CWC is going to test out hospitality industry
Editorial
Kaieteur News
November 26, 2006
Guyana will host the Super Eight matches in the Cricket World Cup 2007. Despite the criticisms levelled against the Local Organising Committee by the visiting International Cricket Council team, the organisers know that it is too late to shift the matches. What is not being said is that Guyana is ahead of many of the other stadiums in the region.
Our greatest problem is having the practice pitches ready, and our workmen are insisting that they will have everything in place by February. The problems with the pitch and outfield will be solved within weeks.
The major problems are far removed from the Providence Stadium. They have to do with the supporting logistics, and it is here that we should have had just about everything under control. Instead, we are at a point where we are likely to be embarrassed.
Guyana is not a tourist-oriented country, and as such, our hospitality industry is far from what it would be in the Caribbean , where tourism forms a major part of the economy. The staffs at the hotels are prepared to handle large numbers of people, prepare numerous meals at short notice, and have the various rooms cleaned and serviced in a jiffy. In Guyana , we surely never had such experience, not even when we hosted foreign dignitaries.
At any given time, we would not have been asked to accommodate more than a few hundred people; and for this reason, many service organisations, such as the Lions and Rotary, never held conventions here.
This time around, for starters, we are expected to host at least 250 officials from the ICC. Then we would have to host the cricketers — perhaps 60 of them — and the umpires, and the camera crews, and the foreign journalists, and things like that.
In addition, the word is that thousands of visitors are going to come for the matches, and many of them are going to need accommodation. As of Friday, there were 883 rooms available for bed and breakfast, many of them not too far from Providence Stadium. Then there are the established hotels and guest houses, with a combined total of about 1,000 rooms.
For now, many of these rooms are empty, because we do not have enough people around to make use of them all year round. As a consequence, these facilities operate with a minimum of staff, but all of that is going to change in a hurry. For the first time, our laundry facilities are going to be tested, our kitchens are going to be tested, and our waiter service is going to be tested.
One would have expected that we would have established a school to train hoteliers some time back, but this has not been done, and there seems to be no move to have such people trained.
Then there is the issue of eating habits. In this part of the world, we have our own way of preparing meals; and we in Guyana have grown accustomed to preparing certain foods indigenous to us. The visitors are going to be coming with their own peculiar tastes, and this is going to pose problems for our chefs.
Our much-vaunted hotel is still under construction near Providence Stadium, so there is no special practice for the staff, which is still to be identified. We can only wonder at the confusion to prepare the morning meal of perhaps 300 boiled eggs, some hard-boiled, others soft; eggs sunny side up; toasts; tons of jams and marmalade; coffee; tea; juices; bacon; and the various things that comprise breakfast.
Simultaneous with that major preparation for the morning meal would be the midday meals, and these would be as varied as any group of people would be. The staff would be on their feet all day and late into the night. Are we, as a people, so disciplined?
There is talk about importing staff; and while this may be necessary, it speaks of the lack of our people to be able to deal with major undertakings.
Certainly, there will be no shortage of jobs in the hospitality industry when Cricket World Cup comes around. Cleaners, washers and the like would be in demand, and whether we rise to the occasion is left to be seen.
One view is that Guyanese, somehow, always manage to surprise people, and this, the third major sporting event in the world, could be the occasion that would allow us to continue to surprise even the most pessimistic among us at this time.