And regardless of that incident, and others like the hijacking of a Tropic Air flight, Mahler says that Belize still did pretty well in terms of tourism numbers in 2025 and continuing up into January of this year.
Anthony Mahler, Minister of Tourism
"We did well regionally, in terms of the Americas. The America's was down by I think one or 2%, we were up by just over 1%. Again a lot of the geopolitical issues, a lot of the trade wars and other issues and sargassum, but we still managed to reach a new level or a new high for Belize. January this year again surpassed January last year so we started this year on a good note, marginally by somewhere like 100 or 200 additional visitors. But in parts of January you had some extreme blizzards and some flights canceled so we could have done a little bit better but I mean you know the weather."
