Belize’s Tourism Sector Holds Steady Despite U.S. Flight Chaos

There’s a bit of good news for tourism tonight, despite a rocky start to the week in U.S. air travel. On Monday, major airports saw mass flight cancellations after the FAA struggled with air traffic control shortages and equipment failures, problems made worse by the ongoing federal government shutdown. For Belize, that could have been another blow to an already fragile industry. Overnight tourist arrivals were down eight-point-six percent in September, and more cancellations would only add pressure. But here’s the silver lining, BTIA President Efren Perez says there’s been no wave of hotel booking cancellations so far. In fact, stakeholders have been smart, shifting focus to markets outside the U.S. well before this downturn hit.

 

Efren Perez, President, B.T.I.A.

“It’s unfortunate. One I think that it is one beyond our control. I don’t think anybody was expecting a shutdown to last more than thirty-six days as it has. And obviously the impact that it brings with delays in flights from one of our major markets. But nonetheless, I think that we’ve seen and we’ve experienced something very similar with COVID, for example. We’ve rebounded. I think this will, this gives us an opportunity for us to reanalyze our marketing strategies. I’m glad to hear that up to this point not a significant amount of hotels are experiencing any delays or cancellations. They are seeing a bit of a slow booking process in the early parts of 2026. And it’s obvious, booking trends are usually ninety days out or sixty days in some cases. And many people are worrying about it, I’m quite sure  but let us look at the opportunities ahead. Let us start to work with our regional markets.  We definitely have, participated in some of these events regionally. We had just recently some of your colleagues who attended. The central American travel market with us, which brought a huge amount of European south American, even Mexican tour operators to Central America to view the tourism product that we offer. We have Air Canada that’s going to be flying in soon too. So all of these are opportunities. And so while it looks really dim right now in terms of what’s currently happening. There is opportunities that we can look at and definitely to keep focus and not to get discouraged.”