Travel

Thirty four tourist hotel projects in pipeline

Ramani KANGARAARACHCHI

Sri Lanka is planning to show strong growth in tourism with the governments ambitious target of 2.5 million tourists arrivals by 2016, and it has already shown a considerable growth by now as a result of many entrepreneurs entering the industry at present. According to reports, there are some 34 new tourist hotel projects in the pipeline amounting to an additional 4,000 more rooms, while another 1,200 are now under construction.

Dilip de Silva

All these construction work can be done very fast but whether the country will have the people with required skills to serve those expected 2.5 million tourists is a question and fast tracking of skill training will be a must.

The tourism sector leader in Sri Lanka Aitken Spence Hotels Group recently demonstrated their foresight into developing their frontline executives for future top jobs by conducting a leadership retreat held at the award winning sea side five star hotel, Heritance Ahungalla.

Thirty eight executives from eight Aitken Spence Hotels participated at the two day training programme.

An ILO expert Dilip de Silva and former hotel school food and beverage lecturer facilitated the workshop under the guidance of General Manager Human Resources Amal Nanayakkara and his team of senior trainers.

Speaking to Daily News Business Amal Nanayakkara said tourism industry has much opportunities and improving skills is vital and the country needs to focus on several areas to develop hotel industry in order to compete with countries like Thailand and India.

Judging a project presented by participants by General Manager-HR Amal Nanayakkara and team

He said only 30 percent of employees in the hotel trade belonging to large chains have been trained and other 70 percent are working with on the job training.

If the industry booms there will be a huge shortage of trained people to meet future demand because peoples expectations have to be delivered consistently.

Training of trainers is also important and this is a time that Sri Lankans who went abroad in this field who has gained much experience over the years can come back and support the country .

However, the Aitken Spence Group is geared to do this with continuous training programmes. There is a trainer in each department who coordinates activities and have training every month.

The programme conducted by Dilip de Silva was a very comprehensive one which he handled extremely well.

The feed back of the participants was also very positive and those who participated in this programme will make presentations to their juniors as a continuous process under the supervision of the training team. There will be a follow up workshop by him in early October Nanayakkara said. The facilitator de Silva said that young executives lacks visionary and inspirational traits of leaders and need to be coached and mentored to become future leaders. The participants at this programme were very enthusiastic and have a good future. Given the competitive nature of today's tourism industry, quality training and professionalism of staff will have a major impact on the competitiveness of the destination, he said.

Participants of the training programme with facilitators