Frank Hachmann — Belize tourism and protected-area specialist
From a remote island dive operation inside a UNESCO-inscribed marine reserve, to a research station in the Chiquibul, to eighteen months teaching the frameworks at university level.
The record
I arrived in Belize through Punta Gorda, in the south, where the road ends.
May 2016 to November 2020 — the island. Four and a half years as Country Director and Operations Manager at ReefCI, running an island and dive operation inside the Sapodilla Cayes Marine Reserve, one of the seven component areas of the UNESCO-inscribed Belize Barrier Reef Reserve System. Full operational responsibility after a change of ownership: a team of twelve, an eleven-month season, mainland office and private island.
Average weekly participants went from 6.7 to 17, and occupancy from 31 to 74 per cent, across the four seasons from 2016 to 2019. I led the medical evacuations from that operation, and the procedures held in the field.
February 2016 to February 2022 — in parallel, the university programs. Six years as Overseas Site Director for CISaustralia, running Australian and US university field programs from the same island site: monthly groups of around ten students, with academic credit compliance, host-community partnerships and safety controls. Six years without a critical incident.
Then GVI — about a year, four countries. Program Manager and Product Development, through a year of portfolio rationalization. San Pedro first, where I assessed the newly opened site and recommended its closure; a replacement Belize program worked up from scratch; Greece, to close and liquidate one project and later to audit a partner operation in Kefalonia; Germany, to research what should replace what had gone; Costa Rica, to establish a new site with local partners. The risk assessments and crisis management plans for two of them are mine.
2023 to 2024 — the Chiquibul. A year as destination manager at a research station inside Chiquibul Forest Reserve. I wrote the 68-page operations manual, a ten-part risk assessment documenting more than forty hazards across five operating environments, the emergency action plan and the incident reporting system.
Occupancy from January to May rose to 14.3 per cent against 5.8 per cent the year before. I compiled ten years of visitation data as the evidence base for the organization's successful case to retain management of the station, and tourism income was built into a growing share of its own-source funding.
August 2024 to February 2026 — the university. Eighteen months as lecturer and course coordinator in tourism management at the University of Belize: five courses redesigned from the ground up, four to five taught each semester, to roughly 150 students.
Before Belize
A degree in forest science from the Technical University of Munich, and a master's in sustainable tourism management from Eberswalde.
The master's thesis was on visitor management in large protected areas, comparing German national-park practice with Anglo-Saxon approaches. It is the exact question this practice now works on, asked more than a decade before there was a practice — and it is why a German institution and a Belizean protected area can be discussed in the same sentence here without either being flattened into the other's vocabulary.
During the forest science degree, a three-month research placement at the German Development Service in Bonn evaluating integrated water resources management in practice, working through case studies from Yemen, Jordan, Palestine, Peru and Zambia. It became the undergraduate thesis, and it is where I learned that most water problems are measurement problems — an argument that runs through everything on this site about the reef.
How I work
Evidence over adjectives
If I cannot source it, I do not claim it. Where the data does not exist in Belize — and it often does not — I say so rather than estimate.
No extractive storytelling
No community, partner or place is used as material without consent and benefit.
Systems, not attractions
Belize is ridge to reef with culture above and below. Reef condition is decided upstream. Guide quality is a workforce question. Almost nothing here is separable.
The answer is sometimes no
A practice whose product is judgment cannot afford to sell agreement. The GVI year above is the evidence: I have closed programs that did not work.
Qualifications, and the frameworks the work is written against
B.Sc. forest science and resource management, Technical University of Munich. M.A. sustainable tourism management, Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development. Certified Hospitality Trainer (CHT®) of the American Hotel & Lodging Educational Institute, valid to July 2030. German national, permanent resident of Belize; German and English.
The frameworks the documents are written to are published ones rather than house opinion: Belize's National Sustainable Tourism Master Plan 2030; the GSTC criteria; ISO 21401 for sustainability management in accommodation; ISO 21101, 21102 and 21103, covering adventure tourism safety management, leader competence and information for participants; and BS 8848, the British specification for visits, fieldwork and expeditions organized outside the United Kingdom.
BelizeWise holds no certification under any of these and neither audits nor certifies anyone against them. They are the reference points the work is written to, which is a different claim and a more useful one.
Institutional references and a full CV are available on request.
What this is not
BelizeWise is not a tour agency, a booking platform or a licensed operator, and does not present itself as one. Field program concepts in development are described as concepts until the partner agreements, permissions, insurance and safety planning behind them are complete.
That distinction is stated plainly here because it is the same discipline the advisory work is sold on.