Quality Tourism Services, a certification programme that ensures the overall experience inside a shop is jolly good. It rates a shop’s cleanliness, staff’s manner, product knowledge, shop’s policies and a whole lot of whats and whatnots. Secret shoppers are dispatched once every half year, and a formal assessment is made on an annual basis. Once everything is tested, submitted, and fee duly paid, the shop becomes the certified badass. Excellent !!
The QTS Scheme is definitely targeting the oversea folks entering HK. DUH !! Being a local, we don’t put too much thoughts on whether a shop is certified or not. It is possible a tourist may walk into a certified shop, receives a big warm welcome from the staff, becomes a happy camper, but all until the moment of truth when he found out the same item is cheaper elsewhere. Pricing is not part of the scheme, nor should it be if a market is to remain faire with a laissez . A price that is out of ordinary, be it too cheap or too steep, common sense tells us it usually comes with a catch, so it’s nice to do a little internet searching beforehand.
Why did we apply for the QTS? We wanted a third party to critique our little shop, to perform a physical check up of some sort, and we want to be a bit more engaging to the place we live in, like the extra curricular we did during the schooling days; joining the chess club, the football trainings, and getting drunk at the parties. In addition to the QTS, we serve as a mentor under the entrepreneur funding scheme hosted by the semi-government financial institution. Bottom line, our goal is to become a contributing member of the society.
What else we doing ? We are helping to organise gatherings on analogue film processing, sharing the art of converting the negative film into a positive transparancy. We miss photography for fun, this little project should satisfy our need to express, and be able to convey the artist within us out to the spotlight. Yeah, OK, whatever !!