Tourism master plan opens to int’l bidders this year

The elaboration of a general plan of the city’s tourism industry development is open to bidders across the globe, the Macau Government Tourist Office (MGTO) revealed yesterday.
According to Helena de Senna Fernandes, MGTO director, the master plan will be open for bidding in the second half of the year. The bidding document is currently being drafted.
Ms Senna Fernandes estimated that the research would take more than a year and the final report is expected to come out in 2016.
Announced last year, the master plan aims to assist the city in becoming “accessible to the world” as well as diversifying its tourism products.
Besides staff from MGTO, Fernandes said they also hope to include a consultant team formed by industry veterans and members of the Tourism Development Committee.
Two of MGTO’s major concerns for candidates are the level of experience and knowledge of Macau. Two academic institutes have been invited to research similar development plans of other countries and regions, with a hope that the comparative report would work as a reference for the Macau version. Another report currently being conducted is about the history of Macau’s tourism industry, as a preliminary reference for the general plan.
The director stressed that optimized measures for the individual visit scheme on mainland tourists does not necessarily have to wait for the final research report. “It (the proposal) has urgent needs. (…) We will announce the decision when the study is completed.” Earlier, Macau officials went to Beijing and reported to the central government about the individual visit scheme.
In the Q&A session of a tourism forum press conference yesterday, the director stated that diversification doesn’t imply the sacrifice of one industry, namely the backbone industry of Macau, for the sake of other industries.
“When we are talking about diversification, it’s not that we are going to abandon one successful business model and go to a totally different business model. We realize however, that in order to keep a sustainable growth in terms of not just putting all our eggs in one basket, there is a necessity to also develop other industries so that there is a more balanced outcome of development.” She also believes that diversification could be applied to different aspects: “On one hand it’s to diversify the people who come to Macau, meaning our source market. On the other hand we also diversify what we offer to our customers.”
She noted the relevance of improvement on the software side of tourism industry – the service – is an “ongoing endeavor”. “We have realized that there are certain things we need to improve on, but there is a consecutive effort to do that,” she stated.