Coming into this trip, I did not really know what to expect from Costa Rica beyond the fact that it was going to be warm and that it was going to rain a lot. Leaving it, I have a completely different understanding of what it actually means to build a business around something bigger than profit. Our project theme was ecotourism as a sustainable business model, and over the past two weeks, I got to see what that looks like across a lot of very different companies.
The example that stuck with me the most was Sibö Chocolate. The founders walked away from their careers and spent three years learning how to make chocolate from scratch because they noticed Costa Rica was exporting raw cacao and importing finished chocolate from Europe. What made it click for me was learning that they pay three times the market price for quality cacao on purpose, while big companies just buy the cheap stuff. When cacao prices jumped 300% in ten months because of climate change and droughts, they did not adjust their sourcing or cut corners. For someone going into accounting and finance, that is an interesting decision because, on paper, it looks like a bad financial move, but it is what keeps their entire business model intact. You cannot really put a number on the conservation mission being the reason the business exists in the first place.
On the topic of climate change, one of the more eye opening moments of the trip was learning how global warming is directly affecting Costa Rican agriculture. What used to be a consistent mist or light rain in places like Monteverde has shifted to unpredictable heavy downpours that can destroy crops overnight. For farmers who have built their livelihoods around specific growing conditions, that is not just an environmental issue, it is a financial one. Seeing that connection between climate and money in person is something I will carry into my career because it changes the way you think about risk. Climate risk is increasingly something that shows up on balance sheets, and Costa Rica made that very real for me in a way that reading about it never would have.
Arenal Mundo Aventura was probably the most useful business case study of the whole trip. They protect 1,300 acres of forest but only use a small fraction of it for activities, with 80% of their revenue coming from one product and 75 to 80% of their visitors coming from the US and Canada. Hugo was upfront about all of it, including the fact that over reliance on a single product and dependence on international markets are their two biggest vulnerabilities. From a finance perspective, that is a company with a strong revenue stream but a pretty fragile foundation, and the conversation about how they manage that through bundles, agency relationships, and direct bookings was very useful. It is kind of a real world financial problem that we don’t really see in a classroom.
The Monteverde coffee farm was a smaller example, but one that also stayed with me. They split their revenue almost exactly 50/50 between coffee sales and tourism experiences, running around 16,000 tours per year. That kind of intentional diversification stood out compared to a lot of the other businesses we visited. It also felt the most genuine out of any tour we did on the trip. The gift shop had prices in colones, the tour went through the actual farm, and we got to shovel and plant bean and corn seeds ourselves. After visiting Cafe Britt earlier in the trip, which felt a lot more polished and tourist-facing, the difference was pretty clear. Authenticity is actually a competitive advantage in ecotourism, and that is something I would not have picked up on just from reading about it.
Dos Pinos was a different kind of lesson. It is a dairy cooperative founded by 25 farmers in 1947 that now has over 1,900 farms participating, and the profits stay with the farmers rather than outside shareholders. Compared to Kyndryl, the multinational IT company that chose Costa Rica for its educated workforce but sends decisions and profits back to New York, Dos Pinos showed what it looks like when value actually stays inside the community. That difference matters when you are thinking about sustainable business because a model that takes value out of a place is very different from one that keeps it circulating. As someone going into finance, that is a distinction I will think about whether I am analyzing a company or eventually advising one.
The broader takeaway is that ecotourism works best when the business is built around protecting the thing that people came to see. Every company that impressed me on this trip had that in common. What I will actually carry into my career is the idea that sustainability and profitability are not opposites. Every business class I have taken frames them as a tradeoff, but what I saw here is that the most financially stable businesses were also the ones most committed to their environment and community. A business that is slowly depleting its own foundation is a bad long term investment, no matter what the short term numbers look like, and Costa Rica made that argument better than any class could.
