ST. JOHN'S Antigua, October 16th, 2013 -- From all reports the recently concluded OAS sponsored Tourism Safety and Security Workshop held from October 7th thru 11th at The Jolly Beach Resort has met and surpassed its targeted objectives.
This is the word from organizers and participants alike who engaged in a grueling 5 days of sessions centered on the fundamentals of risk assessments, security audits, communication techniques, and emergency crisis management.
At the end of the exercise last Friday, Program Manager of the Inter-American Committee against Terrorism with-in the OAS (CIC-TE), Shevaun Culmer said that, “the five days training was packed with information and there was a lot of corporation and collaboration between all of the agencies during the practical exercises that we had… I am pretty confident that at the end of the training they are all walking away with a tool box of techniques, ideas, and preventative measures that can be implemented in the event of any risk to the Tourism sector”.
The course was facilitated by Mr. John Pears and his team from Atlantic Group Associates (AGA), a small consultancy firm based outside of Miami, Florida, who provide services specifically related to the transportation and tourism security industries.
“Overall we’ve had a great week! We started off with some standards of security and leadership training and then developed into the risk assessment committee work…learning about how to do risk assessment work and actually carrying them out”, stated Mr. Pears.
The team had an opportunity to visit a number of properties on island to carry-out practical audits and this Mr. Pears said was another major highlight of the week. “We learnt a lot and there was a lot of variety amongst the properties with regards to how they apply security and we’ve been able to give some feedback. Where it has been requested we will be going back to some of the hotels to see where we can assist,” he added.
The practical audit exercise in Antigua was the first such activity held as a part of the regional initiative embarked upon by the OAS and it is something that facilitators say will be added as a permanent feature of such training activities because of the success encountered here in Antigua.
All of the agencies (over 60 participants each day) that participated in phase 1 of the regional exercise were present for the second phase and the Royal Force of Antigua and Barbuda was duly represented. Assistant Deputy Commissioner of Police, Henry Christian participated in the program and gave high marks to the facilitators for the precise and timely information that was relayed.
“The week was well spent and a lot of information was shared. We can definitely build upon the information that we’ve received and that information can be taken back to our respective agencies and shared with our internal colleagues,” Commissioner Christian said.
He continued that, “over the past weeks we have been discussing plans with the Ministry of Tourism to set up a Tourism Security Unit within the country, the role of which would be to patrol our beaches and places of interest amongst other things… I happy that we had an opportunity to hear from our colleague from the Bahamas Superintendent Leamond Deleveaux, who have such an exemplary model implemented there that we can adopt best practices ideas from them.”
As a result of the workshop Antigua and Barbuda is already steps closer towards the formulation of the National Risk Assessment Committee. A risk register for Antigua’s tourism sector has been compiled with scores for the risks to the sector as well as the action items to mitigate such risks.
Director of Policy and Planning within the Ministry of Tourism, Mr. Cortwright Marshall says that he is already looking forward to the third phase of the project which is the actual formation of the committee which will take place within the next few weeks after the OAS would have completed their follow-up survey exercise.
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