Dear Editor,
In a recent letter to the press by the Public Relations Officer of the Mayor and Councillors of the City of Georgetown captioned ‘City, tourism authorities in discussions on enhancing Georgetown’ she fancifully announced that the Director General of the Ministry of Tourism and Director of the Guyana Tourism Authority had met with Georgetown City Councillors to discuss specific projects that would promote tourism in Georgetown.
Now it is just my hope that these two gentlemen are under no delusions that the administration of the Georgetown Municipality is ready to make our capital city into a tourism destination.
The youngest child knows that more than 80% of prospective tourism customers start their research on the internet. A well-designed and maintained city website is a very important tool for any city to attract these potential customers and generate high quality leads. However when one goes to http://www.mcc.gov.gy the official website of the City of Georgetown, what does one find? An obsolete, bald and useless webpage with nothing but a link to the notorious, deceased and irksome parking meter initiative. Is this what they consider promoting tourism?
A city with rampant crime, just look at what recently occurred on Lombard Street to a Director of a Cruise ship?, a city without public conveniences, one filled with garbage, without proper street lighting, one with dirty municipal markets, with a City Hall building on the verge of collapse, with overgrown vegetation on all of the parapets, clogged drains and street urchins and junkies badgering persons at every corner they turn could not be seriously considering tourism.
It is time that the Public Relations Officer of the Georgetown Municipality come out of La La Land and get real. It is time she stops pretending that everything is kosher in the city. It is time that she builds a proper dynamic website and promote the city through various social media platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat, QZone, Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter and Google+ etc.
They need to consider what makes our city unique and develop it, the Public Relations Division needs to do surveys of visitors to our city by conducting face-to-face interviews at the local shopping mall, in the downtown area etc., the need to create a tourism marketing plan, a unique slogan for the city, and an action plan or a to do list for the city. The PR Division needs to create promotional materials such as t-shirts, hats, stickers, and flags with the town slogan and branding.
The Mayor was correct, this and other useless divisions of the Council should be shut down in order to save the city some very much needed cash
Yours faithfully,
Anu Bihari
