By MACHARIA KAMAU
A hotel classification exercise that was to be undertaken by the Ministry of Tourism this month has been re-scheduled and will now take place in the second quarter of this year and is expected to be complete by June.
This is latest postponement of the exercise that was initially set to take place early 2010. And towards end of last year, Tourism Ministry said it had issued notice to hoteliers that the exercise was to take place January 2011.
Though the ministry said it had trained professional assessors, it is yet to get everything in place, including taking the hoteliers through the classification criteria and getting them to buy in to process, which might cause a delay.
The Hotels and Restaurants Authority (HRA), which has been charged with running the exercise, is also said to be short of funds, casting doubt on whether the exercise will take place at all place.
Eunice Miima Deputy Secretary Ministry of Tourism said the Government had already trained a team of assessors and was moving on to a second phase that entails prepping the hotels on criteria to be used before embarking on the classification.
"We have already trained assessors that will undertake the assessment and classification of hotels using a set of standards agreed on by the East African Community (EAC)," she said.
"We now plan to prepare the hotels on the classification criteria before we start the rating... if all goes according to plan, the process should be complete by June."
She downplayed the issue of HRA being short of funds, saying the Authority has had ample time to prepare for the exercise.
The programme is estimated to cost about Sh15 million. "HRA has been preparing for that for sometime now and the issue of funding is not major," she said. The hotel classification is supposed to rate quality of service in tourism facilities across the country and give them a rating of between one and five stars.
Tourists should expect better service quality from hotels with higher rating.The last such exercise was in 2002 but was disputed by a section of the industry that felt it was not undertaken fairly.
TRAINING MODEL
The current efforts have however been welcomed by most of the players. Miima spoke yesterday when she opened a conference evaluating a partnership between Kenya Utalii College and Manchester Metropolitan University. The two year-old partnership has seen KUC implement in its training a model used by the UK university.
The model has increased interaction between the Kenyan institution with industry through internships and placements.
"The college has been able to develop firm and relevant frameworks, which have enabled us to meaningfully interface and engage with the industry," said Dr Kenneth Ombongi principal of Kenya Utalii College.
"To achieve Vision 2030, training in the tourism sector is critical to making this country a high end tourist destination."
