Nobody's Fault: Why Handovers Fail in High Season

Many tourism operators struggle with internal communication gaps during the peak season, completely losing track of vital updates the moment the rush hits. In this episode, Samantha Smits explains why relying on verbal handovers or expecting exhausted staff to remember every detail is a major risk for your business and reputation. Learn how to move away from constant finger-pointing and build a simple, central system that ensures crucial information travels seamlessly between shifts and departments. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The fix will not just be another policy, fake a rule book, another lecture during a meeting, another morning, but isn't there a way you can work on a system or an infrastructure to support your people? Hi, I'm Samantha Smith and welcome back to the Sustainability Edge, the tourism podcast. No Yargon, no fluff. We're breaking down sustainability and especially how to turn sustainability in a practical tool that gives you more profit, more time, stuff that's staying, and a business you can be proud of. Let's get started. Hello, hello, and welcome back again. Today we're talking about specific situation issue that keeps erasing during high season. And it's not really about someone forgetting a rule or skipping a stack. It really is information that exists in the business. Someone really knows the answer, but it never gets to the person who needs it to do their job properly, or in the moment they need it. And actually during the high seasons, there's more shifts. At least there's more shifts in the accommodation side. For the two operator side, it just means longer shifts. There's more stuff, more moving parts, and this gap's actually getting bigger. Listen, picture this first accommodation side. There's a day shift and uh guest in room 10 as for like checkout, or an AC in another room was acting up, and the technician said he'll be back tomorrow. Then the night shift comes, and none of the information has been handed over to them. And not because someone didn't care, but there wasn't really a moment, or they were too tired, and they went straight home. So it was really the information didn't really arrive to someone else. So the late checkout gets missed. Someone of housekeeping actually knocks on the door or opens the door while someone is still sleeping in, or the guest has to mention the AC again because no one came or no one fallen up, and these become like small frustrations where the staff at that shift has no clue who where this came from, or hey, why did no one tell me this? Which could easily have been prevented. And for Tube Rator, there is a similar gap, but of course, for Tupla, you don't have a day and a night shift. So something I see very often if we talk about visiting parks, I mean very specifically safari parks, for example, but any park really where permits is needed. The amount of times I hear that a vehicle gets stuck at the gate because a permit hasn't been paid yet. And then people are like, Oh, finance didn't pay. Then finance doesn't have all the information yet. They are waiting on someone from operations, then operation apparently was waiting for a passport or couldn't locate the passport number or made a typo or something, and then it gets directed back to sales. And at some point, the driver at the gate, they don't know everyone in the office. They're just blaming the logistic manager because they don't know the structure in the office. And the result is a lot of angry, frustrated people. While somewhere in the beginning, there allegedly is a structure that all of these things have to be manually forwarded and not can be found in a central location, which stopped a lot of people from doing their job and results in quite literally the guest experience being stopped. And they have no idea why. They don't understand, and the the information existed, it just never reached the person that needed to do something with it. So neither of these, I mean, I talk a lot about checklists and policies, and I guess here that's not really the case. There's not really a written rule on this, but it didn't just really reach the person, it lived in someone's hat, it stopped somewhere and it stayed there. So it's not really about people forgetting what they're supposed to do, but there is nothing in your business that carries the information themselves, the system itself does not really carry information from one person to the next. So the passport issue. I recently even got an extra detail on this that of course the strict privacy laws in the EU where quite some clients sometimes don't feel comfortable to send their passport ahead early. So then there has to be put a reminder somewhere, or someone has to magically remember. Okay, once they are actually in the country, I should immediately take a copy, immediately forward the operation, and they immediately should forward to the permit, and blah blah blah. Which is a shame because you want to do the permit months in advance, so there's a lot of touch points in there, of course. So I see this gap coming up in many different ways, both on the toolbrator side, both on the accommodation side, and it's usually just something, especially on the accommodation side, it's usually something passed along verbally, and I think on the tool operator side it's more of a data issue that it's not centrally accessible. But the consequence is always a confused guest that has no clue, of course, and they don't have to how back offices work. So for them it can look painful, they feel forgotten, are not taken seriously. And at the same time, especially in accommodation site, a staff member can feel like, why was there no clear handover to me? And in the two parade, it just creates sort of confusion because where did it come from? Who was responsible for this? So it's it can really be something invisible where probably no one had any bad intention, no one did anything wrong on purpose, yet this is something that especially keeps coming up in the rush season, in the high season, and then the results are only even bigger because sometimes even multiple of these issues happen at the same time, alongside each other, with different bookings, and these are also very often the reasons why you next to genuine emergencies, of course, why you still are for two operators calling at night, why there's still things outside of regular working hours, and it just keeps you very, very busy beyond the normal stuff client stuff you're already working with. It just keeps adding extra work, and very often people are just pointing fingers at each other, they did something wrong, no dareas are stuck, and owners feel like my team just needs to communicate better, and I mean technically yes, but at the same time, is that really the thing that will fix this for good? Once you see how often this happens, it's not worth asking what this is actually costing you, and then I mean for you as the owner, you can say my team should