South Florida is getting a shorter route to the reef. BermudAir will begin nonstop flights between Fort Lauderdale and Belize City on October 26, flying three days a week — Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays — on an Embraer E190 with both economy and business-class cabins.

The schedule is pleasantly compact. The southbound flight, BermudAir 425, leaves Fort Lauderdale at 11 a.m. and lands in Belize at 11:30 a.m. local time, a hop of about two and a half hours. The return departs Belize City at 12:30 p.m. the same days, so a long weekend is genuinely doable without burning a whole day in transit.

What makes the timing work is the onward connectivity. Belize City's international airport feeds a web of quick domestic flights, and some are remarkably short: the hop from Belize City to San Pedro on Ambergris Caye takes about 15 minutes. Placencia and other spots around the country are similarly easy to reach, meaning you can land before noon and be on a beach or a jungle veranda by mid-afternoon.

The Fort Lauderdale route is the first of five new U.S.–Belize routes BermudAir is rolling out. Nonstop service from Boston, Raleigh-Durham, Orlando Sanford and St. Petersburg-Clearwater follows later in the year. Belize's airlift overall keeps growing too — WestJet has added a winter route from Winnipeg — so travellers from North America have more ways in than ever.

Belize punches above its weight for a country its size. From Belize City you can head straight to the laid-back cayes of Ambergris or Caye Caulker for snorkelling and diving on the barrier reef; push south to the quieter beach towns of Placencia and Hopkins; or go inland to the Cayo District for Maya ruins, cave tubing, rivers and jungle lodges. It's one of the few places where you can realistically combine a reef holiday with rainforest and archaeology in a single week, and this new flight shortens the gap between your front door (if that door is in Florida) and all of it.

For anyone in South Florida who has been pricing connections through Dallas, Houston or Atlanta, a two-and-a-half-hour nonstop changes the maths. Even if you're elsewhere in the U.S., BermudAir's wider expansion plus the domestic flight network means Belize is becoming an easier sell as a one-week trip rather than a two-week one.

The first Fort Lauderdale–Belize flight takes off October 26.