Tropic Air Pilots Certified in Tour Guide and First Aid

Tropic Air is now boasting a boost in its human resources as over twenty of their pilots were recently certified in tour guide and first aid training.  Abil Castaneda, the Director of Cruise and Capacity Development at BTB spoke on the training program called Elevate that assist workers in the tourism industry to gain their tour guide license at a fair cost. 

Abil Castaneda, Director of Cruise and Capacity Development, BTB: “At the Belize Tourism Board we have a national tour guide training program which falls under our national training program called Elevate and we usually partner with many organizations that want to provide tour guide training opportunities for people that live and work where those institutions are. The idea is that Tropic Air will have these pilots available to do tours, aerial tours for them here in Belize. One of the most popular ones that they do is the tour to the Blue Hole for instance. Two years ago is that we standardized a price for tour guide training, so tour guide training should cost the trainee no more than $400 so that it is very accessible. Before it used to cost $1,200 to $1,500 for someone to access these courses and so we at the BTB worked out a program where we subsidize tour guide training across the country and so we make sure that the price for tour guide training stays at $400 so we’re very proud of that because it allows others that would normally not be able to access this program and become a tour guide to do so.”

The Belize Tourism Board (BTB) assisted Tropic Air pilots and continue to assist any tour operators who would like to join the three to four-month program.