PNG tourism to spend up in East New Britain and Milne Bay

Transcript

Papua New Guinea's new tourism minister says he needs to invest in building up the countries tourism hubs before marketing it to the world.

Justin Tkatchencko says one priority is to get Air Niugini to lower airfares to attract foreign tourists.

But he told Alex Perrottet his first priority will be spending one and a half million US dollars promoting tourism to Milne Bay and East New Britain provinces.

JUSTIN TKATCHENCKO: We'll use those two hubs as a developmental tourism destination. Develop it, train the people, create the products, get it all up and going and get the airlines involved. Milne Bay has already started, we've already got an airline ready to go, Air Niugini ready to go from Brisbane direct to Alotau with visa on arrival for tourists. We're working on the products, I think we've got around 24 cruise ships docking this year into Alotau. It's going to support the hotel industry there to upgrade their services and their hotels and products that they can sell to tourists while they stay in Alotau in Milne Bay. There's a lot of things that they can do and see but we need to get that sorted out. Once we get a couple of provinces correct and right and in order, we can use those as examples then to spread out to the rest of the country.

AP: Do you have some practical ideas or plans and policies in place to be able to assist those small resort owners who could then market and bring in visitors to those resorts?

JT: What I'm going to do I'm going to call all these resort owners together, we are going to have a big meeting very shortly, I've only been in the job for one week, I'm going to bring them all together sit down and say ok put your problems to me on the table. Tell me what your issues are, tell me where you need help, how can I help you to make your life easier, to make more money to employ more people and make tourism bigger than it's ever been before. So I want to hear from them first to see what their real issues are and then we can go out and tick them off the list as we go along for 2016. Some of the issues for the bigger hotel industries is tax concessions, assistance in rebuilding, land issues, just bringing the people together, especially in the provinces.

AP: Now the issue with Papua New Guinea at times has been transport within the country. One idea is how to get people to have more faith in intra-Papua New Guinea air travel. There's been lots of investment in the past few years in upgrading the airports. Will it be something that will be reasonable and safe in the future?

JT: We are going to work very very closely with Air Niugini and PNG Air, our two major airlines in Papua New Guinea, to ensure they get it right for the benefit of themselves and also for our country. PNG Air is privately owned, and has shareholders, but Air Niugini is government-owned and so we can work with them closely to ensure we get what we want and that is to make the airlines more competitive on the international scene so it's not expensive. We've always seen Papua New Guinea as a very expensive destination to come to because of the airfares, so we need to get that right down. We need to negotiate that with Air Niugini and see how we can do a break-even situation with them, to encourage tourism and people to come to PNG on those cheaper airfares. I think Air Niugini services are top class, I think in the Pacific we've got some of the best airlines, planes and service that you can get."