About 100 front desk workers of hotels and hospitality institutions are undergoing training in the French language in Accra as part of efforts to enhance hospitality service delivery in the country. The three-month training programme is aimed at enabling the workers provide the needed service to French-speaking tourists.
Organised by the Ghana Tourism Authority (GTA), the training forms part of the Ghana CARES Obatanpa Programme, an initiative which seeks to revive the hospitality and tourism industry following challenges occasioned by the outbreak of COVID-19.
At the opening ceremony, Deputy Chief Executive Officer in-charge of General Service, GTA, Ben Anane Nsiah, said the training was aimed at equipping more than 500 hospitality and tourism frontline personnel across the country.
He explained that, it is part of strategies critical to the development of the tourism industry in the country.
On the rationale for the training, he said, it would enable French speaking tourists to feel comfortable and enjoy their experience and easily express themselves with hotel staff without any barrier.
“West Africa is predominantly French speaking countries, when you take out Cape Verde and Guinea Bissau, among the 13 countries in West Africa, only five are English speaking countries.
The rest are French speaking, so those who are in the front line businesses like tourism, hotels, restaurants and others, it is important to make these French tourists feel welcome in our country,” Mr Nsiah stated.
He called on hospitality and tourism industry players to develop bilingual signages in hotels, restaurants and tourist centres to enable French-speaking visitors to understand the services which was provided.
The training, and other initiatives by the GTA was to help in realising its goals of promoting tourism for enhanced revenue generation for the country.
The Coordinator of Ghana CARES Obaatanpa Programme, Richard Agyenim Boateng, said the training was to build the capacity of frontline workers in the tourism sector to enable them provide tourists with quality customer service.
“We have already done some training in areas such as, customer service, digital marketing and tourism products knowledge to build the capabilities of tourism workers to improve service quality in the sector,” he said.
In order to ensure that hotel service was customer-friendly for French-speaking visitors, he said, the GTA would undertake regular monitoring to ensure all the up-market hotels and hospitality centres adhere to the regulations put in place to make tourists comfortable.
One of the training instructors, Alain Ferolle Mboungou, said they would be taking the participants through the basic French language and hospitality skills in the language.
A participant, Sandra Amoah, a frontline worker at the Coconut Groove Regency Hotel, expressed gratitude to the GTA for the training saying that “it would help the workers interact easily with their French customers.
BY CLAUDE NYARKO ADAMS
