Chinese savour Ghana-made alcoholic beverages
Ghana last weekend made a huge impact on the movers and shakers of China’s tourism market. Against the backdrop of rich Ghanaian music and the sampling of made-in-Ghana alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, Ghana’s Minister of Tourism, Culture and Creative Arts, Mrs Elizabeth Ofosu-Adjare, sold Ghana to a sizeable audience of Chinese travel and tour operators, tourism investors and influential travel writers at this year’s China Outbound Travel and Tourism Market (COTTM 2015) in Beijing.
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To the tour operators, the minister gave information about a country with easy access by sea and by air, “where culture, history and nature combine to create a haven for adventure and sight-seeing”, a country “where peace reigns and where the safety and security of the tourist have become proverbial, if not legendary”.
Opportunities
To the investors, she mentioned opportunities to take slots in the proposed Ghana’s Marine Drive enclave, a self-contained city-within-a city project between the Osu Castle and Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park in Accra.
Chinese investors, she added, were also welcome in the up-market hotels sector and the construction of highway rest stops along the major inter-city routes.
Special forum
Mrs Ofosu-Adjare was speaking during a special forum organised exclusively for Ghana’s delegation to the fair.
The event brought together over 300 exhibitors from 62 countries to showcase their destinations and travel services to 3,298 leading outbound tour operators from all over China.
Now in its ninth year, COTTM’s peculiarity is in its being the only business-to-business tourism event in the world that focuses purely on the burgeoning outbound market.
The minister led Ghana’s delegation which included private sector operators, confectionary makers, officials of Ghana Tourism Authority (GTA), Ghana Tourist Development Company (GTDC), Forestry Commission, as well as creative arts practitioners, including hiplife musician Tic Tac, film stars Eckow Smith-Asante, Kalsume Sinare and Irene Opare.
Satisfaction
The private sector operators expressed satisfaction with far-reaching “good business-to-business contacts” with Chinese tour operators.
Mr Samuel Seth Kwabena Kyere, an actor popularly known as ‘Koo Fori’, who represented Joy Industry, thanked the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Creative Arts for “making it possible for a Ghanaian company like ours to take advantage of the Chinese love for herbal preparations to sample Ghana-made herb-based alcoholic beverage”.
Later in an interview with the Daily Graphic, Mrs Ofosu-Adjare said her excitement about the special forum on Ghana stemmed from the fact that although in terms of attendance and size COTTM was not the biggest tourism fair in the world, it represented Ghana’s best opportunity to woo Chinese tourists and investors.
“Ghana is currently attracting just over 20,000 Chinese tourists a year. We aim to multiply this figure, not just double it. The fair is only one of many means to that end. Any country that wants tourism dollars cannot do without the Chinese market. This fair has marked a turning point in that quest,” she said.
On the inclusion of performing artistes in the delegation to a fair which tolerates only the barest of noise, Mrs Ofosu-Adjare said it was to help the artistes to move beyond national boundaries to the international scene.
“By their presence here, in China, for instance, they are being helped to get to know the Chinese taste, a factor which could influence the type of music or film they put out, targeting the Chinese market,” she explained, adding that “tourism, culture and creative Arts, as a triplet-industry, is public sector-led and private sector-driven”.