloomberg Línea — European digital nomads are the target of a new regional initiative recently launched by Central America and the Dominican Republic.
The Central American Tourism Promotion Agency (CATA) has launched a campaign with the slogan “Live, travel and connect”, which seeks to promote the region as an ideal multi-destination for long-stay tourism, with the necessary installed capacity for digital connectivity and tourism infrastructure.
According to CATA, European travelers are characterized by combining their work time with their tourism interests, motivating them to move their office to different cultural and natural environments, but with the guarantee of always being connected to the world.
“With the acceleration of the digitization of the tourism industry seen in recent years, this sector has gained strength, positioning itself as a quite promising niche market for the industry,” CATA said in a statement.
CATA announced that it will be showing the most emblematic destinations of Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama and Dominican Republic to those who decide to take their office elsewhere, and can explore destinations in close proximity to the environment.
To do this, CATA has implemented a campaign on its social networks, and launched a website to publicize flagship locations in each country.
Digital nomads in Costa Rica
In Costa Rica, where there is a visa available for digital nomads, there are between 3,000 and 4,000 such persons living and working, with each person generating around 15 million colons each six months (around $21,700), according to the Costa Rican Tourism Institute (ICT).
“Nomadic work is totally viable in Costa Rica, first because of the conditions of connectivity, infrastructure, and the services that are available ,and it is an enhancer of the tourism ecosystem for the country,” said Adriana Oviedo Vega, coordinator of the remote work and digital transformation program at the Universidad Estatal a Distancia (UNED) of Costa Rica.
Speaking during the 13th Congress of International Relations of the UNED, she referred to the findings of a study she carried out on digital nomads along with professor Nancy Vásquez Flores, and from which she offered some recommendations.
“Hopefully the law, along with its regulations, does not become something bureaucratic and cumbersome where people who come to Costa Rica say ‘that was terrible and a super tiresome experience, and I won’t go back.’ On the contrary, we would like the regulation to be agile and to provide the rights mentioned in the law, without further administrative procedures”, said Oviedo Vega.
The ICT has estimated, according to figures from the specialized site ABrother Abroad, that Costa Rica can hunt 0.25% of the global market of 35 million digital nomads of various nationalities by 2022.
