DEVELOPMENT-ARGENTINA: Newspaper Vendors Receive Tourism Training

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Mar 15 2000 (IPS) - Some 500 newspaper vendors from the areas of the Argentine capital most frequented by tourists have been trained how to best respond to the questions of foreign visitors and how to guide them with explanations and brochures in Spanish, English or Portuguese.

The announcement of the training course in tourism and language triggered an immediate, enthusiastic response among newspaper vendors, opening a world of new possibilities for many of them.

Ana Gimenez, who has worked for 30 years at the newsstand that once belonged to her father, described the course offered by the Buenos Aires municipal government as “fascinating, fabulous.”

“I was born and raised near the corner kiosk and the course helped me resolve the doubts I had about what was going on around me,” Gimenez told IPS.

Recently, she had the opportunity to help out some British tourists who wanted to find a place to listen to live tango music. “I had done the English portion of the course, but they were making an effort to speak Spanish and asked that I did so too,” she recounted.

Buenos Aires receives some three million foreign visitors each year, most coming from the United States, Europe and neighbouring countries. Tourism has grown rapidly over the last 10 years throughout the nation, increasing 70 percent since 1990.

In response to this growth in tourism, which is highly concentrated in the capital, municipal authorities launched its programme, “Buenos Aires – a city welcomes you,” in mid-1999, supported by this group of people known as “key contacts.”

As in nearly every large city, tourists often need a “guide for the moment,” someone who can quickly orient them or answer a question, recommend a place to eat or where to stay, how to move from one part of the city to another or how to exchange money.

“This has long been the function of many newspaper vendors, taxi drivers, police or shopping centre employees, and they are the people we targeted” for the programme, said Claudia Martina, co-ordinator of the city government’s Tourist Training project.

For now, the programme is being developed only for newspaper vendors. In Buenos Aires alone, there are nearly 4,000 such vendors, but so far the city’s courses are focusing on those operating in the neighbourhoods most frequented by tourists: La Boca, San Telmo, Montserrat, Puerto Madero, Recoleta and Mataderos.

The first level of the course – already completed by more than 300 people – consists of four three-hour classes taught at the newspaper and magazine vendors union headquarters.

The students receive information about the importance of tourism for the economy and the role of the good service they can provide as individuals. “The more they understand how much money tourism brings the country, the greater their role becomes,” said Martina.

In the training, participants are grouped by neighbourhood and given information about their specific area of the city: lists of hotels, restaurants in every price range, museums, maps for walking tours, advice and recommendations of all kinds. The course also includes training in basic English.

Instructor Miriam Slemenson, who also developed a programme in Madrid for teaching key contacts – this time taxi drivers -, told IPS that there are similar concerns among workers who have frequent contact with tourists.

“They tend to be groups with little professional training, but who have a great desire to learn,” she affirmed.

Slemenson prepared a language portion of the Buenos Aires programme that includes frequently heard phrases, vocabulary relevant to the city, hotels, currency and sites of interest to the foreign visitor.

The municipal government then gives each course participant a cassette of English phrases so that they may practice saying the price of a newspaper in dollars, or “welcome to Buenos Aires.”

Things may get complicated when tourists ask vendors how to get to a specific point in the city, though the language of gestures, together with some key words, functions well when both sides make an effort to communicate.

Benedicto Doro, a newspaper vendor who completed the course, said that for his needs, the English component was very brief, and described the training as “very good, very interesting, but very short.”

“With information on tourism we can get by, because without taking the course we could already explain it fairly well, but we need more time with the language,” said Doro, who has been assisting tourists for the last 28 years from his newsstand on Florida street, the Buenos Aires promenade most frequented by foreign visitors.

His partner at the kiosk speaks better English, but when Doro is alone he is lost when it comes time to help English-speaking tourists. “I think I will begin to study on my own,” he said.

These new guides are anxious to receive information and in turn provide it as an additional service of their trade – and they do not charge a peso for it.

Periodically, the Ministry of Tourism will update the material it provides the key contacts, especially information about the schedule of shows throughout the city.

There is a second course for those newspaper vendors who want to continue training. It has already been taken by some 200 people. The only requirement is to have completed the first and have the desire to continue learning.

The second course teaches a somewhat higher level of English, reviews the first course and begins providing basic Portuguese skills, so that the key contacts can assist the flood of tourists coming from neighbouring Brazil.

“The response has been excellent, the students have been grateful for everything they receive and ask for more classes at a higher level,” reported Slemenson, who is preparing an English programme, based on the Buenos Aires experience, for key contacts in other Argentine cities.

The vendors who complete the course receive a certificate that states they are trained tourist aides – and many have the document hanging outside their kiosks.

The municipal government is planning to award a diploma with the certification in order to catch the attention of tourists and of potential students for this year’s courses, which begin in April.