UPDATE: The fee has gone into effect. Please check out my newer post on Argentina’s new entrance fee.
Good news for expats and tourists alike! Argentina’s proposed tourist entry fee which was scheduled to start January 1, 2009, and then re-scheduled for March 2009, has been postponed indefinitely. This means that those trips to Uruguay will not cost anymore for us expats. ($131 US was the reciprocal rate for American citizens.)
Argentina had planned to use this money to help modernize many of their immigration computer systems, estimating that it would bring in $40 million per year. However, they never did any research as to how it would impact tourism before they enacted the legislation. Now, amid the global recession, tourism in Argentina has fallen for three straight months, and there’s no end in site. With tourism bringing $4 billion annually to the Argentine economy, the thought of charging an additional fee without knowing how it may further impact the tourism decline may have been enough to put this proposal on hold indefinitely.