While the high season will see a lot more flights, cruise tourism has also been picking up. They've gone from one ship a week to sometimes three, which is triple the number from last year. And Krohn says the fact that the tourism industry is rebounding so fast demonstrates how resilient its stakeholders are.

Stewart Krohn, President, BTIA
"Out of all the sectors of the tourism economy, it is the cruise sector that has been hit hardest. OK. Even in the worst of COVID times, most Belizean hotels were open and at least got a trickle of local visitors, which helped carry a lot of us at least enabled us to keep a number of employees and keep our doors open. So this was a godsend to have the local market. The cruise sector did not have that advantage. OK, so when cruise tourism was cut off, 100% of their business was cut off. So it is really gratifying to see that sector slowly coming up. I see the other day we had a three cruise ship day, and that's good. That goes for both the city market and the aim of the Harvest Caye, a cruise port that will gradually improve. And again, the same thing applies to our level of COVID 19 in Belize. We've got to keep those numbers down in order to attract the cruise tourists to this itinerary."

"We realized how resilient Belizean tourism economy can be. Most of their industry kind of sucked it up and did what we could to economize, we've all lost a lot of money, but I don't hear of a lot of people going out of business or giving up altogether. So I would just at this point where tourism is definitely coming back. I'd like to congratulate all those people that are involved in the tourism industry who suffered great loss but never lost their optimism, never lost their will to work hard. And it's that same hard work that is going to propel the industry to even greater heights in the future."

While there were no cruise ships coming to Belize late last year, the stats for September 2021 show that there were 22,180 cruise visitor arrivals.

Channel 7