Introduction

We have just 15 or 18 hours together in this unit – usually in 5 or 6 sessions of 3 hours each.    This does not represent a lot of time together for such a ‘broad canvas’… culture…museums….marketing…business – the lot!

We will address it in ‘blocks’ in the same way we did in M1.  Each block will generally consist of three elements, as you will recall:

Set up –>   Working Together  –>  You delivering some outcome & me giving feedback.

Framework and Outputs Required

Block 1.    Introduction

(In 2023,Wednesday morning 29/11)

• Business and Management orientation: the ‘Blending the Business’ model (inc SWOT & STEEPL/PESTEL).   Just what are all organisations (commercial, private, public and voluntary) trying to do?
• A tourism ‘orientation’ quiz – to help you understand the development, scope, scale, function, flows, impacts, importance and  challenges of Tourism.  Just how important is Tourism to France culturally and economically? (TJ F/B)
• Definitions of our three foci: Tourism (TJ F/B), Culture (TJ F/B)  & Marketing (TJ F/B) as a the function of business in which you are most likely to become involved in your Museums career. What do they mean to you and how do the ‘experts’ regard them?  To produce definitive definitions.  Start this by asking yourself the key question words: Who, What, When, Where, Why and How (as we did in M1) and applying them to Tourism, Culture or Marketing as directed then get together in teams, share your thoughts and produce a written, narrative definition. (TJ F/B)
• Tourism in France: scale, scope, structure and the why and the how of state involvement. General reasons for state interest TJ F/B.   Interest by Ministry TJ F/B.   French state financial involvement in Tourism (TJ F/B).  Has France been doing enough over the years to adequately / appropriately support this sector?
• Open Debate:
  • is there such a thing as: ‘The Tourism Industry‘?
  • what is its end product / what does it produce?
  • is it in fact a product or a service, a mix of the two or something else entirely?

Task to do (assessed) ready to be handed in, in class, in a printed form for our next meeting on 6th Dec in 2023:

Personal Tourism Experience Analysis

PART A.  [INDIVIDUALLY ASSESSED]

This is to be done INDIVIDUALLY by HALF of the members of your M2 group (please split Part A and Part B as evenly as possible between you).  Please produce this as a Word document (in English or in French), print it out and hand it to me in class on 6th Dec. I know that this might not seem to give you a lot of time, BUT I am not asking you to do research here, but rather to think about a personal experience you have had and know very well and analyse and evaluate it (not merely describe!).

YOUR TASK: Identify, analyse and evaluate your very best Tourism experience:

• What made it so?    Take a step back and analyse and evaluate why this was the case. [Do NOT merely ‘describe’ it – the description is only the start!].  Here are some Qs you should be thinking about to get you started….
  • Was it down to the excellence in design and planning of a tourism product or service or had someone gone further to look at the offer from the tourist’s perspective as the potential to have a rich and enjoyable ‘experience’?  ….
  • Was it just plain luck?  ….
  • Was it that your expectations were appropriately set up by the information you had before the visit
  • Was it the staff you encountered?
  • Was it the ambience?
  • Was it the result of the organiation having made wise investments in good facilities
  • Was it the people you were travelling with or encountered?
  • Was it something to do with you and your carefree attitude and approach to things?
  • Was it a combination of some of these?
  • Was it something else entirely?
  • What was it exactly that made it really work well for you and who would have been most directly responsible for this successful experience and why?
    • if you were the Managing Director of the organisation, can you pinpoint the key business functions and perhaps even particular members of staff (their positions) who have been primarily responsible for this success: the people you really must retain as your employees at all costs.

Be prepared to discuss your experience with your colleagues in our class in the morning of 6th Dec  – especially your anlyses and evaluations.

PART B.  [INDIVIDUALLY ASSESSED]

This is to be done by the other HALF of the members of your M2 group.  Please produce this as a Word/PDF  document (in English or in French) and submit it to me in printed form in class on 30th November.  I know that this might not seem to give you a lot of time, BUT I am not asking you to do research here, but rather to think about a personal experience you have had and know very well and analyse and evaluate it.

