The Ghana Tourism Agency (GTA) says it has begun training over 10,000 hospitality and tourism site operators who have so far been enrolled on the Tourism component of the Ghana Cares Obaatampa Program, which focuses on improving businesses through series of training.

According to GTA, this is to augment the government’s intervention efforts following the disruptive impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the hospitality and tourism sector.

Director of Corporate affairs at GTA, Jones Nelson, said the authority expects to train the tourism operators in an 18-month span with a projection of immensely boosting growth in the sector.

“We intend to train about 10,000 tourism operators at the end of 18 months, which is one and half years. Currently, we are in Kumasi for part two of the exercises because we will be beginning our inspections very soon where we will be advising those who want to put up a hotel, where to put a swimming pool or facilities. We have experts too on the grounds, including architects and planners. We’ve also put almost all the tourism operators under an app where they will display their products and services,” he said.

As part of the Tourism aspect of the Ghana cares Obaatampa program, the Ghana Tourism Authority (GTA) is mandated to train industry players to be well-equipped for the new digital era.

The training element of the program hinges on four major areas, which includes product knowledge, customer service, digital marketing and sales, and basic knowledge in French.

“The training is in two parts. We’ve had training with our tourism inspectors and the idea is to inculcate into the tourism industry practitioners the new ways of doing things. And the inspection bit is an extension service which we do free of charge as part of our mandate to inspect the license and then register tourism plans. So we’ve trained our tourism inspectors. We’ve also had training for our product development inspectors and the product attracts the tourist to ancillary services,” Mr. Nelson added.