MONEY FLOW · PANAMA CITY
Tourism revenue reached $6.58 billion in 2025, up 9.7% — faster than arrivals. The average visitor spends $2,249 across eight days. In a dollarized economy built on the canal, banking and the hub, tourism is now the fastest-compounding service line.
Panama runs on the US dollar, which removes the exchange-rate noise that distorts tourism ledgers elsewhere in the region: the $6.58 billion is clean. The composition is hub-flavored — business travel from the canal, banking and logistics sectors sets the weekday floor; leisure, cruise and stopover traffic prices the weekends and the December–April dry season.
Compare the region: Costa Rica, the tourism brand of Central America, grew arrivals just 1% in 2025 while Panama grew 8.2% — and Panama’s revenue per visitor now rivals its neighbor’s. The isthmus is no longer the cheap transit; it is the high-yield stopover.
Spend geography mirrors the product: Casco Viejo’s boutique hotels and restaurants capture the heritage dollar; the Amador terminal and causeway capture cruise day-spend; Avenida Balboa’s towers take the business premium; and the canal’s visitor centers — over one million visits in fiscal 2025, a record — monetize the attraction itself.
The forward lever is length of stay. Every program now points the same direction: 15-day stopovers, cruise homeporting ambitions, convention inventory like the Hyatt Regency’s 25,000 sq ft and the Amador convention center. Panama is engineering its tourism economy to add nights, not just heads — and the 2025 ledger says it is working.
The TIO read: this is the region’s cleanest tourism P&L — dollarized, high-yield, and growing revenue faster than volume. Watch the stopover cohort and Line 3: the first adds nights this year, the second opens the west bank in 2028. Panama City is pricing like a hub because it is one.
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