New Hotel Tax; Is Belize Pricing Itself Out of Tourism?

The plan to raise Belize’s hotel accommodation tax is stirring resistance across the tourism industry, with stakeholders warning that higher prices could send cost-conscious travelers elsewhere. Government wants to increase the tax from nine percent to twelve and a half percent, a proposal Tourism Minister Anthony Mahler says has been discussed for more than two years. But even Mahler is questioning the timing. He says that whenever the increase takes effect, government must reinvest the additional revenue in the infrastructure and services the industry urgently needs to remain competitive.

 

Anthony Mahler, Minister of Tourism

“Before we took a cabinet, I took a cabinet paper, I had a meeting with the board of directors for the Belize Tourism Board and both major organizations sit and they were in the meeting. So and I will put it on the table. There have been negotiations and discussions about this for almost two years. In fact, private sector individuals have met with ministry of finance, the Prime Minister and other people without the BTB there and they knew it was coming or it is supposed to come. I have said, I don’t think it’s time. Personally, I have expressed that to both BTIA and BHA. What we did was to say, all right, we have a significant problem in Sargassum. It is killing us on the coastal communities that are important for our tourism product. How can we fund this? Right now, we need about $20 million worth of equipment to try to fight it. We don’t have big ships like Mexico and other part. We’re losing this battle and so but most of the fight has been and the money spent have come from the Belize tourism board, nobody else. And so I said, we cannot continue to fight this. We cannot continue to build airlift. We cannot continue to market Belize. We cannot continue to train people here. And then a lot of our resources are going towards Sargassum..”

 

Attention readers: This online newscast is a direct transcript of our evening television broadcast. When speakers use Kriol, we have carefully rendered their words using a standard spelling system.

 

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