Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry Man of the Year awardee Robert Lim Joseph will invest half a million pesos to develop a a Tourism Digital Video Disk for tour guides.
Joseph discussed his plans during an interview last week.
He said this would help improve the quality of city tours in Cebu.
“Our target is to have six million tourists in Cebu in two years time. That should include three million domestic and three million foreign tourists. This (Tourism DVD) can be another first for Cebu. If it succeeds, it can be duplicated in other areas in the country,” said Joseph, who is chairman emeritus of the National Association of Independent Travel Agencies (Naitas) in the Philippines.
The DVD will contain a programmed audiovisual presentation that tour guides can control through settings options for different languages depending on the nationality of the guests.
“The DVD will start with city tour destinations and landmarks. For example, if the tourists are Koreans then the tour guide will set the language to Korean and every time they are in a landmark, the tour guide will simply click on the specific landmark from the menu and information about the place will appear in the Korean language,” said Joseph.
The DVD will also include an opening presentation about the Philippines then focus on Cebu and its specific attractions.
For a start, that the project would need an investment of P10 million to P15 million, h said.
He said he would start investing P500,000 to get the project started and that he was willing to collaborate with interested parties in the public and private sectors.
“We have to again collaborate. This can be an LGU-academe-industry collaboration. The LGU and industry players can help with the investment, academe can help educate and train tour guides,” said Joseph.
In last week’s Cebu Business Month Tourism Congress event, Joseph and Islands Group president Jay Aldeguer were given the “Man of the Year” award for their continuous support to the tourism industry.
Joseph said that he would continue to support Cebu because he believes that Cebu has what it takes to be a world-class destination.
“Cebu is very unique. We have a lot to offer. We can also push more in promoting MICE or the meetings, incentives, conventions and expositions that will help us bring the number of domestic tourists higher,” said Joseph.
Based on figures from the Department of Tourism, as of March this year the total number of tourists that arrived in Cebu reached 539,826 which is 10 percent higher than year-ago figures.
Korea remains the top tourism market for Cebu with 100,721 tourists, followed by Japan with 48,259 tourists and the US with 25,820 tourists for the first quarter this year.