Embratur went to Rimini last week with a growth figure in hand. Read it next to last year’s and the story changes.
What Brazil Brought to Rimini
Embratur exhibited at TTG Travel Experience in Rimini from 14 to 16 October 2026, on a 100 square metre stand with 14 co-exhibitors, among them representatives of Amazonas, Foz do Iguaçu and São Luís alongside receptive operators, hotels and airlines (Embratur, October 2026).
The headline it travelled with: arrivals of Italian visitors to Brazil rose 9.7 percent between January and August 2026 (Embratur, October 2026). Italy is Brazil’s fourth largest European source market (Embratur, October 2026).
The participation sits inside Plano Brasis, the international tourism marketing plan for 2025 to 2027 drawn up by Embratur with Sebrae and FGV (Embratur, 2026). Rimini is one stop on a calendar of 19 international fairs for the year (Embratur, January 2026).
The Number Next to the Number
Now the comparison nobody put in the release. In 2025, Brazil received 177,744 Italian tourists, up 26.4 percent on the 140,641 of 2024 (Embratur, March 2026). In January 2026 alone the Italian flow was running 13 percent ahead of the previous year (Brazilian Embassy in Rome, March 2026).
So the sequence reads 26.4 percent for full year 2025, 13 percent in January 2026, and 9.7 percent across the first eight months of 2026. The market is still growing. It is growing at roughly a third of last year’s rate, and the deceleration is visible inside this year.
That is not bad news, and it is not a warning. It is the normal shape of a market that has finished recovering and started behaving. The mistake would be to build a 2027 Italian plan on a 26 percent assumption.
A word on what these figures are. Embratur counts arrivals, recorded at the border, and the 9.7 percent is a comparison of the same eight month window year on year. It says nothing about length of stay, spend per traveller or which regions those Italians actually reached once they landed. A flat arrivals number with longer stays is a better year for a receptive operator than a rising one with shorter stays, and the published data does not let you tell the two apart.
The Constraint Is in the Air, as Usual
For 2026 the forecast is 972 flights and 355,600 seats between Italy and Brazil, on routes from Rome to São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and from Milan to São Paulo (Embratur, October 2026).
Read that as a map rather than a number. Two Italian cities, two Brazilian gateways, and every onward journey built on domestic connections out of São Paulo or Rio. An Italian client heading for the Northeast or the Amazon is buying a domestic leg before they buy anything else, and that leg is where the itinerary gets won or lost.
Roughly 356,000 seats across the year is also a ceiling worth knowing. Italian demand growing faster than Italian capacity would show up first as price, not as unavailability.
Context helps here too. The Italian market is growing inside a national picture that is broadly flat: Brazil recorded 6,451,257 international arrivals between January and August 2026, with spending up 10.4 percent to 7.4 billion US dollars over the same period (Embratur, September 2026). An Italian market up 9.7 percent is therefore outperforming the total, which is the argument for keeping it on the plan even at a slower rate.
What Brazil Chose to Show
The stand led with Amazônia, the Iguaçu Falls and the Lençóis Maranhenses, and ran virtual reality experiences for Rio Negro, the Pantanal, the Lençóis Maranhenses, Fernando de Noronha and Pequena África in Rio de Janeiro (Embratur, October 2026).
Note what is not in that list: the beach circuit. The official pitch to the Italian trade is nature, distance and culture, which happens to be the product that needs an operator on the ground and cannot be assembled from an online booking engine.
O que isso significa para os seus programas
Three readings. Keep selling Italy, but plan it at single digit growth rather than at the recovery rates of 2024 and 2025. Build the domestic leg into the proposal from the first line, because the air map gives you two entry points and nothing else. And follow the official promotion where it is pointing, toward nature and culture, because that is where the destination marketing budget is going and it is also where a receptive operator is worth paying for.
The fair itself returns to Rimini from 13 to 15 October 2027 (IEG, October 2026). That is the window in which the 2028 Italian contracts get written.
