City tour guide training kicked off in Pokhara

Recentfusion.com—Pokhara: A 10-day long city tour guide training kicked off in Pokhara on Wednesday.

All total 41 persons are participating in Pokhara Tourism Council (PTC) organized training which is being promoted by Nepal Tourism Board and the Nepal Academy of Tourism and Hotel Management (NATHM) has supported technically.

NATHM research and travel department chief Krishna Kharel informed that the participants would learn about various culture and histories of the touristic destinations in and around Pokhara as well as the geography, in the training. He also added that the tour guides are unpaid ambassadors of the nations since they have very sensitive responsibility when sightseeing with guests.

The entrepreneurs from Pokhara have claimed that the town is the tourism capital of Nepal but they also ironically accept that there are no registered city tour guides in Pokhara at present. PTC has no data that how many registered tour guides there in Pokhara are.

Pokhara has been relying on taxi drivers and unskilled man powers when tourists need to visit various destinations in Pokhara, for years. Similarly, there is another problem that the town hardly could available the appropriate guides to the tourists who don’t understand the English language.

So, according to PTC chairman Som Thapa, his organization has launched that training to fulfill the demand of city tour guide in Pokhara. He also hoped that the training would be helpful to ease the scarcity of skilled tour guides in Pokhara.

According to NTB former executive member and PTC former chairman Tika Ram Sapkota, PTC had launched city tour guide training in 1998 during Visit Nepal Year, for the first time. Similarly, there was organized another such training in 2003 for second time. But most of the trained guides were either drained out of the nation or left their job.

PTC advisor Dambar Bahadur KC hoped that the training would help to fulfill the shortage of skilled human resource in the field of tourist guiding. He also suggested the participants to improve their English speaking.

NTB Pokhara in-charge Uday Bhattarai said that the tour-guides are not only communicator but also are the crisis managers when guiding the tourists. He also claimed that the tourism sector has very high potentiality to uplift the economy of Nepal. PTC vice chairman Chiranjibi Pokhrel and general secretary Ramu Gautam also expressed their views during the commencement of training supported by ILO and ILO Japan.