The Belize Hotel Association is also hosting the country's first online travel auction. It's a group of promotional deals designed to generate vacation interest from tourists, who might be shopping around for their next corona-free trip.
The travel auction offers several 3-night accommodation packages at some of the high-end resorts and hotels in the country. Bidding for all 20 of these vacation packages start at 50% below the normal market value.
Whatever revenue is generated from this auction will be re-invested into the Hotel Association's digital marketing efforts on behalf of the hoteliers.
The President told us that they have to try and meet the shortfall in marketing revenue that the Belize Tourism Board used to assist them with:
Ted Tejada - President, BHA
"As you know, many of these institutions, the Belize Hotel Association [and] the BTIA are also funded by the Belize Tourism Board. Unfortunately, because of no tourists coming in, the Belize Tourism Board could no longer sustain some of these fundings. So our institution, the Belize Hotel Association, came up with a bright idea of developing an international auction. Our membership donated to the association. We created an auction page, which went live November 1st and is going to be for 15 days for international people to be able to bid on these rooms and packages. We're going to provide those leads back to our hotels and say these are the individuals that bid on these rooms, even though they didn't win the package, we will know how many people are interested in your property."
"At this moment, our members realize that it is very hard to financially provide monetary support to any organization. There is no tourism, so they have rooms. They were able to provide us with a room so that we can sell to bring money to the Belize Hotel Association. That fund is being used for marketing. Prior to this pandemic, the Belize Hotel Association used to attend 22 International shows. We can no longer physically go to a show. We have to attract tourists, and it has to be done digitally. It takes more investment. You have to invest in Google and Facebook on different platforms to attract tourists. If you have very little money, there's no money to invest in marketing. With that in mind, our members donated those packages which we are utilizing to bring in the revenue for marketing benefits for them."
The online travel auction opened on Sunday and closes on November 15th.