Identify your very worst Tourism experience:

• What made it so?    Take a step back and analyse and evaluate why this was the case. [Do NOT merely ‘describe’ it – the description is only the start!].

• Was it down to the poor design and planning of a tourism product or failure to look at the offer from the tourist’s perspective  ….
• Were your expectations (based upon publicity / advertising material) just to high to be attainable
• Was it just plain bad luck?  ….
• Was it the poor quality / attitude of the staff you encountered?
• Was it the unattractive / non-existent ambience?
• Might it have been a matter of lack of investment in decent, modern facilities?
• Might it have had something to do with poor visitor management?
• Was it the people you were travelling with or encountered who impinged negatively upon your ability to enjoy the product/service…?
• Was it a combination of some of these?
• Was it something else……?
• What was it exactly that made it go so spectacularly ‘wrong’ for you and who would have been most directly responsible for this and why (I am looking for the real root cause here – you may have only seen/experienced the symptoms of it!)?
  • if you were the Managing Director of the organisation, can you pinpoint the key business functions and perhaps even particular members of staff (their positions/functions) who were likely to have been primarily responsible for this highly negative experience: the people you really must consider replacing or at very least retraining.
  • What should have been done to get this right in the first place?
  • What needs to be done now to ensure it never happens again?

Be prepared to discuss your experience with your colleagues in our class on 6th Dec – especially your anlyses and evaluations.

Experience Analysis IN CLASS  OUTPUT 6th Dec 

Drawing Conclusions and Recommendations

[To be produced together by sharing our experiences analyses & evaluations and brainstorming  based upon your individual contributions.  Assessed as a group]

Logically, if we have a list of issues underpinning a great Tourism experience and a log of those causes of Tourism experience disasters we should be able to establish a set of principles and practices most likely to result in high levels of tourist satisfaction with their experience and low risk of bad experiences occurring.

You should find this exceedingly useful throughout your future career.

The industry – yes even Museums – are beginning to talk about a critical new funtion and position: The Visitor Experience Manager / Architect.

What would this post ‘look like‘? Let’s brainstorm up a Job Description and Person Specification.  Then let’s look online and see what we can find to improve / extend our JD & PS.

Would you like such a post, I wonder…….?

Block 2.  Exploring Tourism

(In 2023 on Thursday 7th December: morning – time and Block 1 completion permitting) .

Team topics set in the following areas and addressed in parallel in class. [30 mins for preparation + 30 mins for 4 x 5-8 minute presentations of your findings]

• T1. Tourism used to be seen as a product or a service, but now Tourism managers are beginning to see it as an experience.  Where does the tourist’s experience begin and end [map a particular experience like a restaurant or theatre visit from the idea to go, choosing the place, forming your expectations etc – right the way through the experience and on to post-experience when you reflect upon how it went] and what are the implications for Management? (TJ F/B)

• T2. The Alsace Tourism Observatory  http://www.clicalsace.com/ – and the Grand Est Version what  value to the Tourism Industry in Alsace – particularly to museums?  What does it do/provide and where and how can it help decision-making by Museum managers considering engagement with and operations in tourism

• T3. To what extent might Alsace possess an identifiable and sufficiently distinct, unique and attractive culture to be able to be successful in the international and French ‘Cultural Tourism’ markets?

• T4. Alsace Museums have an interesting set of strategic marketing choices …. What would you do to increase their visitor numbers: why and how? – they might, for example:
  • try independently to draw new visitors into the region from France or further afield specifically to visit their museums   OR   and/or
    
  • compete harder to persuade more tourists already coming to the region to visit their sites  OR   and/or
    
  • co-operate with other cultural attractions or engage in ‘co-opetition‘ [cooperating at times with those in the cultural sector and at other times directly competing with them]. OR   and/or
  • Broader co-operation across any and all sectors looking to promote Alsace abroad (food and drink, tourism etc)
  Your problem is that you are likely to find that Museums’ budgets are heavily skewed towards the site and the collections rather than marketing – and as a result you are unlikely to be able to do everything on your own – especially when it comes to marketing independently internationally…. you’ll have to prioritise…

  IN RESERVE: How might museums ‘ride on the back’ of existing general or cultural Tourism events and promotions? Create an innovate and low cost approach to attracting British visitors to the Alsace Christmas Markets and then to your museums and cultural attractions.

