“Tourism” is the word of the year 2023 in the DR for Fundéu Guzmán Ariza, an entity that promotes the good use of Spanish in the media.
Fundéu Guzmán Ariza highlighted that the noun, which the Academy incorporated for the first time in 1925 as ‘fondness for traveling for the pleasure of touring a country’ and ‘organization of the means conducive to facilitating these trips’, names one of the pillars of the Dominican economy.
By the end of 2023, the DR is expected to reach a record ten million visitors, which has kept the Dominican economy afloat in a year that has not been so good for other sectors.
In addition, tourism, which is estimated to account for just over 20% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) this year, has been key to the Dominican Republic’s remarkable economic growth over the last fifty years, the highest in Latin America.
According to data from the World Tourism Organization, the country will remain this year as the second most visited Latin American destination, second only to Mexico. In 2022, it was the leader in tourism recovery in the region, with almost twice as many tourists as Colombia, Brazil or Argentina. The DR is 175 times smaller than Brazil, which received 3.6 million tourists in 2022, compared to the more than seven million reached by Quisqueya.
For these reasons, tourism has been one of the most prominent topics in the media this year and “tourism” one of the most used words.
Source: Arecoa.com
