peterJudith Phiri, Business Reporter
THE Zimbabwe Tourism Authority (ZTA) has embarked on intensive capacity building to strategically position the country’s community-based tourism and attract more traffic to their facilities in the post-Covid-19 era.
The global tourism industry was heavily decimated by Covid-19 air travel restrictions with Zimbabwe among the affected countries.
The global economy is now on the recovery path after the restrictions were eased, with the local tourism industry harnessing strategies to revert to pre-pandemic figures.
In a sideline interview during the post-Covid-19 tourism impact assessment and stakeholder consultation in Bulawayo on Friday, ZTA chief operating officer (COO), Mr Givemore Chidzidzi said they have put in place measures to capture lost markets.
“We are assisting in terms of their skills development, there is a gap in terms of services delivery and one of the pillars of our Tourism Recovery and Growth Strategy is to look at how the Covid-19 pandemic impacted on service delivery and we are working on that.
Right now, we have a programme where our trainers are moving around the country and training service staff and it is for free. Wherever we are in a location we get all the stakeholders to send their staff for training,” said Mr Chidzidzi.
He said the process they were undertaking was to really quantify the losses and come up with proper remedies as there was need to diagnose first before prescribing something.
Mr Chidzidzi said the way the Covid-19 pandemic impacted on a youth-run business was not the same as it impacted on a conglomerate like one of the big hotel chains or a community-based tourism.
“We have to give the proper prescription to the problems that we have.
Community-based tourism is one area that actually thrives when mainstream tourism is happening.
When it is depressed, you will find it also suffers.
We have been going down and we have taken an inventory all over the country so we are now busy resuscitating,” he added.
He said they had assessed who and where the community-based tourism players are at, as well as at what level they are.
One tourism operator, Entabeni Lodge owner and director, Mrs Faith Makamure said as players in the sector they were appealing to the Government for support as most were still struggling.
She said to avoid such occurrences in the future, there was need for the Government to be prepared and swiftly assist players as tourism was one of the foreign currency earners of most countries.
One of the consultants under post-Covid-19 tourism impact assessment and stakeholder consultation, Ms Leanne Bac from BDO Global said Zimbabwe could offer the world diversified tourism that could range from culture, heritage and open spaces where people can be more involved.
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