And as the state of Emergency looms, hotels have, in the words of Hotel Association President Ted Tejada, “completely dried out Since March 10th the country has received no tourist arrivals.
And last night a press release from the BTB gave stakeholders a notice of much-needed tax relief. Hoteliers are being credited 100% of their hotel payments for March, resulting in Nil Accommodation Tax Due.
Now, they are still being asked to submit their monthly accommodation and guest registration forms - but that is just to use as an account of tourism’s worst month on record.
Tejada hopes that the 100% tax credit can help with the management of hotels countrywide as they ride out this challenging period.
Ted Tejada - President, Belize Hotel Association
“When we knew about this situation back in February we sat down with the BTB and we started to look at strategies we knew that it was going to hit the industry very hard and it has actually we have dried out all the hotels have completely dried out and so at this moment as of the 10th of March the very little to none tourists. So the Belize tourism board with the ministry and the government and we must give credit to the Prime Minister and the committee that has been working on this task force. They have come forth and said the dues of the taxes that are due in March none of the hotels will pay that for the particular month of March which will give each of the hotels that were busy and I’ll be honest with you the month of March was a busy month. So we knew that many hotels were up to 60 to 80% full so the first to the 10th of March many hotels were full so there’s a little bit of tax revenue that we all needed to pay by the 14th of next month to BTB. The government has agreed that we will retain that to help us with the expenses of the hotels.
