An effort to bring hospitality staff together for social and learning opportunities and encourage young people to get excited about the tourism industry is underway.

The Link for Tourism Professionals is a new industry group comprised of hospitality employees and managers, said Monitor Company's Jeff Wetzler yesterday.

It evolved in January from a joint focus group of employers and employees facilitated by Monitor and the Visitor Industry Partnership which identified the main challenges the industry faced.

These included: low morale within restaurants and hotels; lack of interest among young people in entering the industry; and Difficulty providing meaningful learning opportunities for workers.

Coupled with these difficulties were a high turnover and uneven commitment among staff.

The Link's mandate is to bring people of all levels in the hospitality industry together for social and learning opportunities and serve as role models to encourage young people to become excited about the industry.

Mr. Wetzler said: "We are strongly committed to the Link and its goals.

Building morale and providing networking and learning opportunities will help the hospitality industry build the human capital, trust and partnership which is critical to Bermuda's competitive advantage.'' Link has four types of activities planned for the near future as it moves to accomplish these goals.

Regular social events will be held to help bring industry members together for networking and building morale.

The first public event is planned for April 30 at the Oasis night club from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m.

Ariel Sands' Simon Boden, a leader of the group, said: "The goals of this first event at Oasis are to bring together people from all levels in the industry to have fun, learn more about the Link, and have the opportunity to join as members.'' Another Link leader, Irving Raynor, noted: "In the past the hotels used to have staff clubs where people would go when they knocked off. This let you see who else was in the industry and people would have a good time.

"A major function of the Link for a lot of members will simply be to provide a way for people in the industry to come together and have fun. In the future, we hope to plan events like barbecues and maybe a casino night.'' A second priority of the Link is to improve public perception of working in hotels and restaurants -- especially among young Bermudians -- and a committee has been formed which will develop relationships with schools.

Link leader Ernest Marshall said: "There are a lot of positive things about working in this industry and we need to emphasise these to students.'' Activities will include outreach programmes where Link members will visit schools and share their experiences from working in the industry with the hope of becoming role models who inspire young people to follow in their steps.

The Link also endeavours to provide learning opportunities for its members who wish to upgrade their skills and knowledge.

To this end it will work with the VIP and Bermuda College to serve as a pilot group for various training and certification initiatives.

Link hopes these partnerships will provide a test bed for new programmes and will provide feedback and sponsorship in an effort to make them as successful as possible.

And the group will begin publishing a newsletter for all its members to increase communications through the industry.