Amaia García

Amaia García Uriondo obtained a Vocational Diploma in Tourist Activities and Companies from Deusto University. Since October 2002, she has been a tourism technician at Gernika-Lumo Council and head of the town’s tourist office, where she has carried out the following tasks over the last 15 years:

• Managing the tourist office, applying the excellence and quality parameters to the services rendered.
• Managing the resources needed to provide the service, people, infrastructures and economic management.
• Managing the destination: Aligning the municipal strategy and the tourist policies-strategies of the autonomous community. Deployment of the approach and strategy of the office at the destination. Private-public partnership.
• Managing partnerships: Implementation of projects for joint action. Technical representation of the municipality.

Two initiatives headed by the Gernika-Lumo Tourist Office team stand out among this management work:

• Development and daily use of a scorecard to manage the office.
• Design of a local-scale information system to be able to facilitate the work to manage the destination with information on routes followed by the visitors and expenditure, among other variables.

The Gernika-Lumo tourist office was set up in order to serve and assist the visitors to the municipality. That number stood at 10,455 people in 1990. Since August 1989, the TO staff have assisted over 1,000,000 people (1,089,299) in the last 27 years.  In the last year alone, 75,817 people have passed through its facilities.

The Department of Tourism is today a  cross-cutting department of the local council and has autonomy to set its own operational strategic lines as regards tourism. On the one hand, it develops the strategy in line with the tourist sector and the general public, and, on the other hand, it is the driver behind its implementation in coordination with other departments of the local council.

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