Wednesday, August 01, 2007 Cebu tour guides seek training to cash in on influx of Koreans
CEBU tour guides are working on ways to tap the growing market of Korean visitors to Cebu.
This, after tourism frontliners like hotels, transportation operators and tour agencies received the Korean language studies training sponsored by the Department of Tourism (DOT) 7 and the Korean Agency for International Cooperation (Koica) last week.
“The one-week seminar focused on learning to speak the Korean language and an in-depth understanding of their culture,” Cebu Association of Tour Guides (CAT-G) president Steve Retuya.
Retuya said he is optimistic that with the training on Korean language and culture, more tour guides in Cebu can now start serving Korean tourists, whose number continues to grow each month.
Data from DOT 7 reported a 61.26-percent increase in Korean tourists from January to May this year to 98,822 from the 61,280 in the same period last year. This has made Koreans the top travel market for Cebu’s tourism sector.
Korean tourists made up 37.64 percent of total visitor arrivals in Cebu above Japanese (21.79 percent) and US tourists (11.15 percent) in the first five months of this year.
But despite the huge population of Korean nationals in Cebu, local tour guides have not been able to serve Korean tourists as they do not speak the Korean language.
Koreans hire Korean tour guides, said Retuya, adding that local tour guides are only able to serve the Japanese, Chinese and a few European tourists.
While CAT-G has Korean-speaking members, Korean travel agencies “do not utilize them,” he said.
This is the reason that despite the influx of Korean visitors in the province, few, if any, CAT-G members have tapped the market.
“With additional training, we hope to serve more Koreans by the end of the year,” Retuya told Sun.Star Cebu.
Apart from Korean language studies, Retuya said CAT-G will seek DOT’s support in requesting for Russian and Mandarin language seminars, given the increase in arrivals of Russians and Chinese.
In the first five months of 2007, the number of Chinese tourists grew more than 120 percent to 5,798 from 2,624 in the same period in 2006.
Tourism Undersecretary Phineas Alburo earlier said Russian travelers are now eyeing Cebu as a leisure and shopping destination as evidenced by their length of stay which is from seven to 14 days.
Retuya also said there is a need for Cebu tour guides to undergo basic tour guiding seminars to improve their capabilities in terms of tourist handling and knowledge of Cebuano culture, among others.
“We feel there is a need to upgrade the skills of our recent crop of tour guides,” he said, adding that tour guiding services are still in great demand by other Korean, Japanese, German, and Italian visitors. (MMM)
