The struggle to develop the tourism product seem to be receiving some attention with efforts to maintain day tour trips to Montserrat in an organised way.
The Montserrat Tourist Board was abandoned and tourism, according to the MDC shut-down report ‘improperly’ subsumed into the Montserrat Development Corporation. A tourism director was installed. She had just begun to bring life to tourism which had been void of direction over the previous four years when she became one of the casualties of the Shut-Down of MDC which was supposed to be liquidated in short order.
One of her first moves even while the Shut Down committee was in operation a tourism task force was created to move forward with the tourism rebranding and immediate action taken to upgrade the day tour experience beginning with ensuring that taxi drivers and tour guides were trained in various aspects of their involvement with tourists and the public and in particular visiting the southern half of Montserrat.
A ZJB report this week announced the start of commercial tours into Plymouth scheduled for December. The report stated that this follows months of preparation by the Tourism department and other agencies.
The Tour operators are expected to enhance travel experience for visitors to Monserrat, to date several site investigations, consultations and trading have taken place to prepare all stakeholders involved.
In this regard the Disaster Management Coordination Agency (DMCA) explained their involvement in bringing about the preparation and training to ensure that health and safety plans are approved and in place.
Mr. Billy Darroux is Director of DMCA he says, “We would have seen areas of this health and safety procedures that we needed to consolidate and improve on so we have dealt with that.”
He said the next step would be approving that health and safety plan, take applications from the persons who want to conduct tours in Plymouth. “We need to look at making sure everybody’s versed with emergency procedures.” he said, continuing, “We don’t want to look at a logistics relating to radio communication and of course certifying the persons who will be allowed to operate in Plymouth.”
Darroux said it would mean that any person who wanted to do a tour in Plymouth or tours into Plymouth, “would have to use certified taxi drivers and tour guides who would be aware of things like every day first aid, emergency procedures for Plymouth, radio communications and things like that.”
Speaking for the benefit of the various operators, he told them, “You would have participated in the training, in all the training modules put through by the Department of Tourism but more importantly for Plymouth, you’d have to do every day first aid, procedures, training – one the procedures for emergency operations in Plymouth and of course radio communication.”
As noted earlier training had begun last year and into the beginning of this year. Acording to reports, the Tourism Department is planning another set of training in the next few weeks.
