Guatemala Tourism Statistics 2026: Visitor Arrivals, Growth & How It Compares to Central America

As of 24 August 2026. Every figure below comes from the institution that issued it — INGUAT for Guatemala, and each neighboring country’s own national tourism authority or central bank. Metric names are given in the issuer’s own words, because in this dataset the metric name is the story: Guatemala’s headline number and Costa Rica’s headline number count different people.

Quick summary

• 3,361,843 non-resident visitors (visitantes no residentes) entered Guatemala in 2025 — INGUAT’s headline metric, which includes same-day visitors.
• 2,542,822 overnight tourists (turistas) — the internationally comparable arrivals figure, and the one used in the comparison table on this page.
• 819,021 same-day visitors (excursionistas), which already contain cruise day-visitors.
• 62% arrive by land, 35% by air, 2% by sea. El Salvador alone supplied 46% of all arrivals.
• US$1,390.2 million in estimated tourism foreign exchange in 2025, up 15.0% on 2024.
• 2026 has flattened: +0.93% year on year in the first half on the all-visitors metric, and June 2026 was down 2% against June 2025.

Read this first: two metrics, not one

INGUAT’s glossary defines a turista as “visitante que permanece al menos una noche en un medio de alojamiento colectivo o privado en el lugar visitado” and a visitante del día (excursionista) as “visitante que no pernocta en un medio de alojamiento colectivo o privado en el lugar visitado”. The published headline is the sum of the two.

Three consequences that decide how any of these numbers may be used:

1. visitantes no residentes is not international tourist arrivals. Setting 3,361,843 against a neighbor’s overnight figure overstates Guatemala by about 32%.
2. Cruise passengers sit inside excursionistas — the serie histórica states that “dentro de los excursionistas se incluyen los visitantes de cruceros que realizan su visita en un día”. They are never additive to the total.
3. Land flows are estimated, not censused. Every INGUAT table carries the source line “Instituto Guatemalteco de Migración y Estimación de Flujos Terrestres, Departamento de Investigación y Análisis de Mercados INGUAT”. That estimation is why component sums land within ±100 in the rounded 2012-2019 series and generally within ±1 in the exact-count era, with one larger exception: INGUAT’s published 2021 components (602,100 + 63,900) sum to 666,000 against its stated total of 666,017. We publish INGUAT’s stated totals and components as printed and never substitute our own sum. (*In the source-market table, +22,945 is likewise INGUAT’s printed delta; the absolute difference computes to 22,946.)

Visitors have been classified by country of residence, not nationality, since July 2009, “por recomendaciones de ONU Turismo”.

Annual series, 2012–2025

Metric: llegadas de visitantes no residentes (inbound tourism), split into overnight turistas and same-day excursionistas. Source: INGUAT statistical bulletins (serie histórica 2012–2021; annual bulletins 2020, 2022, 2024, 2025; Junio 2026 bulletin for the 2026 partial year). All retrieved 24 August 2026.

Precision note. 2012–2019 are published by INGUAT in thousands and are therefore precise to ±100 — do not present them as exact counts. 2020 onward are published as exact integers. 2020 was down 77% on 2019; Guatemala’s borders were shut from 17 March to 18 September 2020.

The counter-intuitive line in this table. Same-day visitors were 807,200 in 2019 and 819,021 in 2025 — up just 1.5% in six years — while overnight tourists rose 45.1%. The common skeptical read, that the 3.36M headline is inflated by Salvadoran day-trippers, is right about the level and wrong about the growth: on the strict overnight metric Guatemala’s recovery is stronger than the headline suggests, not weaker.

On the 2025 growth rate. INGUAT publishes +11%; the two official totals give 324,561 / 3,037,282 = 10.7% computed. INGUAT’s own bulletin prints an absolute change of 324,562 against a subtraction of 324,561. Both are the same estimation-rounding family described above, and we publish INGUAT’s stated figures rather than silently correcting them.

How visitors arrive

Source: INGUAT Boletín Anual 2025. The percentages are the solid figures here. The absolutes appear in two internal variants inside the same bulletin — air 1,188,808 (three occurrences) versus 1,188,810 (two), land 2,095,171 (two) versus 2,095,169 (two) — an artifact of the land-flow estimation. Where absolutes are needed on this page we use 1,188,808 air / 2,095,171 land, the more frequent variant and the one that reconciles against the 2024 column (1,143,371 air / 1,843,751 land / 50,160 sea). Sea 2025 = 77,865.

The air row is the analytically important one. Air arrivals grew only +4% in 2025 while the +11% headline was carried by land (+14%) and cruise (+55%). Any claim that long-haul tourism to Guatemala grew 11% is not supported by INGUAT’s own table. Cruise passengers landed at Puerto Quetzal (71,782) and Santo Tomás de Castilla (6,083) in 2025; cruise is strongly seasonal between November and April, so a single month is never annualizable. If you are working out how to get there, see direct flights to Guatemala.

