Five-Year Plan To Bring

More Tourists To Tahiti

A 20-man board, with representatives from private organ isations interested in tourism and the French and Tahitian Governments, has been established in Tahiti to control the de velopment of tourism in French Polynesia.

CALLED the Tahitian Tourist Board, the new organisation absorbs Tahiti’s Government Tourist Bureau, headed by Mr. Gerard Gilloteaux. Its first president is the Governor of French Polynesia, Mr.

Jean Sicurani.

The new board will control the implementation of a five-year plan for the development of tourism initiated this year. It will approve applications for foreign investment, devise regulations for such businesses as hotels and taxis, and direct a promotion campaign.

The authorities expect that about SUS2S million will be spent in French Polynesia under the five year plan, which was initiated on January 1. This money will be partly in the form of Government aid and partly private investment.

Among the projects already en visaged under the plan are: • A complex of three hotels with a total capacity of 750 rooms, a yacht basin and a marina, at Punaauia, 10 miles or so from Papeete. • Airfields for Moorea and Huahine in the Society Group, plus strips for some islands in other archipelagoes. • A survey of the uninhabited centre of Tahiti to enable roads to be built. • An 18-hole golf course at Atimaono, on the south coast of Tahiti, where an Irishman, William Stewart, established a cotton plan tation of unprecedented proportions just over a century ago. Atimaono is the largest area of reasonably flat land in Tahiti. • A road-building programme to make more historical sites and areas of natural beauty accessible to tourists. • A training programme for local people employed by tourist agencies to enable them to become proficient guides and hostesses. • The establishment of a hotel school offering two-year courses in all phases of hotel management. Commenting on the projects en visaged under the five-year plan, Tahiti’s Reef magazine said recently:

“The immediate future calls for an explosive expansion both in trans portation and facilities”.

It said that the hotel complex planned for Punaauia would more than triple Tahiti’s hotel capacity in itself, that several international hotel chains had been “eyeing Polynesia with interest”, and that more major airlines, notably Air New Zealand, had recently expressed interest in establishing routes through Tahiti, while other carriers were planning to increase their services.

The number of tourists expected in Tahiti this year is 18,000, com pared with 14,830 last year and only 1,472 in 1959.