Goemkarponn Desk
PANAJI: State Tourism Dept has asked citizens desirous of being certified as tourist guides to enroll for the tourist guide certification programmes offered through the ‘Incredible India Tourist Facilitator (IITF) (Basic) Certification Programme’ of Ministry of Tourism, Government of India.
The aspirants will have to register on the portal https://iitf.gov.in/ . After completion of the IITF Certification Program (Basic), the participant will have to complete the Advanced Tourist Guide Curriculum offered by the institution engaged by Goa Tourism Dept. After completion of both these certifications they can register as tourist guides in Goa.
The online courses can be accessed from different digital devices. On successful completion of the course, an individual will be a professionally certified tourist facilitator who will support tourists by disseminating information, eliciting interest in them about the country and providing experiential tourism.
Further, the Ministry of Tourism is conducting (offline) six week language courses i.e. Dutch, German, French, Japanese, Chinese to train Linguistic Tourist Facilitators (LTF) for tourism service providers under its suo-motu-initiatives under the scheme of ‘Capacity Building for Service Providers’ (CBSP).
The basic objective of these Linguistic Tourist Facilitators is to create trained manpower in different foreign languages to facilitate the tourist visiting India from different countries and to upgrade the skill of the existing service providers to deal effectively with foreign tourists in their own languages.
The Ministry of Tourism has issued indicative guidelines for the state government and the union territory administration to issue guide licenses at the local level, he added.
