The Asean-Japan Centre in Tokyo has reaffirmed its continued commitment to future ‘Interpretive Planning’ programmes at main Asean heritage sites to achieve sustainable tourism in the region.

The commitment was reconfirmed after seeing progress of the previous training on related issues for senior interpreters/tour guides and managers at heritage sites in ten Asean Member States from September 12-15.

The programme in Japan was attended by 17 participants and aimed to familiarise them with interpretive planning while also offering the opportunity to experience interpretive activities, according to the centre.

Interpretation is an approach to communicate with audiences (tourists) in tourism sites and attempts to create personal meaning and connections with things, places, people, and concepts for those visitors.

Sustainable tourism has been gaining attention in the world as an indispensable approach to conserving valuable tourism resources and providing quality tourism experiences to visitors, as well as enriching the lives of people in the tourism regions.

Interpretation plays an important role in sustainable tourism as it can help tourists and stakeholders understand, appreciate, and then support the tourism resources and/or sites. Interpretative planning addresses management needs and resource considerations offering essential guidelines for the development of visitor services at tourism sites or facilities and describing strategic operations and management there.

Interpretive planning, therefore, should be promoted at tourism sites to facilitate sustainable tourism.
The training programme focused on learning about and developing an interpretive plan that describes a strategy for visitor services at heritage sites where participants work.

The training programme offered lectures on the knowledge, skills, and research needed for interpretive planning and involved discussions and exercises for interpretive planning at the participant’s site.