SANTO DOMINGO – More than 11 million visitors arrived in the Dominican Republic during 2025, a figure that once again placed tourism among the main drivers of the national economy. The industry's growth has spurred new hotel investments, real estate projects, air routes, and the development of destinations that just a decade ago had limited activity.
However, behind these results lies a challenge that rarely makes headlines: having sufficiently robust statistical information to understand how the sector is really growing and where it is headed.
The designation is part of the National Statistical Plan (PEN) 2025-2028, prepared by the National Statistics Office (ONE), which raises the need to continue strengthening the production of official statistics to respond to the new demands of an increasingly dynamic, diverse and decisive tourism sector for the Dominican economy.
Although tourism shows one of the best performances of the National Statistical System in terms of capacity to produce official indicators, the diagnosis itself shows that there are still opportunities to expand the information available, strengthen data sources and improve the coordination between the institutions responsible for generating statistics.
The challenge is no longer counting tourists
For decades, tourism statistics focused on measuring the arrival of foreign visitors. Today, that information is no longer sufficient.
The growth of the industry demands answers to increasingly complex questions: which destinations receive the most investment?, how much do visitors actually spend?, what impact does tourism have on employment?, how does hotel development influence the real estate market?, which areas experience the greatest pressure on public services or the environment?
Answering these questions requires a statistical system capable of generating timely, comparable information with high methodological standards.
A sector with solid indicators, but with room to grow
The ONE diagnosis reveals a striking reality.
According to the PEN 2025-2028, 67% of tourism indicators are classified at Feasibility Level I, the highest category used to assess the capacity to produce official statistics with methodological quality.
That percentage places tourism among the best performing sectors in the country, only behind Information and Communication Technologies (86%), the Economic sector (72%) and Agriculture (71%).
The institution attributes this result to investments made in recent years to strengthen the technical capabilities of the entities responsible for producing official information.
However, the same report warns that the strengthening of statistics cannot be stopped, because the growth of the sector demands increasingly specialized information to support planning and decision-making.
A system that still faces structural challenges
The National Statistical Plan identifies 85 statistical operations distributed among the different sectors that make up the National Statistical System.
In the case of tourism, the document records a prioritized statistical operation, a reality that does not necessarily reflect a lesser importance of the sector, but rather the way in which the production of official information is currently organized.
The ONE explains that a single statistical operation can generate multiple indicators, although it recognizes the need to continue strengthening the system to respond to new information needs that arise as economic activity evolves.
A snapshot of tourism in the PEN 2025-2028
| Indicator | Result |
|---|---|
| Indicators at Feasibility Level I | 67 % |
| Position among the evaluated sectors | 4th place |
| Prioritized statistical operations | 1 |
| Statistical operations of the National System | 85 |
The weaknesses recognized by the ONE
Beyond tourism, the PEN identifies challenges that affect the entire National Statistical System.
Among them, they highlight that 27% of statistical operations present problems of underreporting, barely 51% use the official territorial division to organize the information and nearly half of the institutions continue to manage their databases using Excel spreadsheets.
According to the ONE, these limitations reduce interoperability, hinder the exchange of information between institutions, and pose a challenge to the secure processing of large volumes of data.
Main challenges identified by the PEN
- 27% of statistical operations show underreporting.
- Only 51% use the official territorial division.
- Nearly half of the institutions still work with Excel databases.
- Administrative records need to be strengthened.
- It is necessary to expand coordination between the entities that produce statistics.
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