Faced with the crisis hitting the tourism sector, particularly following everything caused by the health crisis which has hampered all kinds of activities, various professionals in the sector will give birth, this Friday in Marrakech, to the National Coalition of Tourism Professions (CNPT). A constitutive assembly is planned, for this purpose, at the level of the Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Services of Marrakech-Safi. This entity includes all the key players in tourism, who consider themselves excluded from all state programs dedicated to the sector. These are those operating in tourist transport, hotels (3 and 4 stars), guest houses, restaurants, car rental agencies and travel agencies, guides, tourist taxis, horse-drawn carriage owners and artisans. “This initiative follows a reality: all these professions have no representative or entity to defend their rights and the health crisis, linked to Covid-19, has only exposed this bitter reality,” explains Najib Hankour, secretary general of the Democratic Organization of Tourist Transport in Morocco. And to clarify: “The Regional Tourism Councils have never included us in their programs and devote the majority of their actions to hotels classified 5 stars and above. However, tourism encompasses more than ten professions which remain on the fringes of any development strategy and support operations.”
For its constitution, the CNPT is counting on an initial membership of 54 members representing these professions and from throughout the national territory. “After creation, in Marrakech alone, more than 1,500 tourism professionals expressed their desire to join the Coalition,” reveals the representative of tourist transporters. The authors of this initiative subsequently aim to create provincial and regional branches of the CNPT, so that each of them is dedicated to the local authority to which it falls, in order to establish programs specific to the nature of tourism at the level of each region. “In this way, each branch will produce the statistics and needs specific to its region, on the basis of which the Coalition will be able to establish an action plan to intervene and plead its case with those responsible for the sector. It should be noted that to date, there are no statistics relating to each of these professions,” underlines Najib Hankour. For his part, Ahmed El Jabri, secretary general of the Independent National Union of Approved Tourist Guides of Morocco, indicates that the idea of creating the CNPT follows the absence of interlocutors regarding the problems from which all these professions suffer. “For several years, we have continually submitted demands to those responsible for the sector, but which have remained a dead letter. Likewise, as a result of the spread of the pandemic, several professions representing the tourism value chain have been hit hard. Hence the idea of creating a new entity capable of defending the interests of this entire community and which can address the government directly,” he explains. And to conclude: “It’s the only way to make our voice heard.”
source: lematin.ma
