The first 2025 IPTGSA committee meeting in January had resulted in kickstarting several actions needed to remain relevant and focused on the present and future of our segment of the tourism industry.
Discussions, among other topics, centered around the Institute’s application to the South African Qualifications Authority, SAQA for short, for registration as a professional body to bestow the successful member the title “Professional Tourist Guide”.
It has come to the Institute leaders’ attention that there are other tourist guide entities, namely Adventure Guides, FGASA and perhaps diluted the NFTGA, are pursuing the registration with SAQA as well.
The committee mandated the chair and vice chair to seek face to face meetings with those entities to establish where they are and how we can cooperate or integrate.
Mails for “Meeting request” were sent out.
The reply from FGASA lead us to have a meeting to familiarize one another with one’s pursuits and to bring us up to speed with facts about the past, present and outlooks to the future. FGASA proposed a meeting on the 30 January in their new offices at Hoedspruit, which we took up.
The two of us, Johan van Biljon and Sam Wenger, left Johannesburg early in the morning by road to go and meet with them in their boardroom. ( 30 January 2025)
A more then 2 hours meeting with 3 of their office staff was fruitful for both parties in that we managed to do away with misunderstandings and find common ground on both sides.
Johan and I learned of some parameter changes by SAQA seemingly verbally disclosed to FGASA and maybe also to the Adventure Guides Association.
FGASA correctly stressed in the meeting that the diversity of what tourist guides actually do in their work as; e.g. adventure guides, culture guides, nature and trails guides, are far apart. Far apart enough to justify each “discipline” to have its own professional body.
This consideration portrays a different angle we were so far not made aware of in all our contacts with SAQA.
On a side note: Apparently, the accounting professionals have more than one professional body approved for their different disciplines, each looking after its own designation with its title.
We need to verify what SAQA’s latest take on having more than one professional body for Tourist Guides of different disciplines is, and see how it impacts on our going ahead with our SAQA application.
We will keep the committee and our membership informed in due course.
It is not befitting to go into too many details emerging from the FGASA meeting. However, we can comfortably report that our endeavors in all this so far, in time and money, finds us on track and in a good position to further push on with the finalization of our submission to SAQA.
One of the meeting outcomes now is that we setup a meeting with the 3 Tourist Guide Associations (disciplines) to collaborate and further discuss all our individual needs and parameters.
This should lead us to come to the point where each of the 3 associations support and endorse the other 2 associations’ application to SAQA.
Driving back to Johannesburg was on the same day and gave us ample time to discuss and think many things over. The pursuits of these goals are ongoing and gain momentum.
Happy guiding and kind regards to you all,
Johan and Sam