Well, the nightmare continued today as 3 more ships were cancelled! We spoke with Director of Cruise and Regional Initiatives at BTB today and he discussed the daily and cumulative impact:

Valdemar Andrade - Director Cruise & Regional Initiative, BTB
"Today we had three ships who decided to cancel because when they reached the English Caye Harbor, the winds were blowing at 50 knots and the seas were very choppy and they decided to again cancel those 3 ships. There were two Carnival and a Princess and so all in all we are looking at about 15,144 passengers that basically didn't come on shore."

Tom Greenwood - Local Tour Operator
"The cruise lines, I am sorry, are not going to lose one single penny other than a few dollars for having turn the waters into Belize and back out, but the people; your hair braiders, your food suppliers, your tour guides, you suppliers of every type of tour you can think of in Belize. Large and small companies are taking a licking. We try to play the financial game as well to see how to compensate these people; get it sold elsewhere or we get some money together to compensate and then we take the food to organizations. We brought some here to the home for the elderly."

Valdemar Andrade
"However, the long term solution is a port, a docking facility where the ships can pull up and the people can walk off."

Today over 15 thousand passengers were unable to disembark. Based on the industry wide formula that each cruise visitor spends an average of 75 US dollars, that translates to a financial loss of $2.2 million dollars for today alone. Add it up to yesterday's losses and it is over three million dollars.