Asian Tourists; do we accommodate them?

[Nyi Nyi ®]

It has been a year now that I was thinking to myself, never expressed it. (according to official news releases) Myanmar tourism trend shows quite positive in terms of arrival figures. But when you look at closely at details, you will see majority of them are "Asians." One and the only Tour guide training school in Myanmar has a standard questionnaires and test to allow as per seating capacity of training school. This has been very helpful generally. However if you see the increasing number of Asian tourists, we should now consider to accommodate the market; "Korean, Chinese, Thai, Japanese tour guides." The current interview plan has been a barrier for candidates who have different language proficiency other than English. So now, it's about time that we need to have a look into the need. If you have different points to help improve this situation, I agree to disagree.
Yours, FNN

YANGON, April 28 (Xinhua) -- Myanmar's second largest city of Mandalay in the north received more than 400,000 foreign tourists in 2014, revealed the Ministry of Hotels and Tourism on Tuesday, predicting a rise to more than 500,000 in 2015.

Most of the tourists came from East Asian countries of China, Japan and South Korea, travel agencies said.

Read full story on shanghaidaily

[Shwemya Aung]

Now is for me the first time to write herein. That the idea that the guide candidate must be at least in good command of English, no matter which language he/she shall speak in communication with the tourist/s has long been old-fashioned and should be wiped out after the old tradition had shown miscarriages for successive years.Right.It has been several years that the asian tourists(mostly of whom  need their respective language speaking tour guides) have arrived.Now is the time to adjust to the demand of non- English speaking tour guide shortage.The ministry should not remain on red-cord as ever.Everthing is changing.The mindset of the ministry is also to be changed.

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[Rain Man]

This is where the question of , how proactive the ministry/ authority concerned is, comes to play. As far as I am concerned I am not at all impressed with what they have been doing in terms of leadership whatsoever. There is a lot they could learn from their counterparts in other countries. STB could be a good example. But I wonder how deep or high their learning curve or motivations are! There have been talks about 2016 to be designated as another Visit Myanmar Year and I wonder again what their objectives are. I remember that in the run up to the first Visit Myanmar Year in 1996 there were a lot of meetings at ministerial levels as covered in the state-owned news papers the notorious General Khin Nyunt often leading such meetings. What happened in reality was many local rich people built 'family-owned hotels' with no idea of what hotel management is, their target market etc; many pagodas that never charged entrance fees before began imposing fees and finally the inauguration ceremony was held at Aung San Stadium launching thousands of balloons into the air. But it turned out to be a shameful failure. As I myself was greatly interested in it I was also reading about other countries which had done the same. They worked 'together' industrywise - bringing down fees and rates to attract more visitors than ever to their countries in that designated year as a Promotional Campaign to promote customer awareness. But in our 'unique country' everybody was doing otherwise. Well, maybe that is why Kipling said "this is Burma and this will be quite unlike any other land you know about". Unfortunately this is still true and it will always be as long as those dim-witted guys governs everything. Damn it. TAM 

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[thaungthwee]

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