Tourism ministry launches online programme to create pool of professional tourist facilitators

The Ministry of Tourism is conducting (offline) 6 week language courses to train Linguistic Tourist Facilitators (LTF) for tourism service providers under its suo-motu-initiatives under the scheme of 'Capacity Building for Service Providers' (CBSP).

The Ministry of Tourism has launched an online certificate programme with the objective of creating a pool of well-trained and professional tourist facilitators across the country, Rajya Sabha was informed on Tuesday.

The Indian Institute of Tourism and Travel Management (IITTM), which is an autonomous institute of the ministry, is the implementing agency for the programme called Incredible India Tourist Facilitator/ Incredible India Tourist Guide (IITF/IITG), which is a digital initiative, Tourism minister G. Kishan Reddy said in a written reply in Rajya Sabha.

“The programme was operationalised on January 1, 2020. The system will provide basic, advanced (IITF-Heritage and Adventure), spoken language and refresher courses for candidates. Inputs are being received by IITTM from the leading universities for developing the course content. The candidates can pursue these online courses from anywhere and at any time and at their own pace,” he said.

The online courses can be accessed from different digital devices. On successful completion of the course, an individual will be a professionally certified tourist facilitator who will support tourists by disseminating information, eliciting interest in them about the country and providing experiential tourism, he added.

Further, the Ministry of Tourism is conducting (offline) six week language courses i.e. Dutch, German, French, Japanese, Chinese to train Linguistic Tourist Facilitators (LTF) for tourism service providers under its suo-motu-initiatives under the scheme of ‘Capacity Building for Service Providers’ (CBSP), the minister said.

The basic objective of these Linguistic Tourist Facilitators is to create trained manpower in different foreign languages to facilitate the tourist visiting India from different countries and to upgrade the skill of the existing service providers to deal effectively with foreign tourists in their own languages.

The Ministry of Tourism has issued indicative guidelines for the state government and the union territory administration to issue guide licenses at the local level, he added.

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