There is an element of luck of the draw for sure, but I have spoken to three other people who have travelled to Belize via Houston in the last year including clients of mine who arrived a few days ago. All have had similar difficulties to our own. I am sure that huge numbers of people have an easy journey, but having travelled to the USA annually for 20 years and to other countries in the world frequently, I can only say that my experience at Houston was extremely poor both times. Just sharing as this is a forum in which people share their knowledge and experience about visiting Ambergris Caye.
A moot (sorry just wanted an excuse to say moot) point, but I did not exaggerate the difficulties we had (nor the number of overbooked seats as this was the figure given to us by Continental). The immigration queue was so long for us at Houston that a desperate Continental employee (bless her for trying at least) tried to get me a wheelchair - at her suggestion - to pretend I was disabled so that she could get us through more quickly. In the end she did manage to get us rushed through immigration without the wheelchair but once we got to baggage that is where they tried to tell us that the flight boarding was closed. On our last trip, as we believed them when they told us this, we ended up staying the night - we later discovered that the flight had been delayed and boarding had not stopped on that flight either.
As far as our stuff going missing at Houston, so far Continental are saying that it was the responsibility of Customs there. Who knows.
Ah- one other thing. It probably is quicker if you have a USA passport. Those queues only took minutes while we were waiting. Ours took hours.
AmbergrisCaye.com 
