Page 199 - Tourism The International Business

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• concessionaires to feed your visitors, adequate lodging facilities to house them
• the sanitation department to pick up litter and provide facilities for personal needs

• paramedics, doctors, nurses, and a treatment station to handle emergencies
• trained tourist information personnel to answer innumerable questions
• programs and souvenirs to be distributed and people to do it
The plans list seems endless.
While the above examples might seem exaggerated, the point is that things do happen during the tourist season

which can tarnish a community's image; which can result in inept handling of crowds, traffic, parking, and sickness;
which can turn a happy event into a disaster.
That is what visitor services programs are about: the preparation and implementation of a specific plan
to insure that visitors are well served by trained personnel when they visit your community. This
plan should not only be developed for special events, but also should cover the spectrum of services needed for
continuing tourism development.

Exhibit 73: Visitors require many services.
(Courtesy Hong Kong Tourist Association.)

The manner in which these services are performed affects visitor satisfactions, the image that the community
projects, and the very valuable word-of-mouth advertising that brings new tourists.

The visitor services program
The development of visitor services programs generally progresses through four stages:
Stage I—anticipating and planning service needs.
Stage II—determining how these needs will be coordinated.
Stage III—training visitor services personnel.
Stage IV—evaluation of training and services performed.
These stages will be discussed in the sections that follow.

Anticipating and planning service needs

Every community has tourists—a motorist who stops for gas, people visiting their relatives, or the vacationer
who spends his holidays at your lake resort. Some visitor services are already provided in your community. While

Tourism the International Business 199 A Global Text