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Let’s Make Hospitality & Good Customer Service a Big Deal
Dear Mr. Editor,
Ever so often, there is a call for hospitality and better customer service, even though the two can take different forms in terms of definition and composition. Hospitality deals with “the quality or disposition of receiving and treating guests or strangers in a warm, friendly, generous way” while Customer service“ is the act of taking care of the customer’s needs by providing and delivering professional, helpful, high quality service and assistance before, during, and after the customer’s requirements are met.
Customers are the core for any Organization. Understanding the significance of good customer service is essential for a healthy business in creating new customers and retaining the old ones.
Good customer service involves promising bonds with customers, ultimately leading to long term relationships. It creates advantages for both customer and the business alike. The Customer get benefits because the business is providing a service that meets their needs and the business gets benefits because satisfied customers are likely to be repeat customers.
Tourism, on the other hand, “is the temporary, short-term movement of people to destinations outside the places where they normally live and work and their activities during the stay at each destination. It includes movements for all purposes.
“Tourism has become an important, even vital, source of income for many regions and even entire countries. The Manila Declaration on World Tourism of 1980 recognized its importance as “an activity essential to the life of nations because of its direct effects on the social, cultural, educational, and economic sectors of national societies and on their international relations.”
Tourism brings large amounts of income into a local economy in the form of payment for goods needed by tourists, accounting as of 2011 for 30% of the world’s trade in services, and for six per cent of overall exports of goods and services. It also generates opportunities for employment in the service sector of the economy associated with tourism.
The hospitality industries which benefit from tourism include transportation service (such as airlines, cruise ships, trains and taxicab; hospitality services (such as accommodation, including hotels and resorts); and entertainment venues (such as amusement parks, restaurants, casinos, shopping malls, music venues and theaters). This is in addition to goods bought by tourists, including souvenirs.
So the forgoing shows how hospitality, good customer service and tourism are inextricably linked to each other.
Kudos to the government of Guyana and the Chambers of commerce around the country for their continuous contribution but in my option, in order for tourism to be successful and sustainable, apart from the other necessary variables, such as infrastructure and policies: hospitality and good customer service must become a way of life.
Hence, the need for more frequent public forum and workshops. In addition, I would support hospitality, customer service and tourism being taught extensively in schools as a single subject.
Let us make Hospitality & Good Customer Service “A big deal.”
Michael Hercules
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