Thanksgiving marks the beginning of Belize's tourism high season and the industry is optimistic that waves of tourists will flood the country in the coming months. Back in 2020, stakeholders were barely holding on while Belize's ports of entries were closed. And when the airport reopened in October, tourists started trickling in. But now, the BTIA president, Stewart Krohn, predicts that this high season will be the rebound that Belize needs and may even reach 2019 numbers, especially with Alaskan Air and Frontier flights coming into the country. We spoke with him via Zoom:
Steward Krohn - President, BTIA
"You might recall when the pandemic first hit in March of 2020 all the experts were predicting that tourism would not regain it's former glory until maybe 2023 the earliest but I think the Caribbean and Belize in particular we've recovered much faster than and as you are aware thanksgiving in the US is kind of a traditional start of our high season and from what I can see and from the anecdotal evidence as well as the hard numbers that we're getting in terms of reservations, I think tourism is back in business. June is the start of our slower season, the numbers for most properties has been higher than even 2019, so the so-call slow season was really for much of the industry the best it's ever been during the slow, this was caused by the pent up US demand for travel. Now remember at that time, Canada was not back in the picture, Europe was not in the picture, so solely on the strength of the rebounding US travel market, we were already doing in many ways better than we did in the summer of 2019 and from the looks of things, it looks like our high season which starts thanksgiving, takes a little dip in early December and with the coming of Christmas, really gets into high gear running roughly through Easter and that's when the Belize market takes over and Easter it should a year that is very close to 2019 numbers. The airlift capacity into the country is a huge factor, I have to take hats off to the airline development committee that is seeing it's efforts come to fruition both in terms of Alaska which is a great route to Seattle as well as LA, that is a great vote of confidence, Frontier opening up another new route to Orlando which is kind of experimental but we have hope for it as well as Denver that they are coming out of and another big factor is the return of Southwest, albeit this point just out of Denver. This is great news, our air lift capacity for this winter will actually be greater than it was in 2019."
Frontier will start flying into the country on December 11th.
