The Dominica Community Tourism Association Inc. (DCTAI) has launched a Community Tourism Enhancement Competition (CTEC) which aims to improve the quality and enhancement of the tourism experience in communities.
This was announced on Wednesday at the Ministry of Trade and Employment conference room at the financial centre.
The competition will be anchored in four pillars (cleanliness, landscaping, hospitality and community involvement) and will be done in a competitive manner where neighbouring communities will be grouped into five or six zones and will be required to host an event during the months of March and April in one of the communities within the zone.
Manger of the DCTAI, Lester Riviere said their main objective of this competition is getting communities more involved in tourism.
“The community tourism association has been in existence for a while with a number of groups to different degrees of development and offering different types of products or services to visitors but as we know, there’s always room for improvement and based on the feedback and observation. It’s quite evident that there’s more work to be done in terms of the management of the community tourism activities in the various communities in the country,” he said.
He said their main focus will be on communities of the North and North East such as Penville, Bense and Calibishie, among others.
Meantime, the President of DCTAI, Josephine Dublin-Prince said DCTAI said the goal is to make Dominica a destination of choice not only for tourists but also for Dominican people.
“The board members and its membership have endorsed this wholeheartedly. The DCTAI is a vehicle towards making Dominica a destination of choice for visitors but we are concerned about making that destination not only for visitors but also for our people because what would be good for our own would be necessarily good for persons we are inviting to Dominica,” Dublin-Prince stated.
She added, “Our mandate is about developing the community consciousness, awareness, product, mobilisation of resources and all that the member organisations would want for the development of the community, with a focus on community tourism.”
Dublin-Prince said the competition is also aimed at fostering cooperation, resource mobilisation within the community and a sense of networking.
The competition will be held March 24th and will be evaluated by a team of judges who will assign scores for the various assessment areas within the four pillars.
The highest scoring zone will be awarded at a prize giving ceremony during Tourism Awareness Month in May 2019.
See how we don’t support good initiatives. Such a small amount of commenters. Guess the heading of the article did not capture many interest.
SAD……
This is an excellent initiative.
The association also deserves credit for avoiding the word “stakeholder” and for using the word “landscaping” rather than “beautification”.
Dominica doesn’t need beautifying – she’s naturally beautiful – but she does need tidying up and an improved standard of design in every aspect of our built environment.
Good initiative … I in that …
Good stuff..Great Idea..things like this makes sense..