Belize Luxury Beach Resort, Portofino Beach Resort, San Pedro, Belize

The Dutch show is one of Europe’s major travel shows, attracting around 20,000 visitors on each of the five days. Nick Davies, Chairman of BHA’s Marketing Committee, explained that BHA’s ongoing work in Europe, and particularly Holland, had raised awareness of Belize to a level where they could now afford to target people more effectively.

“We took a booth this year in the long-haul destination area of the show, close to the Nicaragua and Panama booths, creating a “Central America” section which allowed us to concentrate on quality enquiries, and generating strong sales prospects for BHA’s Global Marketing Initiative participants.”

BHA representative, Sandra van Noord, also took the opportunity to attend a TUI party in Amsterdam. She said,

“TUI is Europe’s leading travel group, operating in 180 countries worldwide and with 30 million customers. We’ve met with them several times at various travel events, and their interest in Belize is steadily growing to the point where they are now ready to visit Belize with a view to expanding their range of holidays. This is a particularly exciting development for us, with the prospect of accessing the huge potential the European market offers.”

In Canada, Robin McCutcheon and Steve Christensen represented the BHA in Toronto at the Toronto Ultimate Travel Show, and enticed visitors to the booth with maps, bookmarks, and the wonderful “Hot Mama’s fudge” give-aways.

Robin commented
“Belize had a great presence at the show, and we benefitted from a prime location opposite a huge tank with non-stop diving exhibitions from a dive club which is visiting Belize in March.

We find that many Canadians still associate Belize with diving, so this was a great opportunity to educate them in the diverse range of inland activities, and our banners featuring Maya sites and fishing really helped reinforce the message that Belize offers something for everyone.”

BHA’s representatives distributed over 1100 brochures at the two shows to high quality ‘prospects’, and generated 50 sales leads for GMI members. This brings the total brochures distributed to over 4000 and over 500 travel trade sales leads for participants since the start of the Global Marketing Initiative in November 2009.

Last night, our staff and guests here at Portofino Beach Resort experienced something very unusual! We saw a large “ball of fire” in the Belizean sky and hear a very loud sonic “boom”….
We didn’t know what happened. 3 minutes after, we saw on CNN that  space shuttle Endeavour and its six astronauts were returning back to Earth and going to land at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, ending a two weeks successful mission.
During the two-week, 5.7 million-mile journey, commander George Zamka and his crew delivered and installed a new space station room “Tranquility” and a big bay window with commanding views of Earth.
It was a quite spectacular experience… and something to share with you!

Orchids are known for their delicate beauty and exotic character. Evolving through an intricate and interesting history, the meanings of orchids include love, beauty, luxury, and strength.

Orchids belong to the most diverse family of plants known to man. There are over 28,000 species. Orchids are the most rapidly (genetically) changing group of plants on earth and more new species have been discovered over the last few thousand years than any other plant group known.

Belize has about 300 species of native orchids including the Black Orchid. This is the national flower of Belize. Portofino’s Tropical Garden has many different flowers, including orchids. We hope you enjoy these pictures from some of the Orchids in our garden!