Tourism arrivals to Belize continue to show impressive growth in 2013, after a strong rebound year in 2012. Figures for the first three months of 2013 are in – and it continues the growth trend making it 19 consecutive months of increases in overnight visitors.
Tourist arrivals at the airport for January, February and March topped 2012 figures by 8% – peaking in march when there was an increase of more than five thousand visitors. And, the 28,623 arrivals make it the first time in history that air arrivals the 28,000 visitor mark for any month.
And consistent with those air arrivals, in March, for the first time ever, overnight visitors exceeded 35,000 visitor mark – easily exceeding the previous record of 32,240 visitors who came in March of 2012. First quarter figures show a 13% increase over the first quarter of 2012.
And cruise arrivals which took a sharp downturn last year were back up in the first quarter of 2013. There was a 19.4% increase in January, and an 11.4% increase in February, but by March, it started to taper off, recording only a 1.4% increase over the previous year. Still arrivals for the first quarter are up 10.9% - and that's good news for the newly installed Director of Cruise and Regional Initiatives. That's Valdemar Andrade who comes over form the Ministry of Tourism to the BTB to take up that newly created office. He says that while 2013 has been encouraging so far, there are significant challenges immediately ahead for cruise tourism.
Valdemar Andrade - BTB, Director of Cruise & Regional Initiatives.
"The situation here is basically that we are now moving to a different level of cruise tourism. We have to make some critical decisions as to moving to a port, looking at where a port would be the best place in Belize because to move beyond four cruise ships a day on any one given day we do have to think about the facilities to be able bring that amount of people on shore. Where the challenge will be for me as the Director of Cruise is to basically work the other lines other than Carnival because Carnival is the only who makes calls during the Summer to work with those other lines is to add at least one cruise ship during the Summer months. To be able to boost the summer months so that we have a better summer season during that time. We have to work with the cruise service providers to other summer packages to look at what is it we have to do with the market. We will be also be looking at basically boosting our marketing within the cruse sector itself and within the US and within the other markets to see how we can attract other people during the Summer months and for that reason so yes will be putting in initiatives in the next year to ensure that the numbers are steady and keep rising."
We also discussed the issue of a Cruise Port with a berthing facility – which is urgently required. We'll have that portion of the interview tomorrow.
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