The participants includes tour operators, and officials from immigration, customs, transportation, water waste companies, amongst others, from Togo, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire and Nigeria.

The two-day forum being organised by the Ghana Tourism Authority (GTA) in partnership with the West Africa Tourism Organisation (WATO) is aimed at beginning a process of promoting joint marketing efforts amongst tourism boards and authorities in the Sub-region.It also seeks to increase awareness of West Africa’s tourism products and other related information as well as provide a platform to draw the attention of related authorities and policy makers to ease up travel blocks within the Sub-Region.

Mr Akwasi Agyemang, Chief Executive Officer of GTA in an interview with the Ghana News Agency, said as a tourism authority, Ghana had taken it upon itself to lead the charge for integrated tourism within West Africa as is being done in Southern and Eastern Africa.

“If you go to Southern Africa now, Namibia, South Africa, Botswana have what we call Retosa, which seeks to bring their tourism potentials together, the same thing is happening in Eastern Africa - Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania.“We feel that West Africa has to also integrate, come together, market and position itself and seek to attract enough tourists into our various countries.

“We cannot do it as individual country, we can do it as a block, it will help us with the economics of scale that comes to negotiate better deals with airlines, tour operators who are selling packages into Africa and all that,” he said.