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| Parliamentary Secretary in the Ministry of Tourism, Senator Irene Sandiford-Garner??consulting with??Tourism Minister, Richard Sealy during a recent press conference. (FP) |
Tourism officials are concerned about complaints of rude and arrogant personnel at the Grantley Adams International Airport and have cautioned that the industry contributes to everyone’s pay cheque.
Commenting on a back page story carried in the Midweek Nation newspaper about ratings from some visitors passing through the airport, Parliamentary Secretary in the Ministry of Tourism and International Transport, Senator Irene Sandiford-Garner, said the reports were a source of concern to tourism officials who had discussed the matter and determined that it was an area that "must be tackled at all levels".
Senator Sandiford-Garner is appealing to Barbadians to return to the place where they recognised the importance of tourism to their survival. "Barbados must get back to recognising that tourism affects every single one of us and contributes to the pay cheque of every last one of us," she emphasised during a press conference to update the media about developments in the tourism industry at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre.
The Parliamentary Secretary said the Barbados Tourism Authority had spent time training frontline industry personnel, but she believed the complaints about attitudes at the GAIA indicated that more needed to be done.
"I do believe it is incumbent on every single Barbadian to understand that if the Government is putting all its resources at the disposal of this industry…those persons who are involved at those critical points of entry need to understand and recognise that it is an enlightened approach that they take…because every single person that comes into this country props up their livelihood," Senator Sandiford-Garner underlined.??
She also said that the work done in the Ministry and its affiliate agencies was beginning to bear fruit, to the extent that Barbados was now beginning to "stem the decline" in tourism business and made reference to two events that had attracted many "high net worth" individuals to Barbados.