Hotel Operators Gear Up for CAN 2008

AS Ghana prepares to host the rest of Africa in the 26th edition of the African Cup of Nations next year, operators in the hospitality and the tourism industries are embarking on various measures to enhance quality service and management of hospitality facilities in the Kumasi Metropolis.

The Ghana Tourist Board (GTB) has therefore organised a three-day training programme for some selected tourism practitioners in Kumasi to equip them with the necessary skills and techniques in the industry. Participants were taken through various topics, including Team Building, Challenges in the Hospitality Sector, Overview of Human Resource Management, Modern Services and Marketing Skills and Developing Positive Attitudes towards Work.

Other topics included Facility Management, Customer Satisfaction and Alternative Finance of Hotels.

Addressing participants at the closing ceremony of the workshop, the Deputy Executive Director of Finance at the Ghana Tourist Board, Mr. Charles Osei Bonsu, noted that the workshop was part of the board's tourism capacity development initiative to train hotel owners and managers to appreciate the rationale and value behind the need to be customer-conscious.

He stated that the crash programme was the outcome of a research conducted by the George State University in the United State on Ghana's hospitality industry, which had recommended the need to bring owners and managers of the hospitality sector under one roof in order to build trust to improve services.

Mr. Osei Bonsu said the programme was heavily subsidised by the International Finance Corporation through the World Bank. The corporation also played a leading role in the selection of the consultancy firm, Top Consultancy, which undertook the training.

According to him, even though Ghana was a preferred tourism destination in Sub-Saharan Africa and had made a steady progress in the past years, quality services had become a major issue of concern because operators in the industry had not been able to turn the proverbial Ghanaian hospitality into professional services due to lack of well-trained customer-conscious staff.

He further disclosed that a six-day seminar on Ethics and Consumer Driven Programmes, Personal Hygiene, Environmental Sanitation and Food and Beverage Services, Housekeeping and Finance and Accounting Techniques would be held for all levels of staff in the industry, including the front desk officers, waitresses and shopkeepers to ensure a holistic approach to customer satisfaction.

r. Osei Bonsu stressed that Ghana, together with South Africa, being executive members of the United Nation World Tourism Organisation, were in a partnership with the world governing body, FIFA, to capitalise on the two tournaments (African Cup and the World) to showcase and promote tourism destinations in Africa.

He was of the view that both pre-match and post-match activities throughout the tournament would be customer-oriented and therefore appealed to hotel operators to deliver the best of services to foreign nationals who would visit the Ghana.

Some of the participants who spoke to The Chronicle after the programme expressed their satisfaction with the workshop and promised to put whatever skills and knowledge they had acquired to good use.

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