SEYCHELLES WILL BE AT 2nd WORLD TOURISM FORUM LUCERNE THINK TANK
Almasalla Arab Travel Portal News – For the second year running the Seychelles Minister responsible for Tourism has been invited to participate at the World Tourism Forum Lucerne Think Tank. The Think Tank will be held on March 2-3, 2014 at the Hotel Palace Lucerne, Switzerland.
The main subject tabled for this year’s forum is “Infrastructure& Investment – New Public-Private-Paradigm” and we will address another pivotal issue – that the financing of Travel & Tourism Infrastructure will be the great challenge of the next 2 decades and again we will do so by exploring new creative solution oriented approaches
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The date for the forum in Switzerland has been chosen on purpose just before the ITB Tourism Trade Fair of Berlin, because most of the delegates will also then be attending the ITB.
After the successful first World Tourism Forum Lucerne Think Tank last year, and based on its conclusions and subsequent discussions at the Advisory Board, the World Tourism Think Tank is now an annual event.
A “New Directions Report” following this year’s Think Tank will be released during the ITB Tourism Trade Fair in Berlin
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The World Tourism Forum have confirmed that for this year they will follow the formula that proved successful at the inaugural Think Tank with 25 invited top level leaders from the public, private and civil society sectors, a strong focusing theme and intensive open debate on key directions forward. Many of the financing, planning and environmental challenges – which are very real – were identified during our first Think Tank: now we intend to dig deeper for creative solutions.
The first session of the 2014 Forum will start at 4pm followed by a working dinner on Sunday 2nd, the second during Monday morning until 11 am. Key discussion areas – which will again be previewed in a Think Tank background paper – will be around tourism clusters, cities, airports and intermodal connectivity, as well as the emergence of new investment flows from crowd funding and development agencies that finally seem to have travel and tourism on their radar screens. A new World Bank study on the potential for tourism in Africa will also provide a valuable backdrop for the discussions.
Participants this year will include South African Tourism Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk, UNWTO Secretary-General Taleb Rifai, Seychelles Tourism Minister Alain St.Ange, Kempinski President & CEO Reto Wittwer, Jumeirah President & CEO Gerald Lawless, former Mexican Tourism Minister Gloria Guevara, PATA CEO Martin Craigs, Orascom Development Chairman Samih Sawiris and Etihad VP International Vijay Poonoosamy.
