Although the American continent holds only third rank in world tourist destinations, after Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, tourism in the Americas is nevertheless an important phenomenon, with 210.9 million international arrivals for 2017, representing 16% of world tourist arrivals (UNWTO, 2018). More importantly still, a number of American countries, such as the US 1 and Canada, boast highly developed home tourism. This home market is in fact preponderant for some of the more developed and rapidly growing countries like Brazil. Overall, tourist movement has a powerful structural influence on economies, societies and territories throughout the Americas. However, on the scale of the entire continent, the tourist development of areas is, for geo-historical, cultural, economic and political reasons, a patchy, unequal process. The majority of tourist arrivals is concentrated in North America, with 137 million arrivals for 2017, whereas, for the same period, there were only 36.7 million in South America, 26 million in the Caribbean and 11.2 million in Central America. In this geographical imbalance, the US emerges as uncontested leader both for home and international tourism, figuring regularly as the third most visited country in the world, as in 2017, with 76.9 million international visitors (UNWTO, 2018), way ahead of Mexico (39.3 million) and Canada (28.8 million). The most frequented destinations elsewhere on the continent straggle way behind, with barely more than 6 million international arrivals for Argentina, Brazil, Chile and the Dominican Republic combined. This state of affairs can be attributed in part to the long-standing development of tourism in the US and Canada, where it began in the 1850s, though in Argentina it dates back to the 1880s, but basically it reflects the disparities between countries in levels of economic development and reproduces the habitually observed economic and socio-political North-over-South hegemony. The cumulative effects of tourism are well-known: the richest countries get the most tourists and gain most from tourism's knock-on effects.
