Leyte chamber endorses tourism seminar for local executives, stakeholders

Tacloban City — Leyte Chamber of Commerce and Industry President Orland Uy strongly endorsed the holding of the “Local Governance Tourism Seminar Workshop” on July 26 -28, 2007 at Hotel Alejandro, Tacloban City.

Mr. Uy said that the training dubbed as “Local Governance Tourism Seminar: A Unified Approach to the Development and Management of Sustainable Community Based Tourism Projects,” was organized by LCCI Director and Business Advocacy Committee Chairman Gerry Palabyab, with the Leyte School of Professionals and Asian Institute of Tourism Dean, Maria Socorro Santiago to provide the training.

The objective of the seminar is to train local government executives, business leaders and other stakeholders in creating, developing and implementing a unified community tourism programs and projects.

“We first need to get an inventory of our tourism resources and some directions from our local government executives on where tourism in our region is headed. Then all of us should be in one page in order to develop a “Tourism Culture or Mindset” before our business community puts its resources in tourism projects”, said President Uy of LCCI.

LCCI is now campaigning for the “mandatory” attendance of the region’s local government executives (the governors, board members, mayors, councilors and barangay heads) because the three day seminar is a “how to” tourism related seminar workshop for local decision makers.

For its part, LCCI will take a look at the expected output of the seminar which includes applications to the Grassroots Entrepreneurs Eco-Tourism (GREET) funding of DOT.

LCCI also plans to screen and use the output of the seminar as inputs to its own private investment initiatives on tourism projects that will be launched in October, 2007 during the month-long observance of the “Leyte Business Month”. (PIA 8 )