Tourism Excellence

Striving for service excellence

longest lunch

Perhaps the most challenging task in becoming a leading tourism destination is to lift the performance standards of  tourism operators. The most strategically planned and best executed marketing campaigns will quickly come unstuck if the on-the-ground service delivery does not meet, and exceed, customer expectations.

During the 1980s, Scandinavian Airline Service’s President, Jan Carlzon, coined the now famous phrase ‘moments of truth’. He analysed how many points of human interaction an SAS customer had from the time of enquiry or booking a flight, to driving home after the journey. He found there were a huge number of occasions when the airline’s reputation could be made or broken in the minds of a customer, through just one interpersonal encounter. His team proceeded to systematically review and improve all those points. Carlzon communicated that it was everybody’s responsibility, from baggage handler to pilot and CEO, to build the company’s reputation and, in doing so, secure their jobs. His ‘moments of truth’ remains a tenet of customer service training and is very applicable in the tourism destination scenario.

Improving standards is a challenge because low barriers to entry means that industry operators come from a wide variety of backgrounds. They often do not have business training and only limited awareness of the intensely personal interactions involved in running a small to  medium tourism business.

The itinerancy of operators often works against developing a body of knowledge and experience, from which the whole region can collectively benefit. The workload of running a small tourism business also means that it can be difficult for operators to find the time to attend professional development sessions, especially if held away from their home base.

However, it can be done. For example, many towns in Australia are now accredited as official ‘Aussiehost Towns’, which is awarded when 60% of a town’s registered businesses undertake the Aussiehost customer service training course.