just do better, they should do a better handover, they should follow up more with each other and so forth. But at the same time, do you make it easy for them to do so rather than just giving them one location? And imagine this in the whole season, how this affects your rep your company and your reputation. One missed late checkout cost you a very awkward conversation. A guest again have to explain that they flagged an AC issue, it's cost a lot of irritation. And the driver stuck at the gate, oof that the freelance driver will be very frustrated, it costs you rep to the freelancer representing you, it costs your reputation to the clients traveling with you, for them it costs time that they would rather have spent inside the park rather stuck in front of it. It's stu it also in all these cases, someone has to apologize, someone has to represent, and if things really really escalate, not for necessarily these examples of refund eventually or any other complementary thing to make them forget. And it's not really like a system failure, it looks like a genuine emergency because enough genuine emergencies occur during this high season. But again, if you stack all of these up and compare them to genuine emergencies, every every shift change, every booking that passes through sales and logistics, driver guide, uh there's really a pattern where it's not just bad luck, but a gap that keeps existing every single time that information needs to move from one place to another, and that cost isn't just one invoice, but it's a lot of small frictions that add up to something bigger in your reputation, in your staff satisfaction, and so forth, and it just has also of course the guest experience and the team stations. So if the problem here really isn't it really is that information doesn't travel, isn't the fix the fix will not just be another policy, if a rule book, another lecture during a meeting, another warning, but isn't there a way you can work on a system or an infrastructure to support your people in this? Something more easier, what helps the information to change hands and to land where it should be. And if I hear, as I quite often do, compare to what a sustainability certification looks at, what requirements often relate to this, or what companies that are sustainability certified would do, is not something that most owners would maybe think about because again it's not another policy document. I know that certifications ask for a lot of policy documents, but it's about just like you for your clients, have like a central CRM, which is customer relation management, which is usually a table or a system. It's quite some of this could be in the CRM, but it could also be another system where people can tag each other, notify each other, where there is reminders. You can really make a whole digital system on this, which helps. I mean, of course, in the UG mail, emails can be snoozed and pop up later, people can work with calendars, but it really helps here to support your people with the system, especially if you ever apply for such a certificate, such a digital footprint also really helps with the supporting evidence, and just recognize that this is a big part of your business, and recognizing that such a handover is just a key business process, it can even be included in job description. I mean, a lot of these things you just consider them as a given, as a normal default, but by actually really I mean, I said no policy, but if you include them in the job description, by making them obvious, by making them out there, by having for a Swatch 2 operator central place where all the data is accessible for all relevant departments, you make everyone's life so much easier. And even for the accommodation side, because if they are running from one place to another and feel too busy to just sit down and note something down, if they even from their phone could access a Google Drive or there's a group WhatsApp or something where they can very quickly drop this just happened, or something just quick that even if they don't feel the give the full gist or the feel full context yet, that at least the first part has been shared somewhere so that the people reading it can properly follow up, oh we need more details on that, so that it's not forgotten, it has already been shared, and that way everyone helps each other to not let these things go. So the point is do not see it as a given, but but and just uh one of the default emergencies, the pop-up and high season. Really plan for it, build a sheet for it, build a system or infrastructure for it in your company. Because when information is a guaranteed way to travel through your business, you don't have to rely on the memory of your staff members or yourself, and good luck to guarantee a good gift experience, you have another something ruled out, you have again reduced the chance of these things to happen, which makes everyone, staff, guests, and you much much happier because it's one of the most frustrating mistakes in ICS, and the most frustrating mistakes in high season they're not really caused by people doing the job badly, they're people are just usually exhausted. Information is getting stuck between people who did their part, but the it didn't travel properly. So by building in such the handover, by building in a central system where all information can be accessed at all times, you don't rely too much on tired people. So if this is a topic that which now is raising any concerns in your head, questions, feedback, disagreements, agreements, do let me know. Do go down to the show notes, do find my LinkedIn profile, do find my email, and do let me know your thoughts. I would love to hop on a call with you and to discuss. And you hear me now and then mentioning sustainability certification. I recently did launch my new blueprint, which is called The First Three Steps to Tripling Bookings through sustainability, which is a bold claim to make, but I wouldn't make it if I didn't have a case study on it for a tool that actually got certified in sustainability, in this case by Travel Live specifically, and they tripled their business because of the agents they got. If that is an interesting path you would like to pursue, do download the footprint by going to my show notes to see the first three steps that help you to get into that direction. And it also covers some steps that have already been mentioned in the podcast in more depth or more directness. So I could ramble about this forever. We've already gone over quite some minutes. I would uh basically see you until the next episode. Bye. Thank you for listening and congratulations on investing your time today to think strategically about your future to make sure you never miss a step to understand sustainability better, how to grow your competitive edge. Follow the podcast right now, and if this was helpful, please leave a five star rating. It will help other people like you to find these tools. I'm Samantha Smith, and I'll see you in the next episode.