The Costa Rican Tourism Institute (ICT) launched its new ‘Only the Essentials’ campaign on Monday in the country’s two main tourist markets: the United States of America and Canada.
The campaign will be activated in the American cities of New York, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Minneapolis, Las Vegas, Tampa-Orlando, Denver, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Seattle, Austin, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas-Houston, Atlanta, Boston and Chicago; in Canada it will include Toronto, Montreal and Calgary.
Outdoors, ‘Only the Essentials’ will resort to fences, buses, taxis and the Chicago subway station.
In addition, it will be spread in digital media, including online travel agencies, organizations specialized in tourism such as Trip Advisor, personalized content, media such as Count Nast, the AFAR travel magazine and the prestigious NYTimes newspaper, among others, as well as search engines Google, Bing and social networks.
This is the fourth international campaign that ICT carries out to promote Costa Rica in North America. The first was “No artificial ingredients” in 1997, followed by “Gift of Happiness”, “Save the Americans” and “My natural decision.”
The tourism industry directly contributes 6.3% and indirectly 1.9% to the national economy, adding 8.2% of the Gross Domestic Product.
In addition, 8.8% of all jobs in the country come directly from tourism. This, coupled with the chains and indirect jobs generated by the industry, represents the main source of income for thousands of Costa Rican families.
During the first half of 2019, the country registered 1,549,812 international arrivals by air, the main port of entry for international tourism, of that total, 65% came from the United States and Canada.