Buenos Aires won a poll of 46,000 readers of the renowned magazine Condé Nast Traveler. Despite the fact that the City has become more expensive, it continues to be chosen for its cultural offer, gastronomy and the quality of its hotels.
Although local inflation and the international crisis produced a notable drop in the number of tourists visiting the country, Buenos Aires continues to receive recognition as a travel destination. Buenos Aires choosen as the best city in Latin America to visit.
In a survey among the readers of the publication, the Federal Capital obtained a score of 76.1, surpassing in the top five to Cuzco (73.8), Medellín (71), San Pedro de Atacama (70,29) and Santiago, Chile (69.7).
The magazine proposed to choose the best tourist destination according to each region (they won Florence in Europe, Cape Town in Africa and Sydney in Oceania, among others). In each city the readers evaluated the same parameters. For Buenos Aires, the most outstanding were the cultural offer, the restaurants, the environmental quality, the accommodations, the kindness of the porteños and the possibility of making purchases, in that order. In total, more than 46,000 people voted.
Condé Nast magazine also chose the five best hotels in Central and South America, and in that ranking dominated four establishments in Buenos Aires.
The first was the Palacio Duhau Park Hyatt, followed by the Alvear Palace Hotel, the Loisuites Recoleta, the Monastery Hotel of the city of Cuzco and the Four Seasons Buenos Aires. The travelers rated the category of the rooms and quality of service, meals, location, design and activities.
This year Buenos Aires had already been recognized in the 13th place among the 25 best cities for tourism according to a site specializing in gowns. In fact, the Reina del Plata had also topped the ranking of Latin American cities, and was the main tourist attraction in Latin America even over Machu Picchu, Bariloche or the Iguazu Falls.
These recognitions are part of a series of good qualifications that Buenos Aires obtained in magazines and websites specialized in tourism in recent years. Many of these recognitions highlighted the varied cultural offer of Buenos Aires as one of its main attractions. Last year it was named the World Book Capital by UNESCO, and readers of Lonely Planet’s magazine ranked it third among the cities in the world that most inspired the imagination of world-renowned artists.
This assessment of the cultural life of Buenos Aires was also detected by the Survey of Preferences that last year the Ente de Turismo Buenos Aires, in which 42.8% of the national tourists and 30.6% of the foreigners chose it as the Main virtue of Buenos Aires.
“We celebrate this new recognition, which demonstrates the importance of our destiny and highlights its unique cultural offer and excellent quality of services,” said the President of the Tourism and Culture Minister of Buenos Aires, Hernán Lombardi.
This type of distinctions can work as favorable publicity that serves to alleviate a bad moment of tourism in the City. According to the Buenos Aires government, since August of last year there has been a steady drop in the arrival of international visitors. So far this year the retraction is 1.7%, with 7.9% less money spent in our country by foreigners. On the contrary, the amount of money spent by Argentines traveling abroad increased.
This fall is of particular importance for the Buenos Aires economy. Tourism is one of the main “exports”, one of the economic activities that brings more dollars. The situation caused that hotels had a 40% of occupancy in the first half of the year, against a 62% of last year’s average, and the tanguerías fell from 70% to 38% of reserves for their shows, while Restaurants lost between 20% and 30% of their turnover, according to the different chambers of the sectors.
This situation is partly due to the economic crisis experienced by the countries of Europe, coupled with the still tenuous recovery of the United States, the devaluation of the real in Brazil and other external situations that make it difficult for foreigners to travel the world.
But there is also a very specific problem: inflation. In recent years Buenos Aires has returned to become an expensive city in dollars, where it is not so convenient to eat in a restaurant, to stay or to buy clothes. A coffee, for example, already costs more or less the same as in New York or the main European capitals. In fact, according to consultant Mercer, Buenos Aires is the most expensive South American city in the last year, comparing prices of food, clothing, transportation and other parameters. The most expensive cities in the region are Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, while the most expensive in the world is Tokyo.
