Mexicans to Train Belizeans in Hospitality Services

Today, the Mexican Embassy in Belize signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Belize Tourism Industry Association to cooperate on training local hospitality workers to offer better services in the tourism industry. The programme will see all levels of service providers from the B.T.I.A. membership and wider public get opportunities to learn from our Mexican counterparts. It is all in an effort to step up the quality of service and improve the tourism experience in Belize. We stopped in at today’s signing. Here’s more from the event.

Carlos Quesnel Melendez

Carlos Quesnel Melendez, Mexican Ambassador to Belize

“We have found out that we agree that tourism is a very relevant driver of economic development, and in this way we have agreed that there is no better way to work out this issue for the benefit of both countries joining forces together. We recognize the BTIA as the main association of tourism in this country, so we are very happy and honored that today to proceed with the signing of this MOU.”

John Burgos

John Burgos, Executive Director, B.T.I.A.

“The MOU is gonna be focusing on four areas. One of them is going to be to bring professionals in different areas, particularly in customer service front line staff training, wait staff training, bartending training and also cooking staff training. It is gonna work in two ways. We will bring professionals in different expertise and they are going to do visitations country-wide. And we are gonna look to have two exchange programs. One of the them providing opportunities for students doing tourism studies at junior college and university level that are able during the Christmas, Summer or Easter time whatever time they have available – they can go and partner at a specific hotel or restaurant based on what specific focus they wanna pursue in the tourism industry. Also, we are looking to have a train the trainers programme. We want to look at people who have been working in the tourism industry for a number of years and they have a certain level of expertise and knowledge and so what we wanna do is to provide them with the opportunity to get proper certification that is gonna legitimize and accredit the skills they possess. And so they will be able to acquire the skills training to deliver and provide training when they return to Belize and so that is the focus of the MOU.”