Stop using “tourist arrivals” as a proxy for investment potential. The Dominican Republic is a perfect example, and the numbers are more interesting than the headlines.
The headline: a record, again
From January to November 2025 the Dominican Republic received 10,284,251 visitors. Of those, 7,884,421 arrived by air, up 35% from 2019, and 2,399,830 were cruise passengers, up 153% from 2019 (Caribbean Journal). By any volume measure, it is a triumph.
Now look at what sits underneath. Stay-over tourists, the ones who sleep in the country, numbered about 8.86 million in 2025. Their average daily spend was USD 170.94, the highest in a decade, but their average stay fell to 7.85 nights, the lowest in ten years (Dominican Today). Tourism receipts for the year were USD 11.3 billion (Rio Times). Divide receipts by stay-over tourists and you get roughly USD 1,280 per trip. That is my own back-of-envelope calculation, not an official statistic, but it matches the roughly USD 1,340 you get from daily spend multiplied by nights.
So: arrivals up, spend per day up, but stays shorter. That is a mixed picture, and the arrivals number alone would never have told you.
Problem 1: not all arrivals are equal
A cruise passenger and a week-long guest are both “one arrival”. Economically they are different products. Data compiled for the Caribbean show average onshore spending per cruise passenger in Barbados falling from USD 110 in 2005 to under USD 90 in 2024, and in St. Lucia stay-over visitors accounted for 97% of total tourist expenditure while cruise visitors made up the remaining 3% (World Bank, Rethinking Caribbean Tourism annexes). The Dominican numbers are different, but the logic holds: almost a quarter of the DR’s visitors this year came by cruise ship, and each of them spends a fraction of what an overnight guest does.
Problem 2: leakage
Even the money that visitors do spend does not all stay. Part of a package trip is paid outside the country to online travel agencies, foreign airlines and foreign tour operators, and all-inclusive resorts keep much of the guest’s spending inside the hotel’s own supply chain. I do not have a clean national figure for the DR’s leakage rate, and I’d treat any single figure you see with suspicion, because definitions vary widely. But the mechanism is real, and it is the reason a country can post record arrivals while local wages and small businesses feel little of it.
What serious investors should measure instead
- Spend per visitor and per night. The DR’s USD 170.94 a day is a genuine strength, and it is trending the right way.
- Length of stay. A stay that shortens from 8.6 to 7.85 nights is a quiet loss of revenue per arrival.
- Foreign direct investment. In 2025 tourism attracted about 26% of the DR’s USD 5.03 billion in FDI, around USD 1.32 billion, making it the largest destination for foreign capital (Rio Times). That is the real signal of investor confidence.
- Resident inflows and local wage spending. People who move in, buy land and hire locals add value for years, not days.
- Retention. What share of each visitor’s dollar stays inside the economy.
My take
Regional comparisons put the DR in the lower part of the Latin American pack on spend per tourist, even as its volumes lead the region. I read that as an opportunity, not a weakness. A country with 8.9 million overnight visitors and room to raise spend and stay length has a lot of upside for anyone who builds products that keep visitors longer: second homes, longer-stay communities, remote-work hubs and health or sport tourism. It also explains why I am wary of projects that depend on volume, such as cruise terminals, to justify themselves.
Volume makes headlines. Yield builds countries.
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