Accelerate marriage tourism amendment – Gouveia urges
Even as Roraima Airways prepares to host the annual Wedding Expo next month, the company’s Chief Executive Officer, Gerry Gouveia has told Stabroek Business that the process of amending the country’s Marriage Act to reduce the residency requirement from fifteen days to two days for non-nationals wishing to marry in Guyana, must be accelerated.
This is necessary to allow the change in the law to impact on visitor arrivals and on the tourism industry as a whole as early as possible.
“There is no reason why this cannot be accelerated since it can have an immediate impact on the tourism industry and on the country’s economy as a whole,” Gouveia told Stabroek Business earlier this week.
For several years Roraima Airways has been using its annual Wedding Expo to mount a lobby for a change in the law which Gouveia has argued would have the effect of attracting a higher volume of wedding tourism to Guyana.
“It is true that there are other infrastructure-related issues that will have to be dealt in order to make Guyana more wedding tourism-friendly but amended legislation is fundamental to the process. The whole idea is to allow persons living abroad and wanting to use Guyana as the location for their weddings to do so without having to deal with what can be the inconvenience of having to be here for two weeks, often more, in order to do so. The impact could well be immediate,” Gouveia said.
And according to the one-time Guyana Defence Force Officer the amendment of the law could have a multi-faceted impact on the country’s economy linked to “the spinoffs from increased visitor arrivals alone. Once couples and their guests start arriving here for short term stay associated with weddings sectors that include accommodation, food, entertainment and transformation, among others, are likely to be boosted immediately.”
“Most of what happens for the tourism industry happens far too slowly and since there is no obvious difficulty with dealing with this particular piece of legislation there is no reason why it ought not to happen pretty quickly,” Gouveia said. Once the law is changed and potential wedding tourism visitors, including Guyanese in the diaspora become aware of this, we will most likely see a greater influx of visitors taking advantage of the removal of that administrative hindrance in order to get married here,” Gouveia says.
Chief Executive Officer of Roraima Airways Inc. Gerry Gouveia has described as “a major potential breakthrough for the tourism sector the announcement by the Guyana Tourism Authority that government is now moving definitively to effect an amendment to the country’s Marriage Act that would allow for a reduction of the residency requirement from fifteen days to two days for non-nationals wishing to marry in Guyana.
At the launch of Roraima’s Wedding Expo 2018 at the Duke Lodge on Wednesday, Deputy Director of