Business

Symposium to re-visit regional tourism guidelines

November 29, 2021 12:20 pm

The South Pacific Tourism Organization will spearhead the inaugural Pacific Islands Tourism Research symposium over the next two days.

SPTO Chief Executive, Christopher Cocker, says the sessions will provide a platform for tourism stakeholders including Fiji to discuss the state of play, challenges and opportunities.

Cocker says it’s about time to re-look at tourism policies especially with the risk of a new variant expanding its reach to the region.

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He says the sessions also aim to highlight the importance of statistics to navigate the journey of Pacific Tourism, especially post COVID period.

He adds the symposium will ensure the tourism sector has a sound understanding of available information for policy development, business and destination recovery planning and to provide direction to research institutions.

“A framework moving forward, and we need some sort of improvement in our Pacific Tourism Strategy. We have one, but needs collaboration and where their gaps that we can fill in and making it more realistic in terms of implementing.”

Cocker confirmed that visitor arrivals dropped significantly to 391, 313 in 2020, which led to visitor spending falling to about $1.4 billion.

The two-day symposium will be conducted virtually and is being attended by over 150 personnel from various regional tourism sectors.