STA celebrates World Tourism Day with tourism festival and food fiesta |28 September 2019
To commemorate World Tourism Day yesterday, the Seychelles Tourism Academy (STA) at La Misère organised a tourism festival and food fiesta for its students and staff.
The activities included open visits, offered services, live cooking, sale of snacks and drinks and cultural demonstrations, as well as a domino competition.
While the students from the reception department were busy demonstrating their skills in answering telephone calls, their colleagues from front office were showing other students from other departments how welcoming, rooming and check-ins and check outs, among other duties in front office, are done.
Those who wanted to taste Creole snacks were not disappointed as the students from the Tourism and Tour Guide, from the Advanced Diploma in Hotel Management and from the kitchen had prepared a variety of Creole snacks and goodies for sale such as banana cakes (gato bannann), pancakes, lafarin mai, biskwi larou saret, gato lapat sek, brenzel fri, different types of cup cakes of different flavours and also nouga koko, fruit salad, mix ladob, among others. Grilled sausages were also available.
Apart from lemonades on sale at some stalls, the restaurant and bar students had prepared a breakfast menu consisting of bacon and eggs, sausages, pancakes, banana cakes, chocolate and vanilla cakes accompanied by ordinary tea and lemon grass tea, coffee, fresh juices and different mocktails.
On a more relaxing note, the Wellness and Spa students had a massage package on offer and for R25, students and staff were able to get a body massage or nail polish.
The section also organised a quiz and those who got three right answers got the services on offer for free.
The students and teachers who talked to Seychelles NATION said they were very appreciative of the activity which is organised mostly every year for Tourism Day.
“Apart from tasting the various dishes and drinks, it gives us the opportunity to interact with other students from other departments and to know what they do as we don’t get to meet to interact at times due to our commitment to our specific courses, unless you’re a friend of somebody in that particular section,” said first-year Tourism and Tour Guide student Stacy Confait.
Yesterday’s activity started with a special assembly where a special Tourism Day message from the secretary general of the World Tourism Organisation (WTO), Zurab Pololikashvili, was read.
The theme for the International Tourism Day is ‘Tourism and Jobs: A better future for all’.
Speaking about the raison d’être of the activity, the principal of STA, Flavien Joubert, said as the local theme is ‘We are Tourism’, tourism for Seychelles starts at STA.
“Thus the students have to know and to understand what the other annex departments have in terms of contributions for the continued development of our tourism industry,” Mr Joubert said.
The tourism festival and food fiesta ended in the afternoon with cultural shows.
Apart from the activity at STA, some students and teachers were at the Grand Anse Mahé primary school to conduct talks on tourism and give live practical sessions on cooking and mocktail making.
The accompanying photos show some highlights of the activity at the STA yesterday.
