It is no surprise that tourist arrivals and overnight stays have been on a steady decline over the past few months. This has been reported by the Belize Hotel Association and Statistical Institute of Belize. According to the BHA one of the reasons for this was due to the closing of the borders after an agreement was made between bus owners and the Government. This agreement restricted foreign buses to only have one of their buses entering Belize per day. Another reason that was listed was because of the death of a tourist that occurred in San Pedro. Love News spoke with Minister of Tourism, Manuel Heredia, who told us that the decrease of tourist arrivals is a global issue impacting the Caribbean and other regions.

Hon. Manuel Heredia, Minister of Tourism: "Well it's a global trend, if you look around the Caribbean, Central America and so almost everybody had a slight some more drastic. We are lucky in Belize that our percentage was small but over all at the end of the year we will still do a little better than what we did last year. According to the World Tourism Organization if you do the same as you did the previous year you are good, in this case we did a little better so we wanted more but we are still satisfied with what we accomplished."

Heredia noted that while we had a decrease in tourism arrivals financial wise we still did better than last year.

LOVEFM