Capital Flight & Leakage
Travel Doesn’t Have to Be Extractive… It Can Be Regenerative
A truly vibrant travel experience increases intercultural understanding, forges peaceful dialogue, transforms consciousness, and inspires change. At AltruVistas, we know this can’t happen without a deep examination of the travel supply web.
Transformative travel and transformative economics are linked.
Travel economics are inseparable from a human rights framework. When tourism dollars directly benefit local communities and host economies, your trip isn’t just about yourself.
Instead, your travel experience
- creates socioeconomic growth
- promotes social progress
- supports the causes you care about
- enhances environmental sustainability
- flips the script on neocolonial patterns of extraction
- helps achieve UN Sustainable Development Goals like poverty alleviation, racial and gender equity, clean water access, health and wellbeing, and beyond.
Traveling with us means that 50-80% of your dollars stay in local host economies—where they go directly to local service providers, nonprofit and community groups, businesses, farms, cultural organizations, and environmental initiatives.
Travel Is One of the Largest Global Economic Forces, and Can Be Harnessed for Good
According to data from the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) and the World Travel & Tourism Council, in 2025 there were over 1.5 billion international travelers—a figure which surpasses pre-pandemic highs. These travelers spent more than 11.6 trillion dollars, while only 2.2 trillion of those dollars (19%) stayed within host economies. But included in that reported 19% are profits from non-locally-owned hotel chains, foreign-made souvenirs, and the like.
- The travel industry now accounts for a whopping 9.8% to 10.3% of the global GDP (UNWTO; WTTC)
- In 2025, 366 million people worked in tourism—approximately 1 in 9 jobs
- In 2025, travel increased both GDP and jobs in every world region.
But… Where Does All This Money Go?
Most travelers’ dollars are NOT staying in local host economies. Instead, their money leaves the country via foreign-owned tour operators, airlines, and hotels; non-local service providers; and imported drinks and food. Sometimes, conventional tourism dollars don’t even reach the host country at all. This is called capital flight and leakage, Skal and we see it as the biggest global problem of the conventional travel industry. Every dollar that leaves or never reaches a host country is a lost opportunity for local benefit.
The Travel Foundation’s 2024 “Creating Equitable Destinations” report offers the following specific leakage percentages:
- Over 55% leakage: high-end Bali tourism (4- and 5-star hotels)
- 75% leakage: Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda
- 80% leakage: the Caribbean region (an improvement from 2016’s 90% leakage)
As we researched updated statistics for 2026, we also discovered that information on capital flight and leakage had grown harder to find. This could be due to the meteoric rise over the last decade in online booking providers, hosting platforms which blur the lines between corporate and individual travel entities, illegal activity, and lack of official recording metrics.
Our prior research conducted in 2016 showed the following leakage percentages:
- up to 85% in lesser-developed African countries (UNCTAD)
- 70% in Thailand (Sustainable Living)
- 40% in India (Third World Resurgence)
- Two-thirds of the income from tourism in the Mediterranean—the world’s largest tourist destination—went to less than 10 tour operators from northern Europe. (WWF)
- In most all-inclusive package tours, about 80% of travelers’ expenditures went to the airlines, hotels and other international companies (who often have their headquarters in the travelers’ home countries), and not to local businesses or workers.
- Cruise tourism generated an astounding 80-90% leakage.
Where Do Regenerative Travel Dollars Go Instead?
AltruVistas’ transformational travel model supports our in-country partners around the globe in their efforts to
- protect bioreserves, UNESCO World Heritage sites, and national parks
- strengthen community infrastructure, social services, and local economies
- support local artists and culture-bearers, farmers, activists and nonprofit workers, and business owners
- protect cultural sovereignty