Learned a lot from the course-Nina

The first learning I got from this course is the complexity of the industry of tourism. I traveled a lot previously, and had experiences of group tours and individual tours. I did not notice that the tourism industry is such a mystery industry. However, after taking this course I realized that every single components of a tour can be evaluated, monitored and analyzed with different methods. I may feel that one hotel is better than another before without knowing what factors contribute to my judgment. Now, after creating mystery shopping form with my team mates, I can tell more than 40 criteria that influence customers’ experiences at a hotel. I think participate observation is one of the most valuable and accurate method that could be used in managing customer experience in service industry because participate observation represents actual experience and how the customer feel about the service directly. The results from participate observation may provide outline of the gap between the experience expected by manager and the experience customer really have. See the amazing video.

Secondly, do not hesitate to try anything new. When we went to the Party boat tour, I did not plan to swim in the water, so I did not wear my swimsuit. However, I definitely regretted when the boat stopped and almost everybody on the boat jumped into the water. At that moment, I hesitated even though I really wanted to jump into the water. I did not convince myself at the first stop. After we departure from the first stop, I kept complaint about not wearing swimsuit to my friends, which made them crazy. Fortunately, we had a second stop. This time, I encouraged myself to jump regardless of fear or jumping in shorts and bra. That was amazing to jump into the water fro the top of out boat. I would never forget the feeling when I jumped from the boat and when I dropped into the water. I could not image how disappointed I would be if I had not done this. So, do not hesitate to o anything you are interested in as long as you can.

The last but not the least thing I learned from this course, or from G adventure is the effort of G adventure to sustainability of tourism. I really appreciated that our course chose G adventure as our analyzing customer. The most impressive thing is keeping the tour local. All the accommodations, transports and attractions of our tour are held by local companies. Foreign company owned hotels may have better condition and can provide upgrade lodgings, however, choosing foreign company owned hotels will not benefit local economy, sometimes even hurt local economy. What we want to see is a win-win situation where tourism will help local economy so that the destination would become better and better, and more people can enjoy the destination.