Tourism officials have put plans in place to revive the Bed and Breakfast (B&B) programme for Carifesta X, confident that it will be utilized this time around although it was not a success during the Cricket World Cup (CWC) last year.
The Guyana Tourism Authority (GTA) and the Ministry of Tourism have started to publish advertisements asking persons interested in providing the bed and breakfast service for Carifesta to make contact with them “urgently”.
It had been anticipated that accommodation would have been a challenge for Guyana during the March 2007 CWC, so the programme was promoted. Government had called on Guyanese to open up their homes. Many invested large sums in making their homes ‘ready’ according to set standards which were being enforced through the Local Organising Committee (LOC).
But for the majority, the investments were not fruitful. The LOC, which was headed by Karan Singh, had acknowledged that there were many empty rooms/homes and Singh had attributed this to the low visitor rate to the Guyana leg of the Super Eight matches.
Asked about the programme’s resumption on Friday, Ohene Koama, who was the focal person for the programme during CWC 2007, and who now heads the Visitors Experience and Accommodation Section of the Carifesta Secretariat said the idea was to give B&B providers an opportunity to benefit from the national event. Quizzed about the problems experienced by those who prepared and did not benefit during CWC, he said the committee’s duty was only to make the necessary accommodation available. In this regard, he said, the GTA was taking the initiative to solicit persons to register.
GTA head Indranauth Haralsingh said the authority was making an effort to rebuild the B&B database and so far 19 persons have responded to its calls for interested persons, he said. This newspaper was reliably informed by a source that the creator of the CWC B&B database had some outstanding pay issues and therefore withheld the database, forcing the GTA to start afresh, since it no longer had access to the already checked and approved providers. Haralsingh could not comment on this.
However, he said while the plans of many who may have applied during the CWC period fell through, he was sure Carifesta would attract more visitors and encouraged persons to apply.
“Carifesta has the potential to bring more people to Guyana and so far many hotels have already been [fully] booked,” he said.
Koama also said that the participating countries have been allowed to place their bookings directly with the hotels. He said 1,352 persons from different delegations have already confirmed their participation and noted that the Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela and Brazil were some countries with sizeable delegations.
Additionally, he said, the authority plans to meet domestic carriers to discuss possible adjustments to their schedules to focus more on the sightseeing needs of visitors.
He said LIAT has committed to increasing its flights to accommodate the expected influx of visitors.
