BY HELEN J. CATALBAS
YES, Sirs and Ma’ams, we are looking at you! You can and should be a tourism promotion officer and have fun while being so. Promise. You don’t have to be employed in a government office or a tourism-oriented/related enterprise to be worthy of this beautiful title. You can be a true blue tourism. promotion officer by just being plane Jane or your male version we can’t recognize from Adam. Believe us, you don’t have to be a boner who parades around in crude braggadocio fashion simply because you have access to taxpayers’ money.
Promotion is one of the 5Ps of tourism marketing. The other 4 are Product, Price, Place and People. We will deal with the latter 4 in future editions of this column. For this week, let’s focus on the topic at hand.
If you are paid from people’s money to promote tourism in a certain assigned place, you should do the taxpayers proud by knowing your job like the palm of your hand thereby delivering results that will be beneficial to the greater number in the community and not only to your benefactors. You should not play favoritism among stakeholders as this can be construed as a shade of corruption. Red tape and not responding accordingly to stakeholders’’ and potential tourists’ communication are among the best ways of depromoting your area of responsibility. We put forth the term to emphasize our point.
If you are employed in whatever legal enterprise in the private sector, you can be a tourism promotion officer by first and foremost knowing and doing your job well so customers will keep coming and keep coming back ensuring you job security while contributing to the making of a progressive business community. Generally, an area with high employment rate is a promotable and attractive tourist destination.
To us, a smiling and courteous taxi driver in his tidy uniform, drives along regular safe routes and charges his passenger fair fare is a good tourism promotion officer whether he/she realizes it or not. When he/she dishes out useful information to passenger-tourists, that would be a bonus.
Smile is the universal language in tourism. Excellent service with a smile adds color and meaning to a tourist’s experience in the destination. A tourism product is the total experience the tourist has in the destination, with point of reference as from the time he/she leaves home to the time he/she returns home. All the components of the tourist visit, therefore, contribute to the making of the tourist destination an unforgettable one worthy of recommendation to family, relatives and friends to visit in the near future.
The tourist destination just visited will be an overnight sensation if the tourist is a vlogger or travel journalist with online page.
Unpaid tourism promotion officers are heroes disguised as fruit street side vendors, bystanders who offer accurate direction to a confused-looking tourist who is on do-it-yourself (DIY) walking tour, or local travellers who assist the tourist where to buy transportation ticket, how much, etc. etc.
The list of tourism promotion heroes seems endless and their trades and occupations are as interesting as the population they represent.
Let’s all be tourism heroes of our province, city or municipality down to the barangay (village) level and help build our beloved country in whatever way we can, in whatever way we should./PN