Source markets, 2025

Metric: visitantes no residentes by country of residence. Source: INGUAT Boletín Anual 2025.

Half of everyone who flies into Guatemala is a US resident. Of 670,103 US residents in 2025, 590,133 arrived by air (88%) and 79,970 by land (12%). That is 590,133 of 1,188,808 total air arrivals — roughly 50%. Cruise passengers are a separate row and are not allocated to any country, so the US figure excludes cruise.

The declining US share is not a US decline. The US was 24% of visitors in 2022, 22% in 2024 and 20% in 2025 — but US volume rose 2% in 2025. The share fell because Salvadoran land arrivals grew faster. Reading the share trend alone would be misleading.

Monthly detail

Metric: total visitantes no residentes. Sources: INGUAT Boletín Anual 2025 and Boletín Junio 2026.

Seasonality: December is the peak (370,164) and September the trough (220,474) — a 1.68× swing, with the December peak driven by diaspora return travel rather than conventional holiday tourism. Guatemala’s June 2025 total appears as 257,496 in the annual bulletin and 257,495 in the June 2026 comparative table; we publish the annual figure, and the one-visitor variance is the same estimation rounding described above.

2026 is flattening, not booming. First-half 2026 is 1,625,850 against 1,610,905 for first-half 2025 (+0.93%) — the 2026 figure is INGUAT’s published half-year total, while the 2025 comparison base is our summation of INGUAT’s six published monthly rows, since INGUAT’s own first-half 2025 bulletin has not been substituted here. June 2026 was −2% year on year, with the United States down 4% and El Salvador down 8% for that month. Direction flips by window: in July 2026 alone the US was +0.1% and El Salvador +5%, so any 2026 country figure without its window attached inverts the story.

Not yet in a bulletin. INGUAT’s July 2026 bulletin had not been published as of 24 August 2026. Press reporting attributes 288,700 visitors in July 2026 (+2%) and 1,915,874 for January–July 2026 (+1.2%) to INGUAT — labeled here as press-reported until the bulletin appears. The July 2025 comparison base used by that reporting, 283,091, matches INGUAT’s own bulletin row exactly.

Tourism foreign-exchange income

Source: INGUAT press release, 13 January 2026. These are the issuer, and the issuer is INGUAT, not Banguat — Banguat publishes no standalone tourism line in its external-sector statistics, and its balance-of-payments travel credits are a different definition that must never be blended with these. Note that the two years are labeled differently in the same release, and that the word estimadas belongs to the 2025 figure.

2025 versus 2024 is +US$181.5 million, +15.0% — our computation from the issuer’s two figures; INGUAT does not state that rate. It is the most interesting line in the dataset: revenue grew faster than visitors (+11%) and far faster than air arrivals (+4%), so revenue per visitor rose.

The same release reports 27.0 million domestic trips in 2025 (against 25.9 million in 2024) and a domestic economic spillover of Q54.2 billion (against Q51.4 billion). A widely circulated US$1,324M figure for 2024 was a preliminary projection and has been superseded by US$1,208.7M — it should not be cited.

Is Guatemala outgrowing its neighbors? Depends on the window

This is the question every regional tourism story asks and almost none answers correctly, because each country counts different people. The rule applied here: compare overnight arrivals to overnight arrivals, name each country’s metric verbatim, and footnote every definition that cannot be reconciled rather than quietly including it. Guatemala therefore enters this table at 2,542,822, not 3,361,843.

Percentages are our computations from the issuer integers. Where an issuer publishes its own rate it agrees with ours: Costa Rica +0.8%, Panama +11.0% and +32.0%, Honduras +9.5%, and CORSATUR prints +8% / +95% for El Salvador against our +7.8% / +94.6%. No issuer-stated rate contradicts this table.

The definition footnotes that make the table honest

The table above uses only the overnight column of each series, so same-day and cruise contamination is already excluded. What is not excluded is returning nationals:

