The outbreak of Coronavirus has been causing massive damage on the global economy. Ethiopia is not exceptional in this regard.
Travel restriction, covering face with masks, stay-at-home unless there is a mandatory order, recurrently washing hands with soap and water are stringently ordered so as to save human life that has potentially been claimed by the pandemic.
Hence, the tourism sector is one of the highly affected economic sectors in the country. The epidemic has highly affected sub sectors like hotels and restaurants, transport, food and beverage, entertainment, and other related sectors. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism formulated new and safe travel protocol aimed at getting the tourism sector revived and reopen tourist destination areas amid the COVID-19.
The protocols are designed aiming at ensuring workers safety, businesses and travelers interacting in the tourism value chain essentially eying at four pillars: Operational and Staff Preparedness, Ensuring a Safe Experience, Rebuilding Trust and Confidence and Implementing Enabling Policies. The major goal of the protocol is to reopen tourism operation taking the health of tour operators, tourists, local communities and people who engaged in tourism sector into account.
As to the protocol, tour operators play a vital role in promoting tourist destinations and attracting as many more visitors as possible. Hence, tour operators act as intermediaries between visitors and business suppliers as they have voluminous interactions with both. In this case, tour operators have their own responsibilities in overall initiatives to ensure safe travels.
Tour Operators may achieve operational readiness for reopening their engagements via preparing COVID-19 prevention plan including an action plan or checklist for infection prevention and a special cleaning and disinfection approach. Equally, implementing protocols and guidelines for staff health and other related precautions as much as possible as per the advice and guidelines cascaded from the Ministry of Health is quite significance.
These operators should work in collaboration to identify and adopt appropriate cleanliness and disinfection of offices and vehicles validated by experts, health authorities and governmental institutions and provide their staff with the tools and necessary information regarding infection control, physical contact, sharing of food and utensils, appropriate attire, and enhanced hygiene measures, the use of masks and gloves as recommended by local health authorities or as required by the tour operators procedures.
The protocol enforces them to establish partnership with suppliers including shops, venues museums, shows, theatre, concert halls and the like to follow likeminded health, sanitation, disinfection and hygiene protocols, minimize physical contact through table spacing and guest seating, review payment method to priorities contact less and pre-payment methods and consider having longer opening hours to reduce the number of guests served at any given time as well as facilitate the implementation of the new measures.
Likewise, they have an obligation to rebuild trust and confidence and work hard to enhance trust and confidence through transparency and communication with their guests through providing customers with clear, consistent and up-to-date communication to enhance health and hygiene protocols via the organization’s channels, both digitally and face to face interaction.
Sharing guest guidelines ahead of trip and where applicable in person upon commencement of trip on the basis of advice from health authorities which may include the wearing of face masks or coverings, guidance on hand hygiene and avoiding physical contact is also what is expected of them.
Attraction sites must be regularly cleaned and disinfected using an appropriate sanitizer through establishing permanent or mobile temperature check service, wash rooms, toilets, and hand wash facilities at entry, en-route and exit points.
To prevent the spread of the epidemic in transport services, before & after every journey wipe all surfaces that a passenger may have touched with alcohol based wipes or disinfectant including inside and outside door handles, seats and seat belts or buckles, life saver coats while traveling by boat and dispose any of used cleaning materials and individually consumed materials safely.
Visitors should be advised to have all the necessary trip equipment privately at hand that required for the visit and not to share these items, if possible, in case there are equipment that need to be shared, equipment used during the activity shall be thoroughly cleaned and sanitized after every use.
Managing the number of service givers in national parks is also of mainly useful in reducing interactions with visitors.
On behalf of themselves, visitors should feel well on the date or time of visit and complete health screening prior to entering the facility, including a temperature check for fever and be escorted by site staff to the resident’s room and remain in the resident’s room for the duration of the visit to get the required quality of life or care.
Regarding precaution measurements in hotels, the protocol stated that all service providers in hotels must be medically fit to host clients and all employees are trained on self-monitor body temperature and ways of removing of masks and gloves, handling and management of their uniforms in their locker rooms.
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