SAN JUAN, Abra April 19 – The Turismo Party-list group is pushing for the aggressive conduct of tour guide trainings among the youth and other interested members of the vulnerable and marginalized sectors in various destinations around the country to help in equipping them with additional skills they could use to earn income.
Former Mayor Marco Bautista, who is the Turismo Party-list group’s second nominee, pointed out that people, especially the youth, in tourist destinations around the country should be provided with the necessary skills which they could use to earn income for their families with the ongoing gradual and safe revival of the local economy, particularly the heavily-impacted tourism industry.
He urged the youth to take advantage of the opportunities being provided by government agencies and local governments for additional skills and knowledge they can use as the tourism sector is being revived as part of local economic recovery efforts.
The party-list group’s second nominee claimed that one of the ongoing initiatives of the organization is to tap the services of relevant government agencies and the private sector to train the youth in various tourist destinations on tour guiding and other related skills which they could use to start earning income after being displaced from the work for a long periods of time due to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.
He believes the tenacity and resilience of the youth will definitely allow them to hurdle the current challenges of the ongoing pandemic, especially with the threat of variant, for them to start earning and recover and bounce back from the heavy impact inflicted by the health crisis on the tourism industry.
He admitted that the tourism sector and other tourism-related businesses were the last to open with the staggered easing up of the community quarantine restrictions but it seems it will be the first to bounce back from the pandemic primarily because of the significant increase in the mobility of foreign and domestic tourists wanting to visit tourist destinations.
Bautista is keeping his fingers crossed that new variants of the deadly virus which were discovered in other countries will enter the country so that the road to recovery will be smoothly undertaken because another surge in cases in the next several months will not do good for both the global and the country’s economy.
The Turismo Party-list group is listed as No. 156 in the order of party-list organizations that had been permitted by the Commission on Election (Comelec) to run for the available seats in the House of Representatives in the upcoming May 9, 2022 synchronized national and local elections pursuant to the Party-list System Act. The said group seeks to advance the interest of all indigenous peoples in the country to help them have a clear voice in the crafting of government policies, programs and advocacies.