• El Salvador’s headline is the extreme case. Its 2024 headline of 3,956,794 visitantes internacionales contains 769,806 same-day visitors and 392,890 Salvadorans resident abroad — about 29.4% non-comparable. Its turistas line, the one in our table, still includes those returning nationals: 12% in 2024, 10% in 2025 (351,324 people). CORSATUR’s own 2024 wording is “el 88% representan turistas extranjeros y el 12% son salvadoreños residentes en el exterior”; the 2025 report moves that split to 90/10, so the quote must always carry its year. El Salvador’s series is also survey-based, not a migration census.
• Belize carries the same contamination at a much smaller scale — 3.5% in 2025.
• Honduras has a definitional break at 2021: before 2021 cruise counted all passengers aboard, from 2021 only those who disembark. Any Honduras 2025-versus-2019 comparison crosses that break. It affects the cruise and headline lines rather than turistas, which is what we use.
• Belize has two disagreeing official series. The Belize Tourism Board and the Central Bank of Belize differ on every year: overnight 2019 503,166 (BTB) vs 464,086 (CBB); 2024 547,370 vs 513,680; 2025 551,681 vs 504,908 — BTB runs 6.6–9.3% higher every year. We publish this as a discrepancy without asserting a cause: CBB labels its cruise row Cruise Ship Disembarkations, but its overnight row is labeled Stay Over Visitor Arrivals and CBB publishes no methodology note for it. Never mix the two series.
• Costa Rica is the cleanest baseline — ICT states its indicator is “recomendado y avalado por la ONU Turismo, para el monitoreo del país y la comparación internacional.” One caveat: its 2019 methodology note lacks the crews and land-transporter subtraction its 2024+ reports carry, though ICT itself prints 2013–2025 in a single table.
• Preliminary figures will move. Panama 2025, Belize 2024/2025 and Honduras 2024/2025 are all issuer-flagged preliminary. None sits near a ranking boundary, but the decimals will change.

The answer, window by window

First-half 2026, overnight metric: Guatemala 1,281,483 against 1,229,404 (+4.2%); Panama 1,349,397 against 1,148,283 (+17.5%, ATP’s own stated rate); Costa Rica 1,733,596 against 1,619,976 (+7.0%); Belize 318,541 against 316,325 (+0.7%). Honduras publishes no first-half 2026 figure — IHT’s 2026 dashboard covers January–March only — and one must not be constructed.

Guatemala’s H1 2025 overnight base (1,229,404) and Belize’s H1 2025 base (316,325) are our summations of the issuer’s monthly rows, because neither issuer publishes a half-year subtotal. Both sum-validate: Guatemala’s twelve 2025 monthly turistas rows total 2,542,821 against a published 2,542,822 (the ±1 estimation family), and Belize’s twelve 2025 rows sum to exactly 551,681 with its six 2026 rows summing to exactly 318,541. Costa Rica’s H1 2025 cross-checks two independent ways: it is printed as 1,619,976 in the 2026 semestral report and its Anuario 2025 monthly rows sum to the same value.

So the honest answer is: yes on recovery, no on momentum. Guatemala’s overnight arrivals have recovered better than every neighbor except El Salvador — whose lead rests on a headline that is about 29% non-comparable and a turistas line that is survey-based and 10% returning nationals — while in 2026 Guatemala is growing more slowly than Panama and Costa Rica. This is not a story about Guatemala losing tourists, and it is not explained by the US market collapsing: US volume rose 2% in 2025 and was roughly flat in July 2026.

The “record year” claim, checked

Supported, within the 2012–2025 window, on the all-visitors metric. 2025’s 3,361,843 is the highest value in INGUAT’s published series; the previous record was 2024’s 3,037,282; the highest pre-pandemic year was 2019 at approximately 2,559,600, which 2025 exceeds by about +802,243 (+31.3%). Because INGUAT’s serie histórica begins in 2012 and we have not checked 1996–2011, the defensible phrasing is “highest since at least 2012”, not “all-time record”.

Who actually said “record” matters. INGUAT does not use the word in either its Anual 2025 bulletin — which says “un incremento del 11%” — or its January 2026 press release, which describes 11% growth. For 2025 the record framing is a Prensa Libre headline. The only record claim traceable to a named INGUAT official is about 2024: director Harris Whitbeck, citing 3,037,282 and +19% versus 2019, via AGN (Agencia Guatemalteca de Noticias) in January 2025.

And INGUAT’s outperformance claim needs a correction, not a rejection. INGUAT states that world tourism grew about 5% and the Americas about 3% in 2025, making Guatemala’s 11% “más del doble” of those references. Those world and Americas rates are UN Tourism figures as characterized by INGUAT; we have not verified them at UN Tourism and do not publish them as fact. The metric mismatch is the substantive issue: UN Tourism counts overnight arrivals, while INGUAT’s 11% counts all visitors including same-day and cruise. Like-for-like, Guatemala’s 2025 rate is +8.8%, not 11%. The direction of INGUAT’s claim survives; the “more than double” margin is doing work the metric mismatch created.

How we verified this

Guatemala’s figures rest on INGUAT’s own bulletins, read in full — the Boletín Estadístico de Turismo Anual 2025, the Junio 2026 bulletin, the annual bulletins for 2024, 2022 and 2020, and the Serie Histórica 2012–2021 — plus INGUAT’s January 2026 press release for the foreign-exchange figures, which appear in no bulletin. All retrieved 24 August 2026 from the INGUAT bulletin archive and the statistics index. The most recent bulletin is the Junio 2026 edition.

