By Analyst
When the Tourism Ministry and the Guyana Tourism Authority sit down to assess the outcomes of the August 8-10 Guyana Festival they will be able to make a sound judgment only if those outcomes are measured against the aspirations which had been articulated in the first place.
The event had been marketed as one of “a number of policy and programme initiatives to advance Guyana’s visibility worldwide and to bring optimum awareness of our diverse cultural heritage.” For that to have happened the organizers would have been required not only to secure a sizeable budget but to recruit key regional and international media entities to ‘spread the word’ about the country’s tourism product.
In the end it appeared that there was more than a hint of exalted ambition in the Tourism Authority’s stated anticipation of an “overwhelming response from exhibitor and visitor participation locally, regionally and internationally. That, had it been accomplished, would have been little short of a miracle.
News of plans to execute the Guyana Festival earlier this year coincided with publicly expressed views by the Tourism and Hospitality Association of Guyana (THAG) about the absence of official preparedness to spend far more generous sums on the marketing of the country’s tourism product abroad. What THAG omitted to mention was the paucity of local
