Tourism figures continue to climb. That's according to BTB's quarterly report released earlier today. It shows that Belize had an increase in overnight visitors this year in months of January, February and March when compared to 2015 by 24%, 18.5% and 10% respectively. March specifically was an extraordinary month for tourism as it saw over 43 thousand overnight visitors- a first for Belize, since the most a single month has ever recorded is 40 thousand visitors.
Cruise arrivals for the first quarter also saw a positive uptick with the exception of January which saw a 19.5% downturn. BTB said this was as a result of 13 fewer cruise calls in comparison to 2015. But the following months of February and March saw an increases of 3.7% and 4.1% respectively. Overall there was a 4.5% decrease in cruise arrivals however BTV remains hopeful that the numbers for cruise arrivals will continue to grow throughout the remainder of the year- and even hope to reach their 1 million passenger mark for 2016.
So what is causing all this positive growth? Noriko Gamero, Public Relations Manager for BTB says that it is all about spreading the word.
Noriko Gamero, Public Relations Manager - BTB
"We've seen 10 months consecutively of increase in our numbers and we know that we've been changing our strategies a lot this year in our marketing so we are definitely looking more at the analytics. We are looking at the numbers. We are trying to be more strategic. So example, we'll have a partnership with American Airlines where they brought their Road Warrior Winners to Belize which gave us like a 9 month consecutive exposure and all their American Way magazines, it had inflight videos of the winners coming to Belize. So the video was on all the back of the plane seats for an entire month of March. We've also been very strategic in bringing international press coverage, that would write articles on Belize, social influencers that take pictures and do a lot more videos and then in addition to that, our stakeholders have been playing a very adamant role in getting the exposure of Belize. So for example we know that before BTB would be putting their marketing dollars into getting Belize awareness, now our stakeholders are also doing that. So the message of Belize is getting larger and so we highly thank them for that, because now we have more awareness on Belize."
So while the numbers are looking good for the first quarter, BTB might be bracing for a negative outlook in April. That's because of all the bad press they got in the first month of 2016.
Noriko Gamero, Public Relations Manager - BTB
"Usually we see a trail of 3 months whenever we have any type of crisis, because the bookings of passengers usually 3 months after they see an advertisement. So I think we won't really see the impacts until probably next month for the crisis that we had in January. However, we were strategic in making sure that we got the positive message out on Belize, making sure that we were addressing the necessary issues and hopefully that all the good on Belize outweighs that negativity that we had back then."
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