Boutique Invest Costa Rica
The room said it all.
We came out of ALISCALA with one clear conviction. The appetite for boutique hospitality investment in Costa Rica is no longer building. It’s here. Across conversations with investors, operators, and capital partners from around the region, the same question kept surfacing. Where are the right assets in Costa Rica, and who knows how to find them?
That is precisely the ground we work.
A market that is ready to be seen
We left ALISCALA genuinely satisfied, not because of the buzz, but because of the quality of what was on the table. The developments and opportunities presented reflected a market maturing in real time: entrepreneurial assets with strong fundamentals, owners thinking seriously about institutional readiness, and capital looking for a credible way in.
One of the high points was the official presentation by Hermes Navarro of the Instituto Costarricense de Turismo (ICT). It drew a full room and held the audience’s attention from start to finish, a clear signal of how seriously the public and private sectors are now taking Costa Rica’s tourism trajectory.
We also opened valuable conversations with PROCOMER and the ICT around investment into Costa Rica. These are the relationships that turn individual transactions into a functioning investment pipeline, and we’re glad to be building them.
Costa Rica took center stage
The clearest signal of where this market is headed came at the awards. Nekajui, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve on Peninsula Papagayo, was named ALIS CALA Development of the Year 2025, the first Ritz-Carlton Reserve in all of Central and South America. The 107-key resort drew roughly US$365 million in institutional capital, and its 36 branded residences sold out before the doors even opened.
Read that again. A Costa Rican development, in Papagayo, won the region’s top development honor, and demand was so strong the residences cleared pre-opening. That is institutional conviction in a supply-constrained market, stated plainly.
Costa Rica’s presence didn’t stop there. Tabacón Thermal Resort in La Fortuna was a finalist for Transaction of the Year, putting the country’s name at the top of the table twice in a single morning.
The numbers behind the confidence
The optimism in the room is backed by hard data. Costa Rica posted its strongest opening quarter on record in 2026, with roughly 1.03 million international arrivals in Q1, up 11.3% year-on-year, and, notably, the first time a first quarter has surpassed pre-pandemic 2019 levels.
For investors watching the coast, one figure stands out. Guanacaste’s Liberia airport grew 16.9% in Q1, well ahead of the national average, consolidating its role as the gateway to some of the country’s most investable beachfront markets.
This is what a structural shift looks like, not a seasonal blip.
What this means for investors
Costa Rica’s boutique hospitality sector is at the exact inflection point where smart capital moves. Demand fundamentals are strengthening, the asset base is still largely entrepreneurial, and the gap between an entrepreneurial property and an institution-ready one is where real value is created.
That gap is our specialty. We source the right opportunities, including off-market listings most buyers never see, and we do the work of taking properties to the institutional readiness that serious capital expects.
And the award speaks to it directly. Papagayo just produced the region’s Development of the Year. We hold a 100-hectare coastal parcel in that very corridor, ready for development. We fully intend to be the brokers who place it with the right partner, and that is exactly the kind of conviction the next cycle will reward.
Explore our current investment opportunities at boutiqueinvestment.solutions and invest-costarica.com, and reach out directly. The assets that define the next cycle are being positioned now.
Boutique Invest Costa Rica. Brokerage and advisory for boutique hospitality investment in Costa Rica.
