PANJIM: With the influx of domestic tourists and the ongoing tourism season, the State government has thrown open water sports activities and river cruises, activities which were shut since the COVID outbreak in March.
The Tourism Department, released a comprehensive ‘Safety and Hygiene Guide’ to resume the 2 activities. Sanitisation & hygiene practices, thermal screening, social distancing, staggered operational timings, are amongst a long list of guidelines set for the staff and the visitors.
For water sports activities, the guidelines makes it mandatory to accept bookings and travels plans for tourists with no medical history of the virus in the last 28 days. Similarly, all activity operators should seek information on age, medical history, allergies, past COVID-19 test etc, in the form of self-declaration from all the customers.
The dept has encouraged accepting bookings online or via an online platform with cashless transactions only. The activity operator shall also explore different options for operations, where possible, such as advanced tickets, timed entries and smaller groups. Proper record and logs are to be maintained for each customer. The operators are also asked to ensure that all equipments, including life jackets, floating devices etc are thoroughly disinfected prior to boarding of customers. Similarly, high touch areas (handles, seats, seat backs, steering wheel, power window buttons, door locks, windows, screens, etc should be sprayed with disinfectant surface cleaner regularly and that hand sanitiser dispenser and masks are kept available before using of any activity equipment.
The guidelines also recommends to greet the customers with “Namaste” instead of handshakes; maintain physical distance, to not keep the occupancy of activity, at a time, to more than 50% of their total capacity, ensure queue markers with enough distancing at boarding and de-boarding points of the water activity, etc.
The protocols for river cruises also comprise of similar safety measures with thermal screening of visitors/staff at entry points, entry of only asymptomatic individuals allowed at the jetty premises, hand sanitisation, designated queue markers for entry and exit of the audience from the boat and the jetty premises, staggered row-wise exit to avoid crowding, sufficient time interval between successive river cruises on a single boat as well as on various boats on a jetty to ensure row-wise staggered entry and exit of the audience, among others.
The guidelines elaborate that staggered cruise timings shall be followed for multiple boats to avoid crowding and the cruise commencement time, intermission period and finish time of a cruise on any boat should not overlap with the commencement time, intermission period or finish time of a cruise on any other boat on the jetty.
