Airport arrivals on major upswing

On yesterday’s newscast B.T.B. director Tracy Taegar summarized the latest tourism figures, pointing to a whopping five fold increase in 2002 cruise arrivals, a respectable two percent rise in airport tourist landings, with a heavy eighteen percent jump in the most recent fourth quarter of the year. Today a closer look at figures provided by the Belize Airports Authority clearly indicate that arrivals have rebounded in a big way, and if the trend holds, 2003 should be the biggest yet for Belize’s tourism industry. Numbers for all international arrivals at the Philip Goldson International Airport in October, November and December show an increase of over seven thousand passengers from the terrorism plagued year of 2001. The latest numbers are also well above the same months for the year 2000. Even more encouraging are the stats for the month of December alone, which show a one-year leap of over twenty-nine percent in airport arrivals. This reflects the impact of new routes to Belize four days each week by U.S. Air and Air Jamaica, which between them accounted for over eighteen hundred incoming passengers in December. For U.S. Air, business has been so encouraging that it plans to introduce daily service in March. During this same December period, American Airlines and Continental introduced supplemental service from Miami and Newark, respectively. These two U.S. carriers continue to battle head to head for supremacy on the Belize run with 2002 ending in virtually a dead heat. American brought sixty-seven thousand, four hundred and seventeen people to Belize, while Continental boarded only six less.