Building the Capacity of Tour Guides

Beginning on Thursday, a second cohort of tour guides will be engaged in a train the trainers’ course hosted by the Belize Tourism Board.  It is being held at the ITVET conference room in Belize City and is building the capacity of fifteen persons from across the country. The topics discussed are contained in the manual that was created by the B.T.B. on effective tour guide, history and culture of Belize, the world of Maya and field experience delivery.  Today, News Five spoke with Director of Quality Management, Capacity Development & Cruise, Abil Castaneda about the objective of the three-day training.

Abil Castaneda

Abil Castaneda, Dir., Quality Management, Capacity Development & Cruise, B.T.B.

“The Belize Tourism Board is hosting a three-day training for new trainers to be able to train our incoming tour guides. Every year we have a cadre of new tour guides that are trained across the country and so we want to be able to make the training much more accessible but to do that, you need trainers. And so over the next three days, starting yesterday, we started a cohort of about fifteen trainers who had already began their training before COVID, but now we are bringing them back to finish up their courses so that they can eventually become a certified trainer with the Belize Tourism Board and with that we would have a much expanded base that we could access for trainings across the country. Recently we began an update of our training manual; we are doing chapter by chapter. So we did one recently on the marine ecology with a regional partner that we have, but two or three weeks ago, we did a refresher course for our current trainers and that is something that we hope that if not every year, every other year, we can bring in our trainers back in to do a refresher course. But also what we did we brought in some experts in marine ecology, for instance to provide what’s happening right now in that particular sector. So we want to do the same thing for archaeology and for other areas that are focused in the training manual.”