Best Practice - Action teams

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Health and wellbeing tourism

Action Teams Visitor Experience

Business consultations to encourage growth The NCTA engaged in one-to-one interviews with a cross-section of SMEs to discover barriers and challenges to business expansion.

Spending time with owners or managers revealed scores of potential new opportunities resulting in a number of positive results.

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visit coastaltourismacademy.co.uk

Action teams

WHAT WE DID

WHAT WE LEARNT

From its start in Bournemouth, the NCTA offered all visitor-facing businesses the opportunity for one-to-one business consultations to discover challenges, obstacles and opportunities for growth across all sectors – accommodation, attractions, transport, retail, language schools and more.

The individual business consultations shed light on a wide range of new business opportunities. Lack of time and appropriate contacts were a major obstacle for many SMEs, almost all the businesses the NCTA team liaised with highlighted further support to enable their businesses to grow. Sometimes it was simply a case of providing necessary links – marketing, planning departments, hospitality consultants – to enable the business to move on, it was not necessarily lack of investment.

Members of the team completed identical questionnaires to ensure consistency. The results of these were then measured against the Academy’s objectives of boosting tourism growth and creating and sustaining jobs to determine which projects best filled these aims.

They were also assessed for their wider evaluation for other coastal destinations nationally.

Projects varied and included: assessing the impact a new cookery school would give for a four-star hotel, providing a digital marketing strategy for a B&B, helping an SME develop a business plan to launch a new restaurant and creating a new forum for town centre retailers.

Once each project was assessed, an appropriate consultant was assigned, offering expertise in hospitality, marketing, academia, business or finance. These experts became actively involved with the business, trouble-shooting and creating strategies for growth.

A number of SMEs welcomed the opportunity to discuss their plans with a third party. Action points varied enormously, from understanding how to gain a licence to open in the evening to learning how to market a hotel without the need for an OTA.

CONCLUSION Most coastal SMEs lack the time and sometimes knowledge to enable them to reach their full potential. Whilst business-owners often want to engage with online support tools, time is an issue. Face-to-face consultations proved the quickest means of identifying areas for growth. It would be beneficial to undertake this approach in a number of varying coastal settings to create a valuable national database.

From the NCTA’s short pilot, a number of new initiatives have been launched that would otherwise have been abandoned. This programme could be replicated nationally.