The Anual 2025 bulletin has an unusually strong chain of custody. We obtained it twice by two fully independent paths — live from inguat.gob.gt through a browser session, and from the Wayback Machine — and the two files are byte-identical: same size (1,110,485 bytes) and the same SHA-256:

64a5bc0a02a4efbe2efff3ea4f2c6af8d7b49ed3686ebb2960bb70ad49512698

That rules out retrieval-path corruption, a partial or tampered download, and a mis-set snapshot, and it means the 2025 figures on this page rest on a cryptographically identified artifact a third party can re-obtain from a public archive and check against.

Every neighbor figure was re-opened at its own national issuer on 24 August 2026 — nothing here is relayed from an aggregator, a search snippet or a wire story. Costa Rica: ICT anuarios 2019, 2024 and 2025 plus the I Semestre 2026 report. Panama: ATP — the 2015–2025 demand series and the January–June 2026 report, two independent documents agreeing digit-for-digit. El Salvador: CORSATUR informes for 2024 and 2025 — the 2024 PDF is image-only and was read visually, page by page. Honduras: IHT static visitor-arrival reports through 2024 plus its Power BI dashboard for 2025. Belize: the Belize Tourism Board statistics dashboard and the Central Bank of Belize key-tourism-indicators workbook. Nicaragua: BCN Nicaragua en Cifras 2025, sourced to INTUR, with the 2019 figure recovered from the archived 2021 edition.

Two rows have no static file — Honduras 2025 and Belize — so we captured each dashboard’s backing query JSON, not a screenshot alone, which makes the value checkable rather than merely readable. Every row was also reconciled against its own components: Panama’s turistas + excursionistas = visitantes holds exactly for all eleven years 2015–2025, Nicaragua’s day-visitor and tourist rows sum exactly to its arrivals total, and Honduras’s Power BI semantic query returns the raw integer 920,427 for 2025 rather than an on-screen label.

The retrieved artifacts are archived in this repository at content/sources/tourism-stats-2026/ with a SHA256SUMS.txt covering every file in that directory; the INGUAT Anual 2025 PDF sits alongside it in content/sources/, with its SHA-256 published above. If you believe any figure here is wrong, tell us — send the issuer document and page number and we will correct the page and say what changed.

What is deliberately not on this page: regional aggregates from SITCA and UN Tourism, average visitor spend, and average length of stay. None of them cleared verification at their issuer, and an unverified number is worse than a missing one.

Update cadence

INGUAT publishes its statistical bulletin monthly, roughly one month in arrears — the June 2026 bulletin was published in July 2026. We re-check the bulletin archive on that cadence and restamp this page when a new bulletin lands, including replacing the press-reported July 2026 figures above with primary ones. Neighbor series follow each national issuer’s own calendar; the preliminary Panama, Belize and Honduras figures will be revised by their issuers.

Frequently asked questions

How many tourists visited Guatemala in 2025? It depends which metric you mean. INGUAT counted 3,361,843 non-resident visitors, a figure that includes same-day visitors. Of those, 2,542,822 were overnight tourists and 819,021 were same-day visitors. The internationally comparable arrivals figure is 2,542,822.

Is 3.36 million the same as international tourist arrivals? No. Comparing it against a neighbor’s overnight-arrivals figure overstates Guatemala by roughly 32%.

Is Guatemala outgrowing its Central American neighbors? The answer flips with the window. Versus 2019, Guatemala is +45.1%, second of seven. Over 2025 alone it grew +8.8%, mid-pack. In the first half of 2026 it grew +4.2%, behind Costa Rica and Panama.

How much foreign exchange did tourism bring in 2025? US$1,390.2 million in estimated tourism foreign exchange, against US$1,208.7 million in 2024 — +15.0%, faster than visitor growth.

Where do Guatemala’s visitors come from? El Salvador is the largest source market at 1,539,421 (46%), the United States second at 670,103 (20%). Among air arrivals, roughly half are US residents.

Was 2025 a record year? It is the highest year in INGUAT’s series, which begins in 2012 — so “highest since at least 2012” rather than “all-time record”. INGUAT itself says “11% growth”, not “record”.

Is Guatemala’s tourism still growing in 2026? It has flattened: +0.93% year on year in the first half on the all-visitors metric, +4.2% on the overnight metric, and June 2026 was −2% year on year.

How often is this page updated? On INGUAT’s monthly bulletin cadence. Neighbor figures were last re-verified 24 August 2026.

Related data pages

Guatemala hotel occupancy — official rates by department and month · Guatemala statistics — cost of living, prices and wages · Direct flights to Guatemala · Things to do in Guatemala · Guatemala’s volcanoes