There has been some evidence, recently, of a deliberate attempt on the part of government to accord tourism a higher national profile. At least this is the impression we get based on the public profile which the activities of Tourism Minister Catherine Hughes has attracted both inside and outside the country.
We are reluctant to go any further—at least for the time being—on the matter of the seeming enhanced profile of the tourism sector, if only because successive political administrations have evinced a decided ambivalence about the seriousness of building the industry. That disposition has been manifested, chiefly, in what has been a decided reluctance to invest seriously in marketing Guyana abroad. Instead, what we have done, over time, is to simply ‘carry on’ about the country’s tourism potential in circumstances where, over the years, our tourism marketing efforts have not even been able to make a meaningful difference to the numbers of visitors that come here to see our famous Kaieteur Falls.
There are times when we even delude ourselves into believing that the noises we make about our tourism product to strictly limited local and—at best—regional audiences make a difference to our market share. Perhaps our statistics on tourist arrivals make no difference between the North American birdwatcher and the Guyanese family well-entrenched in the diaspora who turns up for a long-overdue family reunion.
It is not as if our experience parallels those of say Jamaica or Barbados where arrivals number in the hundreds of thousands who visit, enjoy themselves then depart leaving considerable sums of cash behind.
Mind you, questions continue to arise as to whether we are ‘ready’ for tourism. Surely we desperately need to get over the considerably propagated myth that once you are offering an interior-based nature product you really do not need to lose a lot of sleep over the condition of your capital. This is exactly what some people purporting to be tourism experts say to us. Then there are the far-from-encouraging standards of service in many of our hotels and guest houses and restaurants and snackettes. There has been talk about the creation of a hospitality school to address the training issue for some time now. We hear rather less about it these days.
Then, of course, there is the complex state administrative infrastructure for the tourism sector which begins with the Ministry of Tourism and its stepchild, the Guyana Tourism Authority. Over time the Tourism Ministry has never really been given sufficient breathing room and even now the ministry’s promised new Permanent Secretary is yet to materialize though we learnt recently that a new Director General has been appointed.
In the circumstances it would be good to know just what the administrative permutations of the ministry will now be, some of the critical issues being the substantive role of the new Director General and how exactly he will function vis-á-vis the Head of the Guyana Tourism Authority.
The challenge which the portfolio faces is that over time sufficiently large numbers of Guyanese do not appear to have been taken in by the idea of tourism as a critical economic sector and a major money-earner and one is inclined to believe that the lack of national passion serves as a disincentive to the wider marketing of the product.
The recent new point of interest is the appointment of a Minister of Tourism who—in another life—had secured some measure of experience of providing services to visitors to Guyana. Let us see what kind of impact she can make.
