From time to time I’ve been invited to work with Jane Ashton and her team at First Choice, now part of TUI Travel plc. Jane understands the importance of enabling sustainable development to leave the safe haven of the CSR team, and spread virally through the organisation.
One way that First Choice encourages this is through tailored training for people in different parts of the organisation, whether they work in retail shops, in holiday destinations, liaising with local suppliers of accommodation and activities, or in teams that dream up the new products to sell to holidaymakers. I was delighted to be asked to work with Jane’s team and the Travel Foundation to develop this training.
Once piloted by First Choice, the training courses and materials were made generic, so that any similar business in the sector could use them. This won’t just help staff become more aware of sustainable tourism, it will also help them plan together how to rethink their own businesses to make them more sustainable.
You can access those training materials here.
October 2010 update: I had an email from Sue Hurdle of the Travel Foundation the other day. She says:
“I’m pleased to say I have just passed your super training manual to a new member of staff at one of our partner companies and they are very excited about it and intend to use it across the business.
I thought you might like to know your
efforts of several years ago are still yielding results! Thank you.”
Thank you, Sue, for letting me know!
October 25th, 2010 at 2:16 pm