Everything that we have heard about next weekend’s Guyana Festival so far suggests that its primary focus is on trying to create an event that will serve as a kind of seasonal benchmark for visitor arrivals. In other words, it is not intended to be a one-off event.
What the Ministry of Tourism is seeking to do – at least so it seems – is to create a kind of multi-theme event – commerce, art and craft, culture, entertainment, et al. The goal appears to be to allow visitors to Guyana including Guyanese from the diaspora to soak up some of the various aspects of what – for want of a better expression – can be loosely termed the Guyanese experience.
It is, in principle, a perfectly good idea that appears to be patterned after the practice elsewhere in the Caribbean. The St Lucia Music Festival comes readily to mind. There, a single grand, national multi-event production with something for everyone – so to speak – is held. It targets locals, nationals from the diaspora as well as visitors to the country.
It takes time and costly and aggressive marketing to brand such events and one is unsure as to the extent to which the organisers have been able to effect the kind of overseas marketing blitz which was promised. What we do know is that they would not have been able to afford the big bucks to give them the kind of saturation effect that they might have hoped for, even though it is perhaps entirely possible that they might get meaningful returns from intense target marketing. As an aside it seemed to us that much more time (perhaps as much as a year) ought to have been allowed for the marketing of an event from which so much is expected. We really need to move away from the sort of half-baked efforts which frequently cost a great deal while accomplishing little or nothing.
Still and assuming that government is serious about promoting what we customarily describe as the country’s tourism product, it is good to have a branded event that takes place at a particular time of the year with which visitors to the country can identify. Setting aside the socio-cultural significance of Mashramani it cannot be denied that Mash is essentially a one-day event. We have been unable to promote it as an extended activity with a meaningful programme that runs at least over three or four days and which, over that period, has something really meaningful in it for visitors to Guyana.
From all appearances there are elements of the Guyana Festival that have a sort of more-of-the-same theme to them. Here we may well run the risk of offering a variant of the GuyExpo/Building Expo theme even though the organisers might argue that much of this will be novel to the visitors anyway. That apart, the concept document for the event seen by this newspaper suggests that the event will be full of new and different ideas and that the musical and cultural entertainment segments will be several cuts above the awful and decidedly health-threatening noises that are sold to us as music by the organisers of GuyExpo every year.
Not a lot has been said by the Guyana Tourism Authority about the Guyana Festival idea even though one sector official did tell this newspaper that he was not at all certain that government is as yet prepared to spend the kind of money that would be necessary to properly market such an event.
All that having been said the die would appear to be cast and in a matter of days we are going to be able to make a judgment as to just how successful the first Guyana Festival was. Here it has to be said that the proof of the pudding will repose less in the number of locals who go through the turnstiles at Providence and perhaps more in the hoped-for visitor arrivals from North America and elsewhere. That, we should bear in mind, is what was promised.
This of course is not to say that the Guyana Festival should be either condemned or discarded if this year’s event falls below what might have been hoped for. It takes time, effort and money to brand an exercise of this kind. If, with the support and involvement of the sector we can witness clear and determined efforts to use the event as a focal point for marketing our tourism product abroad then it might well serve as a catalyst for bringing more visitors to Guyana. If, however, we will simply run out of puff after the first event and turn the whole thing into a one weekend wonder then it simply isn’t worth the bother.