Tourism Guide for Accommodation Providers

This quick reference guide for accommodation providers directs you to information within the Tourism South East website that covers the important topics that affect your business.  You can discover guidance for business start ups, training, quality, market intelligence and marketing.  Please do browse our website for further insight into the broad range of services and support initiatives that we can provide.

Business Start Up

If you are just starting your business our Business Advice Handbook is full of information, advice and contacts aimed specifically at tourism businesses.  The handbook is in an updatable format and is designed to be a practical tool during the early stages of your business development and as an invaluable resource as your business grows.

Training

Your customers will remember you for your great customer service.  However, continuing to develop your teams’ skills is a challenge especially when time and money are limited.  Our courses can be integrated to your own training programme as an in-house course or through training your own trainer, or you can participate in one of our open courses.  

All training courses are designed exclusively for tourism and service sector businesses so you can be assured that the content is directly relevant.  Funding and subsidies are often available so check out the current training course list for the latest information.  You might also like to take advantage of the free online interactive courses available to support staff induction or refresher training.

Quality

In order to remain competitive, it is imperative for businesses to constantly seek to improve the quality of their product.  Star ratings remain a key part of the decision making process when business and leisure visitors decide where to stay.  Tourism South East can provide you with details of national quality assessment schemes that encompass food, facilities and service.  Take a look at the video case studies or listen to the podcast – you could be inspired to take a fresh look at your business and identify ways to improve the quality of your offer and offer customers better value for money.

How’s Business?

Tourism South East is an industry leader in providing market intelligence to enable organisations to monitor their performance.  Whether you are providing B&B, Self-Catering or Hotel accommodation, measuring your business performance against similar organisations is an essential part of running a successful business.     An intelligence update is published monthly to provide the very latest vital industry statistics and the latest news from around the region.  Overseas and Domestic visitor profiles and accommodation occupancy are also strategically important to your business operation and Tourism South East provide the latest available data.   We rely on businesses like yuors to participate in these surveys so please do sign up to take part.

Marketing Opportunities

It goes without saying that marketing and promoting your business is fundamental to its success.  Finding affordable and relevant marketing opportunities can be time consuming and this is where Tourism South East can deliver significant return on your marketing budget.  Tourism South East members enjoy many marketing and promotional benefits that include exposure in national press, PR, online and web advertising and exhibitions. This is both to the British and overseas visitors and either to individual consumers or group trade.  Take a look at our campaigns to identify how you can take advantage of the marketing opportunities available.

Membership

There are many ways to keep up to date with Tourism South East activities and industry news.  You can start this right now by signing up for our monthly e-newsletter.  Take a few moments to enter your email address and you will automatically receive the next edition.  As a Tourism South East member you can meet fellow industry professionals and experts at Tourism South East’s Annual Members’ Conference, Tourism Council and area events.  Top-flight speakers from the industry addressing the issues that matter most to businesses has made them ‘must be there’ events.  In addition,  informal events are hosted at member venues providing a relaxed environment for networking opportunities with members of the Tourism South East team.

Tourism South East members receive benefits that provide genuine cost savings on a range of services and business support.  The guideline below is just one example:

Contact your local area tourism representative for more information.

Hampshire, Marietta
Isle of Wight, Marilyn
Berks, Buck and Oxon, Jeanette
Kent, Maddy
Surrey, Marietta
Sussex, Maddy