I refer to the report “Contribute by promoting state’s uniqueness: Lee” (New Sarawak Tribune, Dec 16).
Speaking during the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture Excellence Award and Appreciation Night at a leading hotel in Kuching last Friday, Assistant Minister Datuk Lee Kim Shin pointed out that every member of the public has a role to play in tourism.
He said world-class service could be delivered from strong support, dedication and perseverance from staff in every tourism sector, and this would help the state to achieve economic success.
As 2019 has been designated Visit Sarawak Year, it would be wise to take a leaf from the sterling success achieved by British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province. Its city, Vancouver, hosted the World Expo in 1986.
The exposition’s target was to receive 13.7 million visitors but attracted 22 million, with a single-day record of 341,806 visitors, which was almost 80 percent of Vancouver’s population at the time.
Part of the success was due to a programme specially developed to train the locals to become great hosts to visitors. American Express was so impressed that it bought the training programme and distributed it worldwide.
In Malaysia, American Express partnered with the then Ministry of Culture, Arts and Tourism (Mocat) and rolled out a training programme called Malaysia Host for tourism front liners in the late 1990s. Similar programmes were conducted in other countries, and they were known as Singapore Hosts, Australia Hosts and so on.
Later, Mocat localised the contents and renamed it Mesra Malaysia. The one-day training programme was expanded to two days in conjunction with Visit Malaysia Year 2007, and eventually 100,000 tourism front liners from both public and private sectors were trained.
Mesra Malaysia was replaced by We Are The Host in conjunction with Visit Malaysia Year 2014. While the former was a training programme, the latter was a briefing seminar, packed with 176 slides.
Benefitting from my experience as a trainer for Malaysia Host, Mesra Malaysia, We Are The Host and other programmes by the Ministry of Tourism and Culture such as the Travel and Tour Enhancement Course, I had developed a full day training programme on courtesy.
There are many customer service programmes available in the market, but most trainers do not focus on training of communication skills and courtesy. The former is crucial when interacting with others, as visitors are highly sensitive, and there is no customer service without the latter.
Therefore, to make visitors feel comfortable in a destination, the locals, particularly tourism front liners from both public and private sectors, must be trained on communication skills and courtesy at both organisational and personal levels.
Malaysians are naturally friendly, but many can be rude without knowing it. Even the knowledgeable need to learn cross-cultural communication.
Those who cannot speak confidently in English tend to keep quiet and hide their feelings but would appear indifferent to visitors needing assistance. While it is good for both visitors and hosts to speak the same language, it is not crucial.
More important are the visible body language and the friendly sounds we can make, and for these we can learn from the Japanese who are exemplary for being courteous.
Listening to a long list of dos and don’ts in a briefing seminar is good for knowledge, but practice require skills, which could only be acquired through training.
Effective training could change the lives of some participants forever. For example, those who have truly learned self-respect would no longer allow others to make them angry.
YS Chan,
Kuala Lumpur
