What About Cruise Tourism?

Ted Tejada

On Tuesday, the President of the Belize Hotel Association spoke off the underwhelming tourist arrivals following the airport’s reopening. While stakeholders are hoping that the cold weather in the North will incentive more travel to Belize, What about cruise tourism? Over the years, cruise travel has grown to be a significant player in the country’s tourism industry. Before the pandemic, there were approximately three hundred and thirty-three calls annually, bringing hundreds of thousands of tourists and valuable foreign exchange. In the first few months of 2020, cruise passenger arrivals dropped twenty-four point nine percent as a total of thirty-one fewer ship calls were made during the first quarter of 2020. Tejada says that 2021 is not looking better.

Ted Tejada, President, Belize Hotels Association

“It is going to take, I would say, another six months for us to even see the touristic industry come back to some type of normality if the vaccine actually works as they are promising us. We do not see the cruise tourism coming to fruition in any of the Caribbean countries. We think that in terms of cruise tourism we might not see much for 2021. We might see down November, December but there is no solutions as yet for cruise tourism because of the amount of people gathered in one ship. So we keep in contact with them, we are having meeting with them but in terms of cruise tourism we are not hearing much good luck from the United States.”