Brazil’s faltering economy continued stumbling and the 2016 Olympics was no panacea if last year’s World Cup is any guide. Brazil has failed to lure to its beaches and jungles many of the 3.5 billion TV viewers that followed the tournament.
From the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro to the Amazon forest and Iguassu Falls, Brazil boasts some of the world’s outstanding travel attractions. Yet several hurdles, from high costs and violence to poor marketing and logistics, mean many potential visitors choose to go elsewhere, said Diogo Canteras, partner at hotel consulting firm HotelInvest.
The flow of tourists to the country, which spent more to host the mega-event than any nation before it, has remained flat from a year earlier, according to tour operators and an online search engine. Spending by foreign visitors fell 7.4 per cent from August through November, compared with a year earlier, central bank data shows.
Brazil spent US$11 billion on the World Cup, which was supposed to increase the nation’s visibility and consolidate an image of “happiness and receptivity” to boost its tourist potential, according to a government-sponsored study on the economic benefits of the Cup published early last year.
“The Cup generated a lot of interest but no lasting business,” said Salvador Saladino, head of the Brazilian Incoming Travel Organisation, an association representing travel agencies.
Reservations for 2015 showed no significant increase from recent years, he said.
The number of consumers searching for trips to Brazil spiked in the months before the World Cup and then returned to “normal” levels in the subsequent months, according to a study conducted by Skyscanner, a travel search engine.
That could raise questions for companies that have bet on growing tourism.
In 2013 Alvaro Diago, chief operations officer of InterContinental Hotels Group in Latin America, said the World Cup and the Olympics would be an opportunity for Brazil to consolidate its tourism image and that the company planned to triple the number of its hotels in Brazil to 39 during the next decade.
Post hosting the 2010 soccer World Cup, South Africa’s international tourist arrivals grew at an annual average rate of 7.4 per cent in the three years through 2013, when it received 9.6 million foreign visitors. However, Brazil in the same year received only 5.8 million tourists.
