With Christmas festivities well underway and turkey and tinsel the focus for many of us, we’d just like to say a big Happy Christmas from all of us at the National Coastal Tourism Academy and every good wish for a very prosperous New Year.

…and thank You!

We’re hugely grateful to everyone who has engaged with us, either through a business consultation which is helping to steer our strategy, by becoming a Customer Care Champion or a Scout to drive up standards of service, undertaking the free Bournemouth Ambassador module or participating in one of our training courses.

Much has happened since the Academy launched. We now have 82 Champions and Scouts with numbers rising steadily. The plan for 2014 is to recruit hundreds more to promote great examples of customer service and boost tourism in Bournemouth.

Potential Scouts need to complete the Bournemouth Ambassador training, bournemouthambassador.co.uk. We’ve almost reached the magic 1,000 milestone – why not encourage your staff to become an official Ambassador and line your staff-room with smart certificates! 

Contact Natalie.tye@bournemouth.gov.uk if you’d like to join the Scouts!

And now for the first Course…

We’re kick-starting the New Year with a series of great new training courses, starting with a half day Welcome Bournemouth Host on 22 January. Delegates will hone their communication skills to enable them to interact confidently with guests and to tackle awkward situations assertively. Heavily-subsidised by the NCTA, it offers fantastic value for money at £40 per person, to include a City and Guilds Level 2 Qualification for all your customer-facing staff. 

Other courses in January include:

Handling Conflict, Complaints and Challenging Customers, 23/01/14 - £45,
Recruiting and Engaging A Winning Team, 27/01/14 - £50 
Overview to Social Media, 28/01/14 - £40 (half day course)

There’s a full list and course overviews on our website in the Events calendar which you can find here.

To book simply contact joanne.huey@bournemouth.co.uk

 

Top award!

And the year has ended on a high – the NCTA has just won an award from the Association for Tourism in Higher Education for Building Leadership and Management Capacity in the visitor economy.  Working with Bournemouth University, the NCTA has been pairing dissertation students with local tourism businesses, undergraduates are building a customer care framework, PhD students are researching health and well-being tourism – all of the results  will be shared with you.  And there’ll be much more to come in 2014.

Happy New Year!