RIO DE JANEIRO
With the glittering parades, towering floats and sultry samba postponed by the omicron variant, Brazil will have a carnival week without much carnival this year — bad news for a tourism industry already battered by the pandemic.
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In a world without COVID-19, this would have been the week a deluge of tourists – more than 2.1 million in 2020 – descended on Rio de Janeiro for a free-for-all of street parties and spectacular, all-night parades.
Instead, industry experts predict Rio and other tourist destinations to be relatively low-key, with a smaller number of visitors – mainly Brazilians traveling domestically.
That is adding to the agony of a tourism industry only just starting to recover from near-collapse in 2020.
“It’s been very traumatic,” said Alexandre Sampaio, head of hotel and restaurant federation FBHA, citing official figures showing the tourism industry’s revenues plunged 35 percent in 2020.
The industry…