Hospitality industry has a great promise

Customer care is perhaps the most important aspect of tourism, nay any business for that matter. A country can have the most attractive wildlife in the world, but if it handles tourists badly, it will be shooting itself in the foot.
They say that negative information flies while a positive one travels on horseback. It is about first or passed on impressions. Once tourists are treated badly in this age of the global village, the information would spread like bushfire. The result would be a tremendous decrease in tourist inflows.
On the other hand, if tourists are well cared for when they visit attractions in a country they would be the country’s unpaid ambassadors on return to their home countries.
This is why we support the call for Tanzania’s hotels to provide their staff with in-house training on customer care. It was made by the Tanzania Tourist Board (TTB) marketing manager, Geofrey Meena, in an interview with this paper last weekend.
He said following increased number of tourist hotels in Tanzania, emphasis should now be on in-house training of their staff, especially in customer care.
He could not be more right! This is because tourists would like to get international standards of treatment in the hotels they stay when they visit Tanzania or any other country.

We must remember that some of the tourists save for months or years to pay for their fare and a once-in-a-lifetime holiday in Tanzania.
So they expect to get value for their money, and anything less would not do. Of course, front office staff and others like waiters or receptionists, housekeepers get experience in customer care on the job after acquiring theory in hotel training establishments.
Customer care includes the behaviour of hotel staff. It is a requirement for them to be charming yet courteous and quick to respond to customers’ needs. But, perhaps the most important aspect of customer care is faithfulness.
A country may have the best tourist attractions in the world and excellent tourist hotels, but if its attendants are not faithful, this can put off tourists.
We should remember that there are many countries with tourist attractions to where they could go.
And although Tanzania might have unique tourist attractions, if tourists are handled badly we can forget about increasing their numbers.
What is required is for hotel managements to have an intensive training for their staff while on the job, as Meena emphasised.
This type of training should include learning various foreign languages, mainly those spoken by most tourists coming to Tanzania. We take it that all hotel workers know how to write and speak Kiswahili.
Learning languages for these workers has great advantages because they can easily communicate with tourists who cannot speak the local lingua franca.
As a matter of fact, it will enable them to work in any hotel in the world, thus expanding their market. In the end we may have Tanzanian expatriates working in hotels in foreign countries. The market for the hospitality industry is big. Let us exploit it.

SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN