BTB reports on the year’s efforts
One in four people in Belize have jobs that are affected by tourism, that’s according to the Belize Tourism Board anyway, and they want to increase that percentage even more. This morning, as part of Tourism Awareness Week, the BTB gave its report to the industry, outlining its accomplishments this past year and its plans for attracting more tourists, improving facilities and enhancing service. The BTB reported that of its 8 million dollar budget, this year an unprecedented 4.6 million will be spent on marketing and public relations in order to try and boost tourist arrivals by 12% in the coming year. The BTB says its website; international print and television ads are already increasing the number of inquiries by potential visitors. But inviting people to Belize is not enough, those who work in the industry also need additional training and Belizeans in all walks of life have to become a part of “Team Belize.”
Tracy Taegar, BTB Director
“The number one deterrent to our tourism board, is still lack of awareness in our primary market, which is the US and no knowledge at all almost in Europe. This year we will take a conservative effort to enter the European market, the UK and certainly Germany, which are really good potentially markets for the Caribbean and for Central America. We will be spending more financial resources on our television campaign. The program that we have initiated for the first three months of this year, is just a pilot project, so we can do some analysis and figure out where we need to spend our money, because it’s quite and expensive venture. And certainly, work on other public awareness and public relations initiates both locally and internationally. They say the best sales man goes from house to house and if we need to go from house to house to get our message across and to let people know about Belize, we certainly will do that.”
Anthony Mahler, Dep. Dir. Product Development
“Training in the past use to cost the Belize Tourism Board a tremendous amount of money and what we did was to come up with some creative ideas to provide those training. We develop what we call alliances, throughout the country, with Green Reef in San Pedro, CET in Cayo and the visitors centers down in Placencia and others throughout the country, to provide that same type of training, especially for tour guides, which we have focused on primarily this year. But now we’ll branched out to different training, like our tour operators and again the “Team Belize” program that we’ve talked about some much over the last two weeks, will focus on all front line individuals throughout the industry and also the restaurant tourism program.”
The largest project to come on stream, hopefully in the coming year, will be improvements to Belize’s archaeological sites. 22 million Belize dollars worth of funding from the Inter-American Development Bank will be used to upgrade facilities at Caracol, Lamanai, Altun Ha, Xunantunich, Cahal Pech, Santa Rita, Cerros, and El Pilar. The BTB’s website address is www.travelbelize.org.
