By Analyst
When the Tourism Ministry and the Guyana Tourism Authority sit down to assess the outcomes of the August 8-10 Guyana Festival they will be able to make a sound judgment only if those outcomes are measured against the aspirations which had been articulated in the first place.
The event had been marketed as one of “a number of policy and programme initiatives to advance Guyana’s visibility worldwide and to bring optimum awareness of our diverse cultural heritage.” For that to have happened the organizers would have been required not only to secure a sizeable budget but to recruit key regional and international media entities to ‘spread the word’ about the country’s tourism product.
In the end it appeared that there was more than a hint of exalted ambition in the Tourism Authority’s stated anticipation of an “overwhelming response from exhibitor and visitor participation locally, regionally and internationally. That, had it been accomplished, would have been little short of a miracle.
News of plans to execute the Guyana Festival earlier this year coincided with publicly expressed views by the Tourism and Hospitality Association of Guyana (THAG) about the absence of official preparedness to spend far more generous sums on the marketing of the country’s tourism product abroad. What THAG omitted to mention was the paucity of local
experience in the planning and execution of events like the Guyana Festival, burdened as it had been from the inception with a host of exalted ambitions.
In that context the seeming absence of THAG from any major or supporting role in the planning or execution of the event was conspicuous. Interestingly, the tourism support organization body has skillfully evaded any questions on the matter.
Over time local organizers have become adept at mobilizing vendors in the food, manufacturing and art and craft sectors and combining these with healthy doses of entertainment to attract thousands of Guyanese over a weekend or so. GuyExpo has afforded a good deal of practice at that. Much of what has become common at GuyExpo was in evidence at the Guyana Festival and it was therefore hardly surprising that by Saturday evening sizeable numbers of the visitors to the Festival with whom this newspaper spoke were making more than casual comparisons with the Sophia event.
At Providence, a well-supported and tasteful musical concert provided a welcome change from the outrageous noises which, for years, have passed for entertainment at GuyExpo. Neither that, however, nor the well-supported cook-out were enough to make a persuasive case for the success of the event, given the goals that it had set itself at the outset.
Certainly, while the Guyana Festival can make a case for the “thousands” which it said attended the event over the three days, there was no evidence of the significant visitor arrivals from the region, North America and Europe which the organizers had openly stated that they had hoped for; and by the final evening the vendors of mostly Amerindian craft were saying that they had been decidedly underwhelmed by the experience.
Perhaps the fairest perspective from which to make an assessment of The Guyana Festival is from its vantage point of a first-time event that seeks to establish itself as the trigger for waves of visitor arrivals. Before that can happen, however, the Government of Guyana must come to terms with the fact that as presently structured the Guyana Tourism Authority possesses neither the financial nor the human resources to undertake the sort of comprehensive marketing of Guyana envisaged in the conceptualization of The Guyana Festival.
In the fullness of time the GTA planning team will learn that marketing goes way beyond simply ‘spreading the word’ and that planning includes working to schedules and deadlines so that we avoid the kind of ‘eleventh hour’ rush that was so evident at the Providence Stadium on the evening before the opening of the event and which bared indications of an unacceptable lack of professionalism, The GTA would (hopefully) have learnt too that in matters like the marketing of the Guyana Festival it can more than benefit from the experience of the various other countries in the region that are more versed in wooing overseas visitors, Almost certainly, help in the form of training.
