Tourism strategy: Why Peru is welcoming land-based casinos back into the fold

Peru's Ministry of Foreign Trade and Tourism has recently opened a public consultation on a draft decree that would country's official roster of tourism service providers.

The move addresses an omission created by Peru's Nueva Ley General de Turismo, published in June 2025 and in force since January 2026. The law removed casinos and slot venues from the list of recognized tourism service providers, even though they continued to operate under Peru's separate gambling legislation.

The consultation does not introduce new incentives or alter licensing requirements. Instead, it seeks to restore that administrative classification while leaving the country's gambling regulatory framework unchanged.

The tourism law, Law 32392, consolidated more than a dozen bills into a single statute and introduced Special Tourism Development Zones, offering accelerated asset depreciation, suspension of the net assets tax and reinvestment credits of up to 30% for qualifying tourism businesses. Casinos and slot venues were excluded from the list of eligible tourism service providers under the new framework.

A narrow fix for a broad exclusion

During debate, lawmakers and industry critics questioned whether casino gaming and sports betting should be eligible for these same fiscal benefits. Critics argued the activities did not directly advance sustainable tourism development. That objection appears to have shaped the final text of the law's Annex I, which defines who qualifies as a tourism service provider.

Casinos and slot venues, previously recognized under the prior framework when operating inside qualifying hotels and restaurants, were left off the list entirely.

The practical consequence was not a loss of authorization to operate. Peru's gambling sector answers to a separate and long-established legal regime, built primarily on Law 27153 and its 1999 amendments. That regime restricts casino and slot licenses to four and five-star hotels in Lima and Callao, three to five-star properties elsewhere, five-star restaurants and resort-equivalent properties. Licenses run five years and renew in four-year terms.

A more recent statute, Law 32069, extended that oversight to online casino and remote sports betting platforms. Operators must run under the bet.pe domain and meet the same anti-money laundering obligations as land-based venues. Both channels feed into the Unified Real-Time Control System, which gives Mincetur and tax authority Sunat continuous visibility into wagering activity.

None of that changed when the tourism law took effect. What changed was the sector's formal standing within tourism policy, and with it, the ministry's ability to fold gambling venues into destination planning, visitor data collection and promotional coordination.

The numbers behind the reversal

Mincetur's argument for reversing course rests heavily on revenue. The ministry estimates casino and slot activity generated more than PEN220m ($62m) in tax revenue in 2025, with PEN33m of that channeled directly to the ministry for oversight, promotion and infrastructure.

Industry figures put the broader number, including online gaming and remote sports betting, closer to PEN465m for the year, according to Fernando Calderón Castro, President of the Sociedad Nacional de Juegos de Azar. 

Under Peru's distribution formula, land-based casino and slot tax revenue splits 60% to provincial and district municipalities, 15% to Mincetur, 10% to the Peruvian Sports Institute and 15% to the treasury. Online gaming revenue follows a different split, allocating 40% to Mincetur, 20% to mental health programs, 20% to the sports institute and 20% to the treasury.

The sector currently comprises 60 licensed operators and 280 registered service providers. Venues concentrate in Lima, Arequipa, Cusco, Trujillo, Tacna and Piura. Mincetur says these cities draw cross-border visitors from Chile, Colombia, Brazil and Argentina seeking gaming entertainment, with Tacna, on the Chilean border, offered by SONAJA president Fernando Calderón Castro as the clearest example of the pattern

What other markets suggest

Regional precedent cuts both ways on whether formal integration between gambling and tourism policy delivers a coordination benefit.

Uruguay's model ties casino concessions directly to tourism infrastructure by statute. Winning bidders must build hotels or other visitor attractions alongside gaming halls, a linkage dating to industrial promotion law from the 1970s that predates most of the region's gambling frameworks.

Argentina offers a contrasting case. Gambling regulation there sits entirely with the 24 provincial jurisdictions rather than any national tourism authority. In several provinces, including Córdoba, Mendoza and Río Negro, online gambling tax collection has overtaken tourism as a share of provincial fiscal revenue, a trend industry analysts attribute to tourism's higher cost base and gambling's fully traceable digital footprint.

Peru's proposal sits closer to the Uruguayan approach, formalizing gambling as a tourism-adjacent activity under a single national regulator rather than leaving the sectors to develop along separate tracks.

The consultation process gives stakeholders, including SONAJA, which has lobbied publicly for reinstatement, a formal channel to weigh in before the draft decree is finalized. 

Because the measure does not touch licensing thresholds or introduce new incentives, opposition is likely to be limited relative to the resistance the sector faced during the original tourism law debate, when fiscal benefits were the point of contention.

Restoring casinos to Peru's tourism framework is ultimately an administrative adjustment rather than a regulatory overhaul. The measure leaves gambling regulation unchanged, but could strengthen coordination between tourism policy and a sector that has remained under Mincetur's oversight throughout.