Belize Tourism Board
(BTB)
Thursday, June 18th 2015. BMG: Over the past weeks, the President of the Fort George Tourism Zone Tour operators and Taxi Union, Arton Bowen, has continuously expressed concern on the delegation of tours and distribution of tourists at the Belize Tourism Village. According to Bowen, only pre-booked tour operators are benefitting from the process, while independent and freelance tour operators have been trying to negotiate a change in the system.
In response to dissatisfied independent tour operators, the director of Destination Planning and Cruise, Valdemar Andrade, had this to say:
“The main purpose of the standard operating procedure is we have divided up the gates to allocate people where they do business best, where they would get their better customers from at the end of the day. So at gate 1, we have pre-booked operators, at gate 2 we have independent operators, which is the taxi and tour guide association, presently Mr. Arton Bowen. And at gate 4 we have a mixture of independent and taxi operators because of the sheer numbers of people. The operations occur where pre-booked people, some people who have booking online, they come out of gate 1 – normally they would come out of gate 1. They call for an operator, which ever tour operations and our dispatchers guide them to that operator. If they are just a walk out, then they are re guided to gate 2 so that the independent operators have a chance to sell them a tour. In general terms, all walkouts are to go to gate 2 but since we have implemented this system, a lot of people that are walkouts were coming out of gate 1. So we have made some adjustments to the standard operating procedures allowing the people from terminal 2 – the independent operators to have a rotation at gate 1 so that they are able to get their guests. The walkouts or to have access to those people. One of the biggest issues that we have is that the guests’ satisfactions surveys for Belize have shown that we have marquee tours, so people come here to take tours. So most of the people who go on tour, we have high ratings on those. But the guest experience for the city and for people who walk out is poor – because of this bombardment of operators and guides that are trying to sell a tour. So this is what we try to manage but at the end of the day it comes down to individual behavior and how we manage the standard operating procedures at the end of the day.”
In Andrade’s opinion, it is not the system that is flawed, but rather the behavior and conduct of the independent operators. He claims that both the pre-booked tour operators and the independent delegation agreed to the system currently in place. Additionally, training sessions have been set up for tour operators to improve their business.
In regards to the situation at Terminal 1, the BTB has no control over locked doors; Andrade suspects it may have been a security decision on the part of FSTV.