Tourism figures show record increase
The buzz among people in the tourism industry was that Belize was having a pretty good season, and if you’ve tried lately to buy a ticket on a flight to the States you know that somebody is filling all those airplane seats. Today the Belize Tourism Board confirmed that intuition and announced an unprecedented increase in quarterly tourist arrivals. In comparison with the first three months of 1999 the year 2000 saw over 25% more visitors arrive by air. In raw numbers this meant an additional 8,183 people to dive the reef, climb the ruins, hike the jungle and cast for the big ones in the rivers, flats or deep blue sea. The monthly breakdown was also encouraging, showing a rising rate of increase, with January arrivals up 14.9%, February up 21.9% and March recording an astounding 35.5 more tourist arrivals than March of 1999. Reasons for the boom depend on which tourism expert you talk to but a well-focussed marketing campaign by the BTB certainly did not hurt.
Tracy Taegar, Director of Tourism
“We would like to think that the marketing approach and the marketing program has been a major factor for the increases. However I think that 70% of our tourist arrivals who come from North America primarily from the US and as you know they have a very strong economy right now and that certainly contributes to some of the success of that.”
In terms of the slow season, the indication from the private sector and from the industry is that this summer is looking very positive. We won’t really know the numbers until we can get some projections in from the private sector. But we feel confident that the numbers will be up and we are closing the gap on the seasonality factor. In terms of Europe and Latin America we are making steps towards certainly increasing our arrivals from those areas. We have certainly the lack of, in terms of Europe, the lack of air transportation into the country or direct flights into the country which must be solved.”
The BTB also announced that cruise ship arrivals for the quarter were up a whopping 200% from the previous year. A recently introduced television advertising campaign in selected U.S. markets will hopefully contribute to continued increases in arrivals for the rest of the year.
