Follow Us on Google
By Okorie Uguru
The National President of the Nigeria Association of Tour Operators (NATOP), Hajia Bolaji Mustapha has said the association’s recently launched identity card scheme will help curb cases of fraud and also identify real tour operators.
The identity card which was launched during the association’s annual general meeting in Akure, Ondo State, she said, has certain features that would help to improve your business and get rid of quacks.
While outlining the special features of the card, Mustapha said: “The card will each come with a special code, the ISO number that we have generated. It will help members to authenticate their membership of the association. It will be easy to cross-check with the secretariat and if you scan the ISO number with the bar code, it will go directly to our secretariat and reveal the identity of the card holder because the bar code is directly linked to the website.
“So, in that way, we can easily identify our members. That is like an authentic proof of membership. Members’ can’t carry their certificates everywhere. There are some hotels that have a 20 percent discount if they are able to show their identity card as members. Even if the hotels want to crosscheck, they will just give the ISO number. They can also use their phone and scan the barcode on arrival; it will display all the details to members and confirm if they are genuine.”
She also used the opportunity to talk about the need to register and standardise the tourism industry as it will help kick out individuals that do not have genuine businesses.
She said: “Some people are intruding and also taking our work, people who are not in this business. One of the reasons that I am fighting a particular bank is that I have not seen what the bank has done for the industry. Have they given money in the form of loans to improve businesses? Instead they went to form an agency competing with us. They formed a tour company and took one of our members to teach them what we are doing. And you came from an angle and studied all of our systems, and then you created a portal. You are using tour operators to load their tours on the portal but when a client books, you don’t give it to them. You execute the job yourself.
“If it is a tour company that loads something on, maybe, booking.com, at the back up, you will know that it is so and so people that are handling the package. In this case, there are no traces that lead the package to you. If you load on the portal, they might not even call you as the owner of the package to tell you to come and execute a job that came through the package. They take the job and do it. Even if you go to the portal and book, it will come to you. It does not show on the portal. It is wrong. What are they doing to help the tour operators? When did banks become tour agencies?”
Mustapha explained that because the tourism industry is not well regulated and standardised, many with dubious motives flock into the industry to dupe unsuspecting members of the public.
“Because of travelling out, people are being duped. There are cases of N25 million, N100 million and so on. They will collect the money and will not do the job. That is what the new ID card will help curb.”
