Lauding Guyana at tourism workshop…
SUSTAINABLE Tourism Product Specialist attached to Caribbean Tourism Organisation (CTO), Ms. Gail Henry has said many tourist destinations are, indeed, experiencing a very difficult time, in light of the current global crisis.

She was speaking at yesterday’s Guyana National Bureau of Standards (GNBS) workshop, hosted in collaboration with the CARICOM Regional Organisation for Standards and Quality (CROSQ), on ‘Promoting Competitiveness in the Tourism Sector’ at Hotel Tower, Main Street, Georgetown, to raise stakeholders’ awareness on the importance and benefits of standards in the sector.

In a presentation on ‘Regional Policy Guidelines for Tourism Standards from the Caribbean Regional Sustainable Tourism Policy Framework,’ she said it is very important for any tourist destination to have internationally accepted standards in place in order to remain competitive and sustainable.

She said those benchmarks would ensure that the destinations survive, especially in the current global financial crisis and its impact of the tourism sector.

Henry said she, recently, looked at some statistics for the first quarter of this year and the destinations are naturally being impacted by the fact that, in most of their source markets, many people are not travelling or are holding off on travels.

“So this is a very difficult time for many destinations in the Region,” she reiterated.

According to her, some are doing a bit better than others, in the sense that their tourism, based on the statistics available, have not really declined that significantly but, in others, arrivals have reduced quite drastically in comparison to the same period last year.

“It is something that each destination is grappling with.”

Henry said CTO is trying to assist destinations through areas such as regional marketing programmes.

She disclosed that a Caribbean Tourism Summit is to be held soon in Washington, D.C., where many of the issues would be discussed and dealt with.

“Issues would be dealt with to the point where solutions would be found at the regional level to address them as well to supplement national efforts on addressing the crisis,” Henry assured.

She lauded Guyana as one of the tourism destinations in the region that is now developing and making great strides, in terms of developing regulations which are an essential step along the road to enhance the image of the destination, promote it and ensure that visitors have the type of experiences that would, essentially, bring them back.

“Standards should be broadly applied in terms of the tourism industry because it has so many different sub-sectors – accommodation, the tour operator aspect of it, tour guide aspects.

It is very important to have standards across the board and also in order to have standards that are linked to all the other sectors that impact on tourism as well because as you know tourism is linked with agriculture and these other sectors”.

“It is very important to take a cross sectoral approach to development of standards in this regard,” Henry emphasised.