ROSEAU – The Dominica Hotel and Tourism Association (DHTA) says it is developing a strategic development plan to assist the sector to become more innovative in the wake of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
Newly elected DHTA president, Gans Schielder said Dominica must be able to compete with the rest of the world in attracting visitors.
He said the new executive would need to establish the strategic plan “because we really want to be helping our membership to be innovative in the redevelopment of tourism.
That will be necessary because everybody in the world is now competing for the international visitor and we will have to be creative in our offer, new in our offer and our members will have to have the tools to help each other.”
He said that the DHTA had prepared earlier this year a digital guidebook, titled “Experience Dominica” an application that could be loaded on mobile phones and promoted to all visitors.
“We originally wanted to launch it in April, but we will now be launching it in September. So that is a creative innovative new tool,” he said that would include all available tourism destination, event and facility island wide.
Schielder said a business exchange platform will also be created for DHTA members, adding “we will stimulate that our members offer business services to each other at special rates” that would involve taxi-drivers, hoteliers and tour operators among other stakeholders.
“So when guests want to stay in another part of the island we can offer that and we will include international suppliers who sell us furniture, beddings, as well as suppliers of safety systems”.
He said all these suppliers are willing to make special deals for DHTA members “and work in this closed application because it will not be open for third parties…” (CMC)
