Conference

Last week we attended the annual conference of our Association – the British Holiday & Home Parks Association 

With over 500 delegates in the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre near the Houses of Parliament was very well supported and we came away with some new ideas and with the added benefit of a couple of days chatting with our colleagues about the economic climate and the many issues surrounding the running of holiday parks.

I was asked to speak about our experiences with the customer feedback system launched by the BH&HPA during 2010 and I was happy to share our experiences with the delegates. I hope my presentation will encourage more parks to join which I believe will enable us all to raise our standards and quality to benefit our customers. Over 400 parks took part in 2011 and we would like to see this double in 2012 so that we have a wide range of responses and comments.

We have gained a lot of information and guidance from the comments made by our customers and although we accept that it is impossible to ‘please all the people all the time’ we hope to improve our service so that we can ‘please nearly all of the people all the time’. We have already changed some of our practices and routines and over the winter we have looked at several options in response to customer suggestions.

The conference finished with a very inspirational speech by Ben Fogle, Transatlantic rower and Adventurer, which has set us up for the challenges of 2012 with the Diamond Jubilee and Olympics