tourism
Master plan needs additional work
Public consultations on the tourism master plan were supposed to start last week.
The Instituto Panameño de Turismo (Ipat) has postponed its plan to open public discussions on the Tourism Development Master Plan until October, confirmed Jaime Cornejo, national director of the project.
The first presentation had been scheduled to be held in Chiriquí last week.
The master plan, which was prepared by the Spanish consultant Tourism & Leisure, arrived in Panama on Aug. 14. Rubén Blades, Ipat general manager, explained that the document is not yet finished. Several changes will be made to the document by Sept. 8, and then it will be sent back to the consultant for final revisions. The agencies that will work on the plan are Ipat, the Ministerio de Vivienda, the Autoridad Nacional del Ambiente, the Ministerio de Economía y Finanzas, the Cámara de Turismo, the Asociación Panameña de Hoteles, the Asociación Panameña de Operadores de Turismo and the Asociación de Líneas Aéreas en Panamá.
Ipat said it expects to receive the finished version of the document during the last week of September, and then it will begin holding public consultations on it. A total of nine presentations are planned, one in each province.
The plan will manage tourism development in the country's 26 major destinations. It includes an evaluation of the existing products and the areas where more development needs to take place.
A major component of the study is examining the hotel facilities available to travelers.
In the case of municipalities that have already begun studies to adopt a development plan, such as Bocas del Toro, the plan will seek ways to help those efforts.
The country has experienced a large amount of growth in terms of the number of visitors, but the development of an infrastructure to accommodate that increase has lagged behind.
One way the government has sought to address that issue is by offering tax incentives to hotel developers. While that program has been successful in adding hotel rooms to Panama City, the same can’t be said for the country’s interior, where such facilities are still widely lacking.
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