Belize Looks to Sports Tourism to Attract Visitors and Boost Economy

Belize is looking to sports tourism as a new avenue for attracting visitors, strengthening international partnerships and creating greater economic opportunities for the country. A Belizean delegation recently participated in the Fourth United Nations World Sports Tourism Congress in Mexico, where discussions focused on the growing connection between major sporting activities and the global tourism industry.  Minister of Tourism, Youth, Sports and Diaspora Relations Anthony Mahler says the Government’s decision to place tourism and sports under the same ministry creates an important opportunity to develop both sectors together. Mahler explained how sporting competitions, training programmes and international events can be used to bring more visitors to Belize while promoting the country’s athletes and destinations.

Anthony Mahler, Minister of Tourism: “I was invited as a panelist and they heard about Belize, they heard about sports in Belize and that then triggered off without being planned one-on-one with UN tourism secretary general and we spoke for about two hours and I educated her about Belize. They’re talking about wanting to have a visit to Belize and then we met also the regional director for UN Tourism who is based in Brazil and he wants to get involved with what we are doing here in Belize in terms of sports and tourism. So we made a lot of links. I also took some of the federations to Mexico to meet with their counterparts and those meetings were very, very high level and we believe that we can produce some good things out of those meetings. If you look at tourism on a whole, globally it’s about $12-13 trillion in revenues. If you look at sports globally, it’s like $2.5 trillion but sports tourism is about a trillion dollars. So what we want to do is to continue to push forward in terms of improving our facilities, whereby we can host more and more events here in Belize. I think we can carve out a niche that can help boost tourism especially in the softer months especially if we have more indoor facilities. We hope to have some pools and stuff like that, so swimming pools so we can start to build those areas. We have two swimmers right now, two of them based in the United States, but I think we have to build that culture here in the country as well.”