OAS DEPLOYS VOLUNTEERS TO HELP CARIBBEAN HOTELS

Six Caribbean countries are the latest beneficiaries of the Caribbean Tourism Competitiveness and Sustainability (CTCS) project, coordinated by the Organization of American States (OAS) Inter-Sectoral Unit for Tourism to provide assistance to small hotels.

A group of 12 Netcorps Americas volunteers were recently deployed to assist small hotels in The Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Jamaica, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Trinidad and Tobago. These volunteers will conduct training in areas ranging from word processing, database management and spreadsheets, reservation and accounting systems, networking and the Internet and, more importantly, they will train property owners to design and develop web pages so they can better market their products.

The volunteers will also conduct group training--at technology walk-in centers the CTCS project has established in each country--for small hotel, tourism ministry and hotel and tourism association staff.

The Netcorps Americas volunteers were deployed following a four-day orientation at the OAS headquarters in Washington, during which they where they also visited the diplomatic missions of the countries in question. They will be in the field for a period of three to ten weeks

There are already 11 Netcorps Canada volunteers in the field in Belize, Trinidad and Tobago, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, Suriname, Guyana and Grenada, under the aegis of the CTCS program. Meanwhile, a pilot project is being set in motion in hotel operations and marketing training for small hoteliers, tapping into the expertise of volunteers from the Canadian Executive Service Overseas (CESO). One CESO volunteer is now in Trinidad and Tobago and another two are scheduled for Belize and St. Lucia later this summer. A full-fledged volunteer program will be developed after this pilot phase.

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