TOO often travel companies pay only lip service to the importance of training. That much is evident when times get tough, the first cuts tend to make an appearance in the training budget.
But on-going investment in training for employees is crucial to the future health of any business and that is the point the Tourism Training Forum for Wales is now keen to get make to the country’s many small tourism ventures.
‘You may have a beautiful product but if your customer service is rubbish, you lose trade’ is the blunt message from Diana James who is the training and business support manager with the Wales Tourist Board and who represents the WTB on the training forum.
She said that the majority of complaints about holidays in Wales received by the board relate to poor service.
“It’s not surprising. If you think of your own holidays and reflect on your opinion of the destination, it is not so much to do with physical things as to whether the people you met were rude or inefficient.”
But encouraging more investment in customer-service training is just one part of the work of the forum which brings together all the main bodies involved in training in the country.
Its strategy, broadly stated, is to promote and develop education and training within the Welsh tourism industry, with particular focus on the needs of smaller businesses.
The forum has recently published a guide to the sort of training available to companies and its latest project is to put together a showcase of best practise so that everyone in the industry can learn about the training initiatives undertaken by fellow tourism industry businesses.
James said: “It is very easy for people like me to say training is a good idea because that is my job. But what small operators are really very interested in listening to is what other people like themselves are doing about training.
“If they hear ideas from people who have the same struggles as themselves, it has far more influence.”
But trawling the industry in search of training success stories would be such a marathon task that as an alternative, the forum has decided to organise a competition called Are You A Star In Tourism Training?
This aims to encourage companies to come forward themselves and volunteer their own tales of training achievements.
The competition is being run on a regional basis with winners from North, Mid, Southeast and Southwest Wales.
Entries in each region will be judged in three categories, ranging from firms with up to 10 employees to those with over fifty.
Category winners in each region will receive £1,000 worth of training courses, while the overall winner in each category will receive a further £3,000 worth of training. The deadline for entries is February 29.
According to James, the forum is not only looking to hear about companies’ successes in achieving Investors in People awards or putting employees through NVQ courses.
It may just as easily be they had a really simple idea on training and it worked but it is something other people in the industry can learn about.
Meanwhile, the forum is active in ensuring that Wales’ new National Assembly is kept informed about the training needs of the country’s tourism industry so that, for example, when resources are allocated to higher education bodies, the need for courses designed for the tourism industry is not forgotten.
“We want to improve the image of the sector and ensure that its importance to the economy is not forgotten,” said James.