Bournemouth Ambassador visit coastaltourismacademy.co.uk
Health and wellbeing tourism
Visitor Experience
A straight for ward, online product knowledge training course, tailor-made for Bournemouth’s tourism industr y. Like many coastal resorts, Bournemouth has a relatively high staff turnover with little or no knowledge of the resort. To plug the gap the NCTA created a free product knowledge course that could be completed within an hour at a time to suit employees.
visit coastaltourismacademy.co.uk
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visit coastaltourismacademy.co.uk
Bournemouth Ambassador
WHAT WE DID
WHAT WE LEARNT
Initial research concluded that a simple and effective way to increase resort knowledge among tourism employees was needed to enable customer-facing staff to offer advice confidently to visitors. Bournemouth Ambassador was created as a free, simple and accessible online training course, part of the NCTA’s ‘blended learning’ objective. The first version was piloted in May 2013 with feedback obtained six months later from managers and employees.
Bournemouth Ambassador offers an effective entry level course for full time and seasonal workers. Pass certificates proved popular, with businesses displaying them in public areas. Communication with existing Ambassadors, particularly to announce new modules, was important to keep learning up to date. Ensuring managers were course advocates was vital, they then encouraged their staff to take it.
A new Bournemouth Ambassador site was then launched using a learning management system. It was designed for use on tablets and mobile phones to allow industry staff to undertake it as flexibly as possible. After initial feedback, the text was updated, and content and interactivity increased. New modules and downloadable resources were then added. A promotional film from staff who’d taken the course was added to the home page, encouraging others to take it. Audio and translation tools were also uploaded. A standalone module on Poole and a ‘Festival Makers’ event management was added for Bournemouth Tourism’s volunteer event stewards.
NCTA evaluation showed that 82% of businesses felt the staff were more knowledgable as a result of the course and 70% that staff are more confident. Of those who have undertaken it, 88% would recommend it to other businesses. However, further promoion needs to be done to embed the Ambassador training into existing staff induction processes. Costs / Resources: Development was relatively expensive at just under £10,000 for the original programme but running costs are minimal. The system is easily replicable for other destinations.
CONCLUSION More than 1600 industry staff and tourism students completed the course within just over one year. It has generated positive feedback within the industry with a good percentage of the town’s hotel managers supporting it. It is a cost-effective and sustainable method of providing relevant product knowledge and has proved popular with staff for whom English is a second language. It success lies in its flexibility, allowing staff to take it when it suits them, and in its easy-to-use format. It has had the added benefit of encouraging further training. An enhanced Customer Care Specialist course is in production as a result of the success of Bournemouth Ambassador which will also be online to make training as easy as possible. Ambassador is now being developed for other coastal resorts.