Accra, July 24, GNA - Mr Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey, Minister of Tourism and Modernization of the Capital City, on Thursday urged operators in the tourism industry to upgrade their services to meet international standards.

He said stakeholders in the industry, particularly hoteliers, must work harder and improve on their services to bring it at par with those in developed countries in order to make Ghana a first choice tourism destination.

Mr Obetsebi-Lamptey said this in Accra when he met hotel and airline operators to discuss government's tourism strategy and implementation of a plan to boost the Sector's potential.

He said Ghana had an impressive tourism potentials because of its position as the most peaceful country in the West African Sub-Region and urged the hospitality industry as well as other service providers to exploit the situation to attract more tourists into the country. The Minister suggested that the focus should be on the standardization of training to attract more people.

He told the operators that tourism, which had become the fastest growing Sector of the economy, was a private sector activity and added that government was making the necessary inputs to ensure that Ghana offered the best in terms of the services provided.

Outlining government's tourism development strategy dubbed: "Tourism Five Year Action Plan 2003-2007", the Minister said the plan, which is geared towards raking in about 4.5 billion dollars by 2007, aims to put the necessary infrastructures in place to make Ghana a first choice tourism destination.

The Plan, he said, would also be aimed at developing the rural areas to create jobs to stem the rural-urban drift.

The Minister said the tourism plan would also aim to increase revenue generation for government and encourage good governance. He said the plan sought to promote conservation because Ghana had some of the finest beaches in the world as well as a lot of world heritage sites.

The Minister said the major targeted markets for the plan were the Ghanaians in the Diaspora, who number between two to four million. He said if 15 per cent of these people visited Ghana yearly, it would be a boost for tourism in the country.

Other markets on the plan include the African Diaspora, Southern Africa, the Arab world, Europe and Japan.

Mr Obetsebi-Lamptey said the plan would also focus on developing Ghana into a major conference site because a majority of the 482,643 visitors that came to Ghana last year were on business trips.

Currently tourism is the fourth largest foreign exchange generator for the country. Ghana realized 520 million dollars in 2002. The Sector also created about 115, 223 jobs especially for women. It also contributed 3.7 per cent to the country's GDP.

He said the objective of the plan was to target one million visitors by 2004 and to generate 4.5 billion dollars in receipts by 2007.

It also aims to increase the number of jobs in the hospitality industry to about 300,000 and to own the "slave trade", which most of those in the Diaspora identified with.

The Minister said, however, that the factors militating against the plan were the fact that Ghana was a high cost destination in terms of airfares, hotel charges and visa acquisition.

He advised hotel and airline operators to lower their rates to make Ghana attractive to tourists.

The Minister said the low awareness of Ghana's tourism potential internationally and the lack of marketing coupled with the weak human resource base was hampering the tourism drive in the country. Poor infrastructure and inadequate funding to market Ghana and improve the human resource capacity of the industry, he said were some of the problems the plan sought to address.

Mr Obetsebi-Lamptey said in view of these, government had decided on the development of a website as a basic marketing tool for Ghana's tourism potential.

He said the Ministry wanted to involve the hotel and airline operators in the implementation of the plan as well as build a public/private partnership to boost the industry's growth.

The Minister stressed the need for the standardization of syllabuses and curricular as well as a uniform certification for the hospitality training providers and institutions.

To this end, he said government would soon restructure and expand the operations of the Hotel, Catering and Tourism Training Centre (HOTCATT) to meet the industry's training needs. HOTCATT, he said, would run courses in all the regions and this would be done with the Highly Indebted Poor Countries Funds.