Task to prepare for our next meeting : take 15 minutes to familiarise yourself with the ColmarCo company outline to which I will direct you …. our next three sessions will be based upon it…

Blocks 3, 4 and (possibly – time permitting -) 5.

ColmarCo Realistic Work Environment  

BACKGROUND:

• ColmarCo is my company in the Tourism Industry
• I am your boss
• You are small teams of senior personnel who direct the various divisions of ColmarCo
• I have drawn you away from your desks to a special ‘away-day-and-a-half‘ so we can reflect upon how we are doing, where the problems and opportunities lie and address them.  [For the purposes of this exercise, I am ignoring CoVid – but we might reflect upon it later]

• These three half-days will be focused on three key issues:
  • BLOCK 3. PERFORMANCE: A candid analysis and evaluation of our overall performance (in financial and operational terms), and divisional and brand performance.  Some components of our business are clearly failing, whereas others appear to be performing spectacularly well.  We perhaps have some unpleasant decisions to make concerning our poorest performers in order to release funds to invest in our success stories…  Other things that might help us in our anlyses:
    • Blending the Business representation.
    • Boston Consulting Group Matrix: Stars, Cash-cows, Question marks and Dogs … which of our brands’ performance suggests which of these four options and what does it mean?
  • NB.  Don’t worry!!! … If you can add, subtract, use a calculator to multiply or divide with a calculator, you can do this!  There are no formulae to handle – almost all of this is simple common sense and puzzling things out.  The beauty of this is the fact that from some very basic analysis of some very simple figures you can identify individuals (their positions) or business functions which/who deserve praise or the sack!
  • BLOCK 4. PEOPLE. Unacceptable levels of labour turnover.  Our labour turnover rates are catastrophic. Our hard-earned profits are constantly being ploughed into a gigantic and constant cost-covering exercise of replacing management and operational staff who seem to leave us almost as fast as they arrive. Either we are recruiting and selecting the wrong people OR we are getting the right people but not making their working lives attractivve enough for them to want to stay… OR maybe both.  This HAS to be changed TODAY.  How do we turn the situation around?  I am reminded of my old Senior Lecturer’s comment: « Companies don’t make profits – People do! »….  No links or material on this – you need to think it through.
  • BLOCK 5. PREDICTION & PLANNING. Vision and strategy: where should we be going [Ends] and how can we get there in the most effective, economic and efficient way [Means]?  …  Strategy = ends + means.  I commissioned a global scenario projection from the world-renowned UHA University Scenarios and Stragegies Think Tank.  Your task will be to envision the future of your ColmarCo divisions and brands within this Scenario and to consider:
    • the degree of threat(s) to each of our brands and whether and how they might be overcome.  Can the brands be maintained as economically viable contibutors to ColmarCo?  If not, when and how do we dispose of them as painlessly as possible?
    • the opportunities that are presented for:
      • our existing brand portfolio and how we might seize them
      • new product/service/brand development and how we might achieve this
    • What might the overall ‘shape’ of ColmarCo look like in 10 years time when cast forward into this scenario?
      • what divisions will we have?
      • what will our brand portfolio look like
      • where in the world will the bulk of our business and profits come from?

____________________

ASSESSMENT

______________________________

As your boss and ColmarCo’s CEO, I will be assessing the quality of your Block 3 + 4 + 5 analyses, evaluations and creative solutions….  your career is on the line here: we have our proverbial ‘backs against the wall’ as a company and we cannot afford to ‘carry deadwood‘…..  [Out of role and as Tony the Tutor, I will be assessing all three of the above role play elements.]

MARKING.  I will produce a ‘base’ mark for each team’s work based upon its content and the extent to which you have maintained an analytical and evaluative approach to the question/topic.  I reserve the right to moderate this base mark up or down for ‘conspicuous’ individual performance.   Any written précis will receive a team mark.