The Member for Gazelle, Jelta Wong, has announced the launching of the Fire Dance Festival to be held at the Gaulim Show grounds in the district on the 18th and 19th of October, 2019.
“The Fire Dance Festival is the first for the people of the Gazelle District geared toward attracting tourist to our district,” the Gazelle MP said.
“The Gazelle district administration is working tirelessly to deliver this event and we are proud to announce we will be hosting the event on October the 18th and 19th 2019.”
The theme for this event is ‘Promoting Responsible Tourism and Agri-tourism’ which will see over 1,000 individual performers taking part in over 55 different and unique cultural performance groups.
Key agents from Intrepid Travel and Peregrine Adventures, one of the biggest wholesalers in Australia, will be hosted by the Member for Gazelle and the Gazelle District at this year’s show. Intrepid Travel is one of the biggest wholesalers in soft adventure tourism in the world and the brand is recognised in every major country in the entire world.
The agents will be brought into the Gazelle district to familiarise themselves with the Fire Dance Festival product, and will then have firsthand knowledge as to how to market these products to the world through their sales and distribution channels.
“The agents from Intrepid Travel are the exact type of agents we need to engage to sell our products. They specialise in soft adventure tourism products and are passionate about promoting responsible tourism products,” Wong explained.
“They have a worldwide reach and they send almost 2,000 people per week out of Australia to various destinations in the world, we need to engage more travel wholesalers.”
Representatives from the IFC who are also going to be attending the event in October 2019 will be looking at ways to support this event to ensure its success.
“The IFC will be assisting by sending two travel writers who will be attending the Fire Dance Festival and give us much needed exposure through international media avenues,” Jelta Wong mentioned.
“We are giving this event every reason to succeed.”
The Gazelle District’s plan to have this event as a permanent fixture on the PNG tourism calendar and will be seeking the support of the PNGTPA in advertising the Fire Dance Festival.
“As Member for the Gazelle, I would like to request that this event be added to the PNG Tourism Promotion calendar for future years,” Wong added.
“We are locking the dates in for this event for the next two years, it will be run twice a year and we would like the PNGTPA to help us in promoting this event to ensure our vision of becoming one of the premier tourism products is realised.”
The Gazelle District has announced dates for 2020 – 19th/ 20th June 2020 and 23rd October 2020.
(Baining fire dancers – Picture: PNG Tours)