After years of isolation, Venezuela sees a slow but steady return of tourists by Isabel Bonnet

Under the dictatorship of Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela became a no-fly zone. Unlike the rest of the world, Venezuela’s aviation industry did not crash during the pandemic: it already had. Main airlines such as LATAM, Delta, Air France and Iberia had left prior to the pandemic. On top of becoming inaccessible, Venezuela was on top of the most catastrophic rankings for crime, medicine supply shortages, hyperinflation, repression, among many others. Within the first three years of Maduro’s government, the tourism industry had already shrunk by 60 percent.

As airlines return to Venezuela and new hotels and tours open up, I aim to understand the scope of Venezuela’s tourism industry's slow growth. Using a combination of several techniques to gather information, from web scraping to archive research of old airport arrivals and departures web portals, I collected a series of dataset on Venezuela’s aviation industry in the past decade.

Although the dataset has several limitations, it is a good start to understand the slow but steady return of tourists in Venezuela, as the country struggles to keep afloat after years of humanitarian and economic crisis.