Best Practice - Welcome to Bournemouth

Welcome to Bournemouth Handbook visit coastaltourismacademy.co.uk

Health and wellbeing tourism

Visitor Experience

A Staff Handbook for the Town The NCTA created a booklet with key resort information on how to achieve excellent destination knowledge with a relatively high turnover of tourism staff and to welcome staff to the town, not just an individual business.

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Welcome to Bournemouth

WHAT WE DID

WHAT WE LEARNT

The NCTA created and distributed a free reference booklet about the town, its facilities and the immediate wider area for tourism businesses. The 16 page booklet provides a hard copy reference document and complements the visitor-facing consumer publications produced by Bournemouth Tourism.

The book was distributed to all accommodation providers in the town. It was well received with several businesses requesting additional copies; it is being used within individual business’ induction processes and as a reference document. Ensuring the text complemented the consumer publications was key but the information had to be relevant to staff - clear, simple and to the point.

Written in easy to understand English, it enables employees at all levels to read and absorb information, its clear design makes it a quick and useful reference guide particularly for staff for whom English is not their first language.

The booklet gives a warm welcome to new industry staff and outlines the importance of tourism to the town and the key role staff play.

It lists major events and attractions, offers transport details as well as the basics of offering great customer care and the importance of making visitors happy.

The booklet complements Bitesize Bournemouth and the Bournemouth Ambassador, free online training course, which is promoted in the guide.

Although NCTA evaluation was carried out soon after distribution, feedback was very positive with 81% rating the handbook as very or quite useful. However several businesses did not recall receiving the handbook which will be addressed in the 2015 season.

Costs / resources: These included writing the content (3.5 days), design of booklet (1 day) printing (ÂŁ750) smf distribution. The booklet was relatively easy and cost effective to produce as the information was available from other sources which may not be the case in other destinations.

CONCLUSION This Welcome booklet has proved a cost-effective way of delivering resort information, and consolidating much of the content of the online Bournemouth Ambassador and Bitesize Bournemouth seminar in one print format. However, information had to be general to avoid being time-sensitive. It proved popular with the industry who requested extra copies in print and online.