Investing in The Key Areas That Boost Belize’s Tourism

And while 2023 looks positive for our tourism product, a lot of the behind-the-scenes effort to keep the high standards that tourists are accustomed to has to do with training. It is a necessary undertaking that the Belize Tourism Board saw so important that it invested almost a million dollars over the past year. Castaneda told us that 2022 was a milestone year for the B.T.B in that regard. It started at the end of 2021 with a program dubbed Elevate.

Abil Castaneda

Abil Castaneda, Dir., Quality Management, Capacity Development, Cruise, B.T.B.

“We looked at different areas of the sector because before we were providing training only really for the tour guides and maybe some for the hotels and restaurants. But the tourism sector is much bigger than that, so we developed a program and looked at what the destinations needed, looked at what our tourism stakeholders needed and we developed a national program with five sub-programs. And we have been able to provide training for over fifteen hundred Belizeans this year. We have been able to provide over sixty to seventy different training courses over this period and we have invested close to almost a million dollars in these training programs, so we are really investing back in building the capacity of our tourism industry and even of people you may not feel are in the tourism industry but we see the importance of it. A good example would be training of our immigration, customs, BAHA, and health officials that work at the border points. We have trained them in frontline customer service, how to be good leaders, how to be good communicators, and that has been very successful. We have done the same thing with our tour operators, our tour guides. We’ve also trained car rentals. We just had a training for street food vendors in Orange Walk and Belize City. That’s another big part of our tourism sector – the culinary part, so we provided some training on how to do proper packaging, how to price your food, how to build new menus. So we are really taking a comprehensive look at what the training needs are for the country and do our best to invest and put that into place.”