Gov’t bent on building Destination Guyana brand -Jordan
Government will continue to support the local tourism sector with further investments in marketing, capacity building and product development, while investments in critical infrastructure will reduce the cost of accessing Guyana’s unique tourism brand, says Finance Minister Winston Jordan.
The aforementioned was related on Monday during Jordan’s 2019 budget presentation. No sum was quoted for the further investments, he mentioned.
“Additionally, we have included several goodies in the tax measures for 2019, including tax credits linked to investments in hinterland regions and further tax exemptions for certain vehicles used to transport tourists anywhere in Guyana,” the minister stated.
Noting Guyana’s “unparalleled endowment of virgin rainforest, biodiversity, mountains, wetlands, savannahs and magnificent waterfalls, rivers and creeks,” he said, “Destination Guyana is a haven for adventure seekers and nature lovers.”
Interventions in the tourism sector in 2018 are bearing fruit, he said, as seen by consistently high visitor arrivals. In the first eight months of 2018, visitor arrivals reached 189,066, an increase of 15.2 per cent, when compared with the same period in 2017.
Airlift capacity has also received a significant boost, with the recent addition of American Airlines adding 81,000 available seats to the Cheddi Jagan International Airport, Timehri.
The additional airline should result in lower ticket prices and increased passenger movement, which has grown by nine per cent a year over the past three years, Jordan said.
In the interest of providing sustainable livelihoods, with a focus on hinterland communities and economic diversification and development, Jordan said that positioning citizens to take advantage of Guyana’s unique product is both a challenge and an opportunity that the government is keen on.
He noted that an enhanced destination marketing programme was developed to focus energies toward integrated marketing and communications, with special emphasis on the country’s core markets in the US, Canada, the UK and Germany and more specifically, on the nature-based, cultural and adventure tourism niches.
Further destination marketing activities, he noted, included participation by local tourist operators in international travel and trade shows, hosting familiarisation (FAM) trips for travel writers to highlight the country’s tourism product and experience, and the publication of seven official Destination Guyana videos, which have received over 2,000,000 online views.