Upskilled tourism workforce vital in delivering quality visitor experience

AMMAN — With tourism booming in the Kingdom, there is a crucial need to ensure investment in the training of tourism workers, according to stakeholders.

“The surge in tourism requires legions of qualified, trained and competent tourism workers, so we would provide the best visitor experience in Jordan,” Vice Chairman of the Jordan Inbound Tour Operators Association Awni Kawar told The Jordan Times on Thursday.

The local tourism sector is facing shortages of trained workers such as tour guides, hotel personnel, and even tourism professionals who speak languages of tourists visiting from new markets, therefore providing intensive training is crucial, to level up their skills and achieve customer satisfaction, he said.

“Now Jordan’s focus is not only on customer service but also on customer experience,” he said. 

Kawar also mentioned that a number of tourism-related businesses are experiencing resource shortages due to the “unexpected” uptick in the number of tourists. A common shortage is a lack of sufficient numbers of tour buses, prompting Jordan to rent 200 buses from Egypt, he noted.

During the January-March period of 2023, the number of overnight tourists reached 1.204 million, marking an increase of 80.9 per cent when compared with the corresponding period of 2022, according to data by the Central Bank of Jordan.

After the pandemic many workers have left the tourism industry or decided to look for employment in other countries where they eventually remained. “But now inbound tourism has increased by at least 30 per cent when compared with the same period of 2022,” Kawar added.

Consistent with the view expressed by Kawar, Musa Mansour, a hospitality specialist who is also an investor in the local tourism sector, said: “Now more than ever it is of utmost importance to provide skills training and courses for tourism employees and professionals here in Jordan, in order to have an upgraded level of services year by year.”

This is an opportunity to invest in tourism workforce development, so that there will not be shortages of any kind during the upcoming tourist season that starts in September, Mansour told The Jordan Times.