The Barbados Tourism Marketing Inc. (BTMI) is continuing to fulfil its promise to help taxi operators develop their shore excursion offerings.
To this end, the BTMI held a two-day training session entitled: Interactive Tour Design through The Five Senses at Courtyard by Marriott on Thursday.
BTMI’s Chief Product Development Officer, Marsha Alleyne, said the session was a continuation of the “very broad-based” training to assist in enhancing tours offered to visitors by taxi operators.
Ms. Alleyne noted that to date, some of the training the taxi operators had received since July 2022, included COVID-19 protocols, social media content management, service quality management and most recently heritage tours.
The Chief Product Development Officer emphasised the importance of the training. “We have a shore experience expert and she is helping them to take the information they received from the historians during the heritage tours, and create stories so that when they take out the visitors to the heritage sites, they can create wonderful stories with the historical information.
“And, in addition to that teach them how to be more engaging with the customer, how they can be more welcoming and how they can differentiate their product. So, we want these operators who will be conducting these bespoke unique tours to be equipped in such a way that they can actually provide a unique product and experience for the visitor,” she stated.
Conducting the training sessions was the President and Founder of Canadian company, Lemoneight, Claudine Pohl. She explained that the training involved role-playing, creating a tour and storytelling and sought to teach taxi operators how to explore the “Perfect Day” and also find ways to elevate the guest experience.
The main aspect of the training was teaching participants how to become efficient in storytelling by utilising the five senses (touch, smell, hearing, sight, and taste) in their product development and tour design process.
Noting that the four epic Ps of storytelling are people, place, plot and purpose, Ms. Pohl said what a visitor to Barbados truly wants is to leave the island saying, “I became part of that country”. She added that this is achieved when a visitor has a hands-on personal experience.
Taxi operator, Janice Brathwaite, said she found the information given to be “very informative and a lot of it made sense”.
Ms. Brathwaite stated she had already incorporated some of the strategies taught into her tours, but noted, however, some information was new and it could be used to help make her tours and connections with the guests much better.
Her colleague, Pedro “Big Mac” Harrison, shared that he was happy and grateful to see BTMI conducting training sessions. “I enjoyed every bit of it; the presenter did a wonderful job. It has refreshed a lot of thoughts in my head about tourism and how I do and organise tours, and the things I have not been doing in my tours. I will use the information in the upcoming season 2022-2023.”
The training catered to over 120 taxi operators and was also geared towards tourism industry stakeholders. It was organised by a team from the Product Development Department in BTMI.