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Saturday, January 16, 2010

Our Very Own NYC Splash Down

Can it be a year already? I was actually taking the only nap I would take all year at the precise moment Sully brought his US Airways airplane down for a miraculous landing on the Hudson RIver, directly behind my home. And now here we are just one week from taking USA Tour Pros for what we believe will be our first spectacular landing in NYC!

For the past two months, a team of Alice Devereaux, Pat Neimeyer of USA Student Travel and I have been organizing a 3-day NYC FAM Trip/NYC Sightseeing Guide Exam Study Session, to be held January 22-24, 2010 in Manhattan. And now is our time to start making big news across the Hudson. And we couldn’t be better prepared.

Despite the sinister scheduling of a competing, similar event scheduled just two weeks before ours by someone of questionable integrity, we managed to pull in three times the number of participants because our event will be that much better.

For a bit of background, USA Student Travel (USAST) approached me in late October 2009 about leading a training session on group touring in NYC which coincided perfectly with our plans to do such an event all along. This opportunity pushed us to implement what we were planning to do a lot sooner. Once USAST agreed to allow me to open up the session to Tour Pros not currently employed by USAST, many new friends came onboard. The fact that we were going to include a full-day study session for assisting our participants in passing the NYC Sightseeing Guide exam made everyone that much more interested. And, rather than having a web site that talks about wanting to help others in the industry, we are doing it.

We’ve been so fortunate to have this new partnership with USAST, as they are longtime pros and well-respected within the student tour industry. Constant support from Vice President Pat Neimeyer and owner Bruce Bitnoff has made our event one not to miss. Early on we had to deal with the distraction from the previously referenced colleague who bent my ear to find out our plans on November 3, 2009, only to turn around less than 10 days later to announce he was hosting a similar event—just two weeks before ours. The industry is not so large that nonsense like that isn’t shared amongst upstanding friends throughout the country.

So, if competition was what he sought, we were game. And just like we did when a former training school boss basically suggested we needed his blessing to do anything in the industry, we took the hubris in stride. We decided to buckle-down and make our weekend the premiere event. With the backing of USAST, we moved our event from our originally scheduled Jersey City, NJ location, to a world-class hotel in the heart of Times Square. When weather became a concern for some of our potential participants, we made sure EVERYONE involved in our event was covered with USAST’s generous, supplemental travel insurance. We decided we would cover all transportation for the group once at the hotel, whether they are riding on our STARR coach, the MTA’s efficient subway system, or on the Hudson River. While other FAM trips rely on a local double-decker tour bus with a script-reading, puppet City Guide babbling on, we countered with scheduling our 5-hour, interactive, training city tour!  Throw in admissions to three top attractions, four meals and it would seem like a really sweet weekend, but we weren’t done yet.

After hours and hours of collaboration and research, we wrote, printed and distributed electronic and hard copy version of both our NYC Study Pack  (of 250 possible exam topics to research), and our info-stuffed, 55-page NYC Training Guide, which we believe will become the gold standard resource manual for Tour Pros of all levels of ability on tour in NYC.

But even better than all of that, we will actively seek honest feedback from our participants as to how we can improve the entire event for the next time. We want to know what they think of our hotels, our restaurants, our itinerary, our Study Pack, our Training Guide, our presentation on both the coach and in the classroom….everything! Rather than roll-out the same, tired, FAM trip formula others employ, we’ve challenged ourselves to provide a more personal experience through constant communication and support all along the way. and that means from the release of the event’s information, through the processing of payment, to the arrival and execution of the event.

This is our first major Training event of what we believe will be many in the future, in cities like Washington, DC, Boston, and San Francisco. We love a challenge and we’re looking to live up to our motto: Leading the Way!

We hope to see you in NY