In its endeavor to make Destination North West a preferred destination, the North West Department of Tourism has declared tourism service excellence as one of its major priorities. This is in line with ensuring high standards and quality within the sector in the province.
The department recently convened a workshop with products owners in the Bojanala West region to robustly engage on issues such as quality assurance, service excellence and grading of various tourism and hospitality establishments.
Chief Director for Tourism Growth, Development and Transformation, Sarah Manone said that the workshop was really to make tourism product owners aware of avenues they could explore in enhancing the quality of their service and products. “These workshops are really meant at building partnerships with product owners in dealing with issues of service excellence and quality assurance.
We as the department can preach all we want but the service is at these establishments and we need their informed buy-in so that we can improve the manner in which we conduct tourism business in this province. We need to work hand in glove with our product owners and ensure that they can implement the standards which we as a department want to implement”, she said.
Manone also added that her department will support the sector in any way and will be working with all relevant stakeholders to ensure that service excellence is a reality in the province. “We are creating conducive conditions for a sustainable tourism growth in the province through managing the tourism growth, development and transformation within the sector.
Tourism plays an integral pillar of the province’s economic growth and sustainability. We need a stable and sustainable business and that could be achieved if our product owners and service providers adhere and maintain certain industry standards”, she added.
Deputy Director for Service Excellence at the National Department of Tourism, Paballo Molele said that Service Excellence is an integrated approach to improve service levels by developing a service excellence-orientated culture focusing on business operations and processes through the application of service excellence strategy and standard.
She said that there was a need for product owners to develop their own mechanisms of getting feedback from their clients. “South Africans are not keen to complain about poor service therefore the service providers often do not know that their services are not up to the expected standards hence product owners need to develop systems which will encourage clients to give feedback in order to improve the current customer service levels for the better.
This is will also assist in maintaining the desired level of quality in a service or product, especially by means of attention to every stage of the process of delivery or production”, said Molele.
Meanwhile, the department will further visit all other districts in the province to conduct workshops of such nature in ensuring that thus critical factoris highly prioritized and taken serious. All non-graded tourism products in this province are further urged to register for grading assessment in order to be exposed to the basket of benefits available to them through Tourism Grading Council of South Africa (TGCSA)
For enquiries:
Dineo Lolokwane
Cell: 072 542 8444
Tel: 018 388 2081
E-mail: dlolokwane@nwpg.gov.za
