Saturdays are Belize’s Busiest Day at P.G.I.A.

There have been photos circulating of long lines of tourists waiting to be processed at the Philip Goldson International Airport on Saturday. Some blamed the Belize Tourism Board’s recent mandate of mandatory travel insurance as the cause for the bottleneck. But B.T.B. Director, Evan Tillett, told News Five today that the long lines, particularly on Saturdays at the airport, are the result of Belize seeing a lot of carriers landing at the P.G.I.A.

Evan Tillett

Evan Tillett, Director, B.T.B.

“It is a good thing and a bad thing because it is all about the visitor experience. And of course you want to have a seamless processing of every visitor that comes to Belize. But in times of travel and COVID, you know that there are additional protocols in place and we are working to try and get those protocols relaxed. So it has become a part of traveling but we have to do what we need to as an industry. This Saturday, you had just about twenty-three flights on the ground and you had flights coming in minutes in between so there is a processing of passengers that has to take place. It is a capacity issue in my mind in terms of why we have the crowds. And we will continue to push from the B.T.B. to get new flight routes into Belize so it is something we definitely have to look at in terms of improving the facilities at the airport to be able to accommodate the volumes.”