I started as ACE's new Director on Monday 5th October 2009. On arrival at the lovely London offices behind Oxford Street I was given a whirlwind tour of the offices, the systems and the team by Debbee Dale who had been standing in as interim Director since June (and doing a superb job I might add).
My feet were barely behind the desk before I was flying to Barcelona for the ABTA Travel Convention on Tuesday! I felt extremely lucky and excited about the four days. Debbee and I chatted away for most of the journey, doing my handover and briefing whilst in the air. The flight was 80% occupied by other convention delegates, many of whom were catching up with each other much to the bemusement of the other passengers who probably all felt like a spare part at a wedding.
On arrival at Barcelona it was clear we'd left the wintry England weather behind, it was a lovely 25 degrees. The first night was taken up with bumping into old friends and colleagues at the hotel bar and meeting new ones at the icebreaker party including ACE's competition winners Gary Hudson, Martin Hay, Richard Rochester and Katherine Doyle.
The convention was a heady mix of interesting convention sessions, cocktail parties, dinners, drinks receptions, trade fairs, forums, ship visits and a lot of alcohol and networking! I collected a huge number of business cards as I met so many interesting people, all of whom seemed to be having a great time - I was delighted with the opportunity to visit three ships in Barcelona; the Thomson Destiny, Royal Caribbean Navigator of the Seas and MSC Fantasia.
The Cruise Forum on the Thursday was fantastic, we had over 150 delegates. The forum kicked off with a presentation from Debbee on ACE's achievements so far - over 3,000 travel agency members, 35 cruise line members and over 20,000 agents trained in 2008! I then gave a brief overview on my plans for ACE including revamping and rebranding ACE events, retaining and increasing membership and new training modules coming online for cruise line products and destinations. The forum included a great presentation from Carol Marlow from P&O, a Q&A with Michael East and Jane Archer and a panel discussion with cruise lines and agents talking about the sticky issues of gratuities on ships and discounting cruise holidays in the recession.
I learned a huge amount in Barcelona and came away extremely motivated and more excited than ever to get into the ACE job and start work! During my second week I met with some of ACE's cruise line members to discuss plans for the UK Cruise Convention in 2010, wrote an article for Cruise News and learned how to operate ACE's comprehensive online system so I could answer agent queries regarding training and logging in and send out the weekly e-newsletter, 'Watermark'.
On Thursday 15th I was invited to the Mail Newspapers' box at the Royal Albert Hall for the International Ballroom Dancing Championships; something I was not expecting to enjoy but was thoroughly riveted, especially by some of the outfits (or lack thereof!!)
It's my third week and I now have the website programmers and creative team on speed dial, I've briefed the ACE team with my plans, designed and sent out a membership survey for ACE members to let me know their feedback on our benefits, and emailed all cruise line members with a huge list of questions and requests!
I'm absolutely delighted to be working with such a fantastic team; Adele & Nat who work exclusively on ACE, as well as Bill, Kat and Hayley at the Passenger Shipping Association and Penny, the PR Director for both ACE and the PSA. The office is incredibly busy and I'm sure many of our members will be shocked to learn that ACE is run by just three people - we are a small organisation with a big ambition. It is my aim to improve our benefits to members and get even more travel agents trained in cruise lines, destinations, cruise products and services and business skills. I want to offer more benefits to our ACE Ambassadors who have managed to get 600 points through ACE training and cruise experience, host a fantastic UK Cruise Convention in Southampton in 2010, publish a programme of inspirational events including ship visits, EXPOs and fam trips for our members and make our online training resources even more interesting, exciting and accessible.
I will be going on my very first cruise on 3rd November, on the P&O Aurora ship to the Med so watch this space as I'll be twittering and blogging my experiences!
See you soon,
Flo Powell
Director - ACE
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment