Repost of a column I wrote in July, 2010 in the ‘Daily
Financial Times, Sri Lanka’ examined the need for maintaining our brand
identity of being a destination that offers an experience combing nature,
culture, heritage and adventure of a friendly and hospitable people. We are indeed
a blessed land in terms of our natural endowment and it is for us to ensure
that we conserve it, through the training and education of people to take care of it, for that is value that is unique to us and can make us
stand tall in the ‘crowd’ with other destinations.
At every two year interval, an exit survey is conducted by Sri Lanka
Tourism among visitors departing Sri Lanka. At each of these over many years,
friendliness of our people and their smiles came at the top of list as the most
appreciated aspect of their visit to our island nation. This was so, even at
the height of our saga with terrorism when arrivals dropped to all time lows. We,
Sri Lankans smiled and continue to smile naturally. Unlike some other
destinations, we never had the need to carry out campaigns to ask our people to
smile.
Today, we are in for good times and that is when we should be cautious
and concerned about looking beyond those natural smiles to providing caring
service. With an over 50% increases in visitor arrivals, and growing upwards, our
hunger for visitors and their business as tourist guests, could face the danger
of decline. Many destinations have had that experience in the past, in being in
situations where when things were rosy, the service levels and caring ways
dropped to lows, and regaining them once again, became a costly exercise. There
is always the danger of us getting into that trap and we must exercise care to
not look at visitors as money making machines, placing our hospitable and
caring ways on the back-burners.
Now that there is enough tourism business around to place a smile on
every tour operator’s, hotel owner’s, shop keeper’s and tour guide’s face, this
perhaps is the right time for us to wean away from the most deplorable
practise, of add-on commissions we had, for so long on the agenda of our tour
operations. In the past, these accounted for mark-ups on goods bought at most
jewellery and handicraft shops and spice gardens for up to 60 percent of its
actual retail sales value.
Tourism is a service industry where service is spelt with a capital ‘S’.
What was good about our caring ways in the past is that to most, it came
naturally, and was in no way considered an add-on. For this to continue in good
times, it is vital that we undertake a strong and wide-spread programme of
training and development of human resources. Most of the larger corporate
entities in tourism in Sri Lanka pay much attention to their training now.
Human resources development is an integral part of their corporate strategy and
members of their staff are direct beneficiaries of those initiatives.
Unfortunately, it is the smaller and more localised enterprises that do
not get the benefit of such strategically designed programmes.
Interestingly, this is not a phenomenon limited to our own country. In a
recent book published by Abby Liu and Geoffrey Wall of the Faculty of Tourism, Aletheia University in Taiwan titled “Planning
tourism employment: a developing country perspective”, the authors argue that “tourism planning should be about planning for
residents as well as for visitors”. According to them “if tourism is to be a
positive force in the lives of local residents, it is contingent upon local
response, involvement and support”. They contend that “many tourism plans for
developing area destinations give inadequate attention to human resources
development. Furthermore, many tourism plans espouse forms of tourism that do
not fit well with existing human resources capabilities, so that local people
find it difficult to participate in tourism and, in consequence, benefit less
than might otherwise be the case”. Substantiating the position enumerated
earlier in this column, they say that “Human resources development often
focuses on the employment needs of large international companies, especially in
hospitality, to the neglect of the employment requirements and opportunities in
tourism more broadly conceived”.
We do
have regional tourism training institutes and one can argue that these meet the
requirements in providing opportunities for local youth to participate in
tourism endeavors. On an in-depth study of the curriculum offered, one can see
that at most of these institutes, the skills training provided is to prepare
youth to serve as paid employees at hotels, restaurants and other outfits of a
corporate nature. There is little or none in content taught to develop
initiative for them to become small tourism entrepreneurs on their own right.
There is very little in content that teaches them to develop a culture of
caring but a dishing out of a set of basic skills i.e. cookery, room service,
restaurant service etc.
At
these times when larger business entities take on serious corporate social
responsibility initiatives, it is opportune that focus is placed on policies
and strategies that will develop our tourism human resources to also become
independent operators of their own in their own locales, rather than remaining
as mere wage workers. Such strategy, will auger well to keep the smiles on, of
communities that act as important catalysts in making the tourism experience at
a destination like Sri Lanka, potent and bright.
Pic credit: Self
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