Tourism

Part of the debate – in the Scottish Parliament at 3:01 pm on 16 December 2004.

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Photo of Patricia Ferguson Patricia Ferguson Labour 3:01, 16 December 2004

I want to move on.

The mountain bike world championships will be held in Lochaber in 2007; it will be the last major cross-country mountain bike competition before the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and a key event in the qualification process for those games. Such events are of huge significance for the whole of Scotland and allow us to raise our profile on the global stage.

The image that we portray to our visitors affects directly our standing in the world. We all have a role in promoting Scotland to the world, but the tourism and hospitality sector has a particularly vital role in promoting Scotland internationally. We can never stop asking whether we are matching and exceeding the world-class skills and customer services for which many of our competitors are renowned. The success of tourism in Scotland will depend on meeting customer service expectations, which is why I want to focus even harder on skills and training.

I want to work with the enterprise networks to improve the training that is on offer to staff. I fully appreciate the effort that the enterprise networks and the new skills council, People First, put into improving skills. Springboard Scotland also carries out good work and I was delighted to launch its career pack, which aims to encourage more people to enter the tourism and hospitality industry as a career, in Aviemore a few weeks ago. Another good project that is aimed at stimulating excellent levels of service is the pride and passion initiative, which aims to enthuse every part of the tourism and hospitality sector throughout Scotland; I hope that all Scots will get involved in it.

Work to implement an integrated tourism network is well under way. I am pleased with the progress so far and confident that the network will support further growth throughout the tourism sector. From April next year, we will begin to see the results of all the hard work of those who are involved in the project in implementing an integrated tourism network that will offer a high-quality, seamless service to all our visitors and tourism businesses. We must provide all our visitors with a high-quality information service that presents all that the country has to offer in an attractive and accessible way.