The National Association of Travel Agents Singapore (NATAS) will expand training for the travel industry aimed at enhancing skills and productivity at Singapore’s 1,000-plus agencies.
Courses will be conducted by NATAS’ subsidiary, the Tourism Management Institute of Singapore (TMIS) beginning in June 2016.
"The current travel landscape is increasingly disrupted by changing consumer habits on travel research and booking. Within Singapore, manpower constraints also call for travel agents to remodel their business and operations to increase productivity. Thus, it is important to invest in people development to ensure our travel agent workforce has the right set of skills to transform the industry," said Ong Ling Lee, director of travel agents and tourist guides at Singapore Tourism Board.
NATAS will also launch an updated travel agent accreditation programme in July which is aligned to the workforce skills qualifications tourism framework.
"Consumers are growing to be more sophisticated and have higher expectations of what they want in a vacation. We therefore need to train the staff of travel agencies to be knowledgeable in handling these customers and be able to sell travel experiences professionally," said Fiona Lim, chairman for manpower and training at NATAS.
