Tan Holdings Corp. president Jerry Tan was elected yesterday as chairman of the Marianas Visitors Authority board.<\/p>\n
Tan was unanimously voted to the post by his peers during an election of officers in yesterday\u2019s board meeting.<\/p>\n
Other elected officers are Marian Aldan-Pierce as vice-chair, Rita Arkle as secretary and Yoichi Matsumura as treasurer.<\/p>\n
Other members are JM Guerrero, Emma Villagomez, Seiji Sato, Edward U. Maratita, and B.K. Park.<\/p>\n
The new members\u2014Tan, Villagomez, and Arkle\u2014were also sworn in yesterday morning at the Governor\u2019s Office prior to their meeting at the MVA office in San Jose.<\/p>\n
Tan replaces long-serving MVA board chair David Sablan, who resigned from the panel in early January this year.<\/p>\n
Evaluation<\/p>\n
In an interview with reporters, Tan said he would focus on implementing \u201ceffective\u201d measures to bring in more tourists to the CNMI.<\/p>\n
To do this, the MVA will evaluate all its programs to identify shortcomings and to correct these.<\/p>\n
Also part of this is to convene the board into a working committee to do a comprehensive evaluation of the programs.<\/p>\n
The board intends to conduct a closed-door meeting on Tinian and Rota so they could conduct \u201ca no-nonsense\u201d evaluation of entire programs.<\/p>\n
He said he would also push for more dialogue with airline companies and key agencies in efforts to bring in more tourists to the CNMI. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ll see more dialogues with airlines, ports authority,\u201d said Tan.<\/p>\n
He said that, based on previous surveys, tourists visiting the CNMI \u201call have good experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe problem is, we are not getting enough of them to come in,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He also said that, based on earlier evaluations, the CNMI has to offer more attractions to tourists, including more shopping centers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of opportunities for the CNMI. We just need to identify who are our partners,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He said the CNMI must continuously be promoted, especially in its key markets such as Japan and Korea, as well as China, which has granted the CNMI an approved destination status. <\/p>\n
Tan earlier said that the market for the CNMI is huge, noting that its key markets\u2014Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, and Russia\u2014have close to 2 billion people combined.<\/p>\n
The board chairman has also said that Saipan has to improve its shopping activities for tourists, especially at night.<\/p>\n
He said these do not have to be large malls but more of a city-like shopping center \u201cwhere people find lots of dining places, lots of shopping opportunities.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tan said tourists would love to find on Saipan a Universal City Walk-style of attraction. <\/p>\n
He said the CNMI already possesses great natural attractions that need to be kept clean at all times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tan Holdings Corp. president Jerry Tan was elected yesterday as chairman of the Marianas Visitors Authority board.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99540\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}