Minister Mahler clarifies tour guide licensing requirements – Love FM

Also last week, FECTAB complained that tour guides would have to take basic courses to obtain or renew a tour guide licence. Tourism Minister Anthony Mahler explained.

Hon. Anthony Mahler, Minister of Tourism: “As long as you’re a tour guide, you don’t need to go through basic training. What we are trying to do is to level up and that will be optional so my take on training Belize tour guides is that you have a general level and then you have specialist areas. So if you want to be a specialist birdwatcher it’s one thing, if you want to do diving certifications it’s another thing, if you want to focus only on the history of the Mayans it’s another thing, if you want to go on sea excursions that’s a different matter and so we will offer optional training opportunities. No tourist guide who has a license at the moment and will have to renew in July will need to undergo training that is not the fact. In the new program, we seek to advance and improve the program. Again, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years ago, personally, I was in charge of training and I restructured the training at the time and the quality of the guides went up, that’s what we’re trying to continuously to improve standards in Belize.