Some 35 senior citizens from Tacloban City and nearby Palo town completed a community tour guide training program as part of the Department of Tourism\u2019s (DOT) goal to make tour guides inclusive of all sectors. <\/p>\n
The seven-day training included topics on first aid, Filipino Brand of Service Excellence, tour guiding, and a mock tour. <\/p>\n
Among the sites included in the mock tour are the Tacloban City Hall, Madonna of Japan Shrine, Magsaysay Boulevard, the old provincial capitol building, and McArthur Park in Palo town. <\/p>\n
In her message during the culmination on Thursday, DOT Eastern Visayas Regional Director Karina Rosa Tiopes encouraged the participants, whose ages range from 60-75, to \u201cgather more reliable information and stories about their locality and enhance their story-telling skills.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cTour guiding is storytelling. Tourism is all about stories. You may have a very beautiful natural site, but that is just a site if there is no story to tell. As guides, we have a great responsibility to be able to bring out the best of our place, the place we call home. You are the heart of the tour,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
The training also aimed to capacitate the seniors to provide excellent quality service of globally competitive standards to tourists.<\/p>\n
After their program completion, they could now apply for DOT accreditation to become full-fledged tour guides, Tiopes said.<\/p>\n
The training is in partnership with the local tourism offices of Tacloban and Palo, the municipality of Palo, and their senior citizen affairs offices. (PNA)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
35 locals in Tacloban City and Palo shine as they step into their roles as community tour guides.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":75,"featured_media":255991,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-255990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-travel"],"zyndk8_nxtgen_metadata":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diplomatic-fuchsia-armadillo.46-250-226-234.cpanel.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diplomatic-fuchsia-armadillo.46-250-226-234.cpanel.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diplomatic-fuchsia-armadillo.46-250-226-234.cpanel.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diplomatic-fuchsia-armadillo.46-250-226-234.cpanel.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/75"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diplomatic-fuchsia-armadillo.46-250-226-234.cpanel.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=255990"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/diplomatic-fuchsia-armadillo.46-250-226-234.cpanel.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255990\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diplomatic-fuchsia-armadillo.46-250-226-234.cpanel.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/255991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diplomatic-fuchsia-armadillo.46-250-226-234.cpanel.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=255990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diplomatic-fuchsia-armadillo.46-250-226-234.cpanel.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=255990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diplomatic-fuchsia-armadillo.46-250-226-234.cpanel.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=255990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}