A warmer welcome

The Malta Tourism Authority is going to extend its successful Merħba training programme using €173,000 worth of surplus funds from the European Social Funds.

The authority decided to repeat its programme for transport-related sectors but added two new ones: Gozo and English-language schools. Training will start on March 24.

Merħba will once again be run through Misco, who in turn contracted the communications part of the contract to JP Advertising. (The original €400,000 programme had been awarded to a consortium made up of Misco, JP Advertising and Irish company Optimum Results).

"The idea of Merħba is to improve the soft side of the tourism product," MTA's head of human resource development Joe Tanti said.

"We feel that this programme was the one that most benefitted the industry. Through the ESF 7 Tourism and Support Services Training Programme, we reached 958 people to-date, and plan to reach 600 more through the second Merħba intake split evenly among the three sectors."

Mr Tanti explained that there had been many calls over the past years to improve those involved in the English-language school sector and following discussions with the federation representing them, Feltom, it decided to focus on present and future group leaders.

"We will explain the dos and don'ts of the job, leadership skills and dealing with injuries and emergencies. Once the training module has been created, we hope schools will use it in future as part of their induction process," Mr Tanti said.

"Ideally, undergoing this training would become a requirement for group leaders. This would raise the industry standards in the same way that having a TEFL certificate raised the standards for teachers." Isabelle Pace Warrington, the executive officer for Feltom, stressed that the programme would be open to all schools, and not just Feltom members.

"The programme is a great start as each school can add to it as they wish. Group leaders need to understand that the job is not all about having fun but also brings with it great responsibility. It is not easy to control students - especially young ones - and to get them to respect curfews and drinking laws," she said.

"Group leaders tend to be students who are looking for summer work, so once they graduate they move on. There is therefore quite a turnover but a very positive thing is that these skills will be benficial to the group leaders in their future jobs."

Gozo will encompass all the sectors where people come into contact with tourists.

"Merħba reaches frontliners directly. It really goes to the core of customer care," Misco consultant Morgan Parnis said.

"The Gozo module will be based on the modules from the original programme but they will obviously be customised. There will be the same emphasis on learning about tourism sites as this had proved to be a hit with the taxi drivers and karrozzin drivers, many of whom had never been into the sites where they dropped off tourists every day!"

Merħba was one of five activities run by the MTA's human resource development division over the past two years, the others being service culture: train-the-trainer, best practices in human resources, management training and support, and lifelong learning.