The Belize Tourism Board has managed to compile the number of tourist arrivals for this year's third quarter, and according to the BTB, the numbers are up, when compared to last year.
Airport Arrivals for the last 3 months up to September 2014 totaled at 7,692, 76 more than last year. For the total 9 months, there have been 45,862 tourists who have arrived at the PGIA, 1,729 more than last year, or an increase of 3.9%.
Overnight arrives are also up by 5,248, or an increase of 8.8%, so are cruise passenger arrivals, which increased by 73,409, or 77%.
Today, BTB's Market Director told the media that it is a welcomed boost especially since the third quarter is part of the low season in Tourism:
Alyssa Carnegie, Marketing Director - BTB
"Arrivals for both overnight and cruise are doing very well for not only this month, but for this quarter. We've been up I believe 12.1%` this September over last September and I think we've done for cruise 90.1% increase this September over last September. So that's a tremendous indication to us how well the country is doing, how interested people are. For cruise it's really great. We have a schedule of calls that are 
made every year, so while the calls haven't increase, what we are seeing is that more and more people are getting off the ship. So that's a really good sign that they are interested to experience Belize and that they are engaging and interacting and liking that experience. For overnight we had 11,943 actual overnight arrivals and then for cruise 47,625 passengers who disembarked this past September. As so far as trends go, right now we are in what is considered the low season and we are still performing very well. I think a lot of our industry partners have been telling us that even though it's a slow season and they never had to close and maybe hold back a little bit for renovations or whatever they are doing - it's one of the best slow seasons they've had. So now we are heading into the high season and we are really excited about that because as you know Belize has never cross that threshold of 300,000 overnight visitors and we are really working hard to exceed that mark and we are very confident that we will be able to do that this calendar year in December. So we expect it to build and to build to a number that we've not seen before in Belize. We are very excited about that. I think all Belizeans should be happy about that."
As we've reported in the past, Cruise Tourism numbers had a sharp decrease in 2012, and then, there was a recovery last year with an increase of 30% when compared to 2012. Again, it has seen a sharp increase of 77% once again.
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