Amazing Hiking-Nina

Three of our team spent our second day in Paraty hiking to Grand Island. Our CEO explained details to us about what we are going to do, how long the whole activity will take, and what we should wear and take with us during the hiking. What I did appreciate is that our CEO reminded us to pack an extra shirt and shorts because my shirt was totally wet after hiking for three hours and I could not help myself to jump into the water at the second I saw the beautiful beach. Our CEO also did a great job of estimating time and energy needed for the hiking.

The most impressive moment of this experience is we scarified our sweats, even blood maybe, for unforgettable views and experience in our lives. Suffers will be paid off, sooner or later. Although the hiking process was not a real suffer, I did doubt why I was doing this when my skin was burning under the super shining Sun. Every single sweat drops were paid off when we saw our three fantastic beaches each by each. The picture below shows how beautiful the beaches are. 

                                                 

This experience will remind me not to give up when I am facing any difficult moments in my future life. And the picture below is the view we saw after we actually climbed onto a small hill using all our hands and legs.

What I learned from this climbing is that if you are willing to effort more, you will get better view.

Moreover, I was impressed by the efforts that local people took on protect their environment. All of these colorful billboards in the picture below, which was took at one of the beautiful beaches, are about environment protection.

However, on the other hand, this may present that the beaches were not protected well before or are not under good protection now.  Positively, people are noticing that they need to keep the beached clean so that more people could have the chance to enjoy the wonderful place. Reducing environmental impact to destinations is one of the concerns of G adventure. This company has done a lot (i.e. using public transportations) try to eliminate environmental impact to the destinations where their tours go.

Overall, the hiking is one of the most impressive and wonderful experiences I had during our trip. I enjoyed the beautiful views and the fantastic surfing experience after a three-hour hiking. The experience is actual a local living experience since we are the only foreigners on the beaches I believe. And our team member and our CEO took care of me when I hurt my big toe by accident on the beach. Thank you all! I will never forget this day wet wonderful day!

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.