A Career in Community Tourism

Mark Pike
Director

The decision to take on a career in Community Tourism in its purest form is characterized by a desire to make opportunities within your own environment; Building your community image through your personal entrepreneurial efforts or visions; Visions that are shared with the community and stimulated to a collective level with collective participation and collective benefit.

Products and services offered in communities influence the character and image that it has in the minds of people in other communities across Jamaica and the world. Ultimately influencing travel motivations based on the curiosity that is created based on that image (The place to be).

A career in ‘Community Tourism’ is built on a ‘Community Consciousness’ highlighting the community as a destination within the domestic and international tourism marketplace. Ultimately influencing ‘people flow’ into a community and the capitalization of providing goods, services and hospitality to these people attracted to the community both local and international.

Building your community as a destination and an attractive place to come involves sustainable tourism investment as well as products and services that are unique in their own right; Products and services that are designed and developed taking into consideration the natural, cultural and heritage resources of a community; Where way of life is re-generated through products and services that package culture in a creative, meaningful and dynamic way.

A career in Community Tourism therefore is never isolated from the responsibility one should have for his or her environment—it should embrace and involve the members of the community. A Community Tourism career therefore embraces and requires a high level of social consciousness (a high sense of social responsibility) and patriotism.

The values and elements needed to be embraced in a Career in community tourism are: service oriented hospitality, environmental consciousness, patriotism, social responsibility and an entrepreneurial mindset and a pride in ones way of life. It involves a mindset to act within your own environment, build indigenous, culturally oriented products and services that are attractive to a global market at global standards; building the capacity for export and earning of foreign exchange.

Whatever you do, once you seek to represent and be an ambassador for your community at all times and simultaneously create benefits and opportunities for your community and its members; in building the image of your community as a destination for people to come; you have a career in Community Tourism! So whatever your occupation and investment once it’s built on nurturing the image of your community you are working in Community Tourism.

Opportunities in the Career of Community Tourism

- A Community Tourism Trainer
- Community Tourism Marketer
- A Community Cook
- Bed & Breakfast
- Bar
- Rest Stop
- Restaurant
- Entertainment (Dancer, Singer, Poet, Story-Teller)
- Small Hotel
- Art & Craft
- Farming
- Agro-Processing
- Tour Guiding or Community Hosting
- Community Event Planning/Promotion (Festivals, Parties, Exhibitions)

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