The Belize Tourism Board today released the first quarter statistics for the months of January through March of this year 2017 and is reporting an increase in overnight, cruise and airport visitors when compared to the same period last year which had seen an unprecedented growth.
According to the release, in January, a total of 38, 531 tourists visited the country and stayed overnight while 39,221 tourists arrived in the month of February resulting in an overall increase of 2.7% compared to last year's record numbers. This marks the second year in a row that the total amount of overnight arrivals to Belize has surpassed 70,000 visits within the first two months of a specific year.
In March of 2016, there was a record number of tourist arrivals totaling over 43,000 visitors. However, this record was surpassed in March 2017, with over 44,400 tourist visitors, making this the highest number of tourist arrivals ever recorded in a single month.
When it comes to cruise arrivals, the country saw an increase of 8.7% in cruise passenger arrivals for the first three months of 2017. With an increase of 24.2% and 22.7% in January and February 2017 respectively, along with a short decline of 13.1 % in March 2017, the total number of cruise ship passengers registered in the first quarter of 2017 surpassed that of 2016, giving a positive outlook for Belize's cruise tourism for the remainder of this year.
According to BTB, these figures directly reflects the vigorous marketing and product development efforts of the Belize Tourism Board (BTB) and its Stakeholders in the tourism industry. BTB is also forecasting that these increasing trends will continue both in the overnight and cruise sectors for the remainder of 2017 and beyond.