Alain St. Ange Congratulates Mahama, Says Ghana Remains Tourism Leader in Africa
Charles Ajunwa
F
ormer Minister of Tourism, Civil Aviation, Ports and Marine of the Sychelles, Alain St.Ange, has congratulated Ghana’s President-elect, John Dramani Mahama on his electoral victory.
According to him, “Ghana remains a tourism leader for Africa with a long list of great USPs (Unique Selling Points), and with the potential of developing tourism with the Ghanaians in mind as the owners of their unique industry.”
Mahama who was President of Ghana from 2012 to 2016, received St.Ange at his Accra office during a visit to discuss tourism on the African continent. This was just before the bid in 2017 for Sychelles to lead the UNWTO with Alain St.Ange as Secretary General.
St.Ange as the Head of his Saint Ange Tourism Consultancy took a role in tourism a couple of years ago with Ghana through a World Bank open bidding contract.
“This contract enabled me to re-discover this great country and to appreciate its people,” he noted.
In another development, St.Ange has completed a four-day training for tourism-related workers in different fields of government such as tourist police, rescue, destination management, museums, customs and border guards in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
He travelled to Almaty on the invitation of ‘Visit Almaty’, the Almaty Tourism Department of Kazakhstan, working alongside local Kazak tourism training personality and official guide, Mrs. Zhanar Gabit and Mr. Tom Buncle, the Managing Director of ‘Yellow Railroad’ International Destination Consultancy.
The training sessions concentrated mainly on managers to empower them to follow up with training of their department’s personnel on better ways to work with tourists in a manner to show the country is attractive for tourism.
The organisation rallied some 300 government delegates divided into 10 groups with 30 people for all day sessions spread out over two days.
“The knowledge of international tourism is average. The employees understand what tourism is in general. And Kazakhstan is a new destination on the world tourism map so many people do not understand how to deal with foreigners. The format is the facilitation training that will end with an extensive question and answer session,” said a representative of the organisers, adding, “Mainly, the goal of this government organised training programme is to firm up the understanding of International standards implementation importance in hospitality industry to create friendly environment for international visitors and to train people the high standards of behavioural norms towards visitors. Which can be addressed to Global awareness of Kazakhstan as friendly tourist destination.”
St.Ange took on his sessions with what is tourism and how each and every manager in attending the sessions can help tourism in Kazakhstan to be consolidated.
He encouraged the Kazakhstan authorities to work with its Central Asia countries and to develop a new ‘Central Asia Tourism’ as a new destination.
“I was amazed by what Kazakhstan has to offer the discerning travellers looking for a new destination. They have the most incredible mountains just 30 minutes from Almaty City centre with ski-slopes offering four feet of snow now and this at very high altitudes, they have the rivers offering incredible white-water rafting and they have lakes and a desert. “They have canyons, great nature as a remarkable asset and the people and culture remain unique as they are not Asia and they are not Europe, but well established as a tourism centre in Central Asia and are Eurasian,” St.Ange said.
He also encouraged the authorities to embark on collaboration with the likes of World Tourism Network (WTN) that can help open up tourism to become a solid pillar of the economy after oil and gas that they are so blessed with.
