USATP Blog //

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Save your tour by addressing mistakes

by Adam Della Rocca, Guest Blogger/General Manager of Popa Paradise Beach Resort (exclusive discount offer for Tour Pros at article’s end)

I was honored when Tom invited me to guest write on the USA Tour Pros blog. His passion for Tour Directing and his constant sharing of knowledge throughout his career before and during the establishment of USA Tour Pros has been a huge help and encouragement to others. As a way of repaying some of the knowledge I have learned “on the road” generously shared by tour directors, I would like to share something that I have learned that has helped me in my Tour Directing and in my life.

It’s about making mistakes. The best tour directors aren’t the ones who never make mistakes. The best tour directors are the ones who can best handle mistakes.

Our job as a Tour Directors is to be the “metaphorical umbrella,” shading and protecting our guests from any mishaps, hiccups and minutiae of travel. In order to facilitate an enjoyable, memorable experience, we are there to take care of all the things that can take away from that experience. That is the number one reason that escorted tours are so popular.

Yet every once in a while, something happens that does affect the guests negatively. These mishaps, whether your fault, somebody else’s or just Murphy’s Law, can be handled well, effectively turning a negative situation into a positive experience or they can be a negative experience exacerbated into a worse one. A Tour Director stands at the crossroads.

Mistakes can be small: a restaurant reservation is delayed by 15 minutes by the prior group, a small traffic jam puts you a little behind schedule, a couple who asked for two twin beds, were booked into a room with one king. Mistakes can be big: a motor coach breaks down, hours from any mechanics or repair shops; NYC suffers from a massive blackout effectively forcing your tour to a standstill; your entire Fall Foliage tour is rained out; a tour passenger dies (all things that have happened to me and I am sure many of you).

My reaction to those situations and many others made me the Tour Director I am today.

Mistakes happen. Humans are fallible and as much as we try to hide it from our guests, so are Tour Directors. Once you accept that, you look to mistakes not as a foul-up and a tarnishing of your reputation in front of your group, but instead as an opportunity to shine.  There is an inverse relationship between how smooth my trips would go (in my mind) and how much in tips I earned at the end of a trip.  The same inverse relationship applied to my enjoyment of the trip. If a trip went smoothly, I did well with tips, and I was bored. If a trip was full of mishaps and craziness, it was exhilarating for me and I ended up with a pocketful of large envelopes at tour’s end. I took every mistake as an opportunity to shine.

Am I saying that we need to purposely make mistakes or feign disorganization to make us look good when we “fix” what went wrong? Absolutely not.  I knew of a Tour Director who used this as his modus operandi. Drivers, vendors and hotel managers would often tell stories about his outbursts. I could never understand why the tour company still employed him. Their reason was that his surveys came back with outstanding reviews. I always was tempted to ask the company to not only judge their tour directors on their reviews but the repeat business that they drew in. For I am sure, that this tour director, in particular used the tour company as his scapegoat, making him look like the hero, fixing all the mistakes of the “flawed” itinerary.

A tour that runs smoothly is a pleasure and we still have plenty of opportunities to prove our worth during a normal tour. Yet mistakes are not to be feared but instead to be tackled head-on and seen as opportunities to shine.

I often draw on the expertise of Danny Meyer, the New York City restaurateur (Union Square Café, Gracmercy Tavern, Tabla, the Shake Shack, etc.) who writes in his book Setting the Table, about addressing mistakes.

Meyer sums up the “Five A’s of Effectively Addressing Mistakes”:

Awareness: Taking the temperature of your guests through open communication will bring your attention to mistakes or problems before they become unsolvable. Put the microphone down every once in a while and listen to your passengers.

Acknowledgement: “There seems to be an issue with the tour coach’s computer. We are going to pull into the nearest rest to further investigate.” Tour passengers are the biggest rubber-neckers. If they see you dealing with something out of the ordinary they want to know immediately what is going on. Satiate their curiosity with calm, reassuring and informative updates.

Apology: “I want to apologize for the obvious delay in our itinerary. We will do our best to make sure we see and do what we planned on.” An apology goes a long way. An excuse or blame falls short. “If we hadn’t been late leaving our last destination, we would have time to deal with this.” “The driver should have checked this when we were at our last destination.” Even if it is absolutely someone else’s fault, never pass blame. Your guests are keen enough to know whose fault it is. When you blame someone, the sympathy shifts away from you to the person you are blaming.

Action: “We are going to have to eliminate the time we have allotted at the gift shop, but we will make that up to you tomorrow at __________ where they sell similar items and our schedule has more room to play around with.” Say what you are going to do and follow through with it.

Additional Generosity: “We wanted to thank you for your patience and understanding in dealing with the unanticipated change in plans. ABC Tours Int. would like to offer you each a complimentary glass of wine this evening with dinner.” If companies don’t allow for these extraneous expenses, use an extra photo-stop that you had been planning anyway as a generous offering or something similar. “Because of that delay yesterday, we were thinking it would be nice to spend some time off the bus at this beautiful lookout we will be passing later today.”

One of the first things I had to learn to do as a Tour Director was to paint a picture of confidence. This was especially true when things weren’t going so well. I was 21 years old when I was directing my first tours and the expectation of my passengers was always that I was too young. I usually put any of their fears aside with a confident and self-assured approach and easy demeanor during my first couple of hours with them. Yet the minute things went wrong, I could tell all eyes were on me. I developed a grace-under-fire attitude by pretending there was a mirror in front of me. I never wanted to show my true emotion, which at times was panicky, frightened, unsure, so I held my composure and noticed that the emotion I conveyed, my guests picked up on. This only gave me more confidence and eased my inner turmoil, a self-fulfilling system.

The last lesson that I have learned on addressing mistakes is to always match your apology to the mistake. If I react strongly to someone’s bag being lost and am profusely apologetic, it will look ingenuous if I react the same way to someone who just didn’t enjoy their meal. The second guest may feel like they need to be more upset than they actually are, because of my reaction. The first guest will question my sincerity after seeing my second reaction.

In the end, people make mistakes and mistakes happen on tours. If we learn from our mistakes and address them correctly, the lessons learned, the feedback gained and the tips pocketed will only grow.
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Panama’s Popa Paradise Beach Resort (http://www.popaparadisebeachresort.com) recently voted #1 Hotel in Panama on TripAdvisor.com, is offering a 10% discount on the casitas (free-standing, individual suites - some blackout dates apply) for all USA Tour Pros. Be sure to mention Tour Pros when inquiring about the discount!