Hotel room sales increase by 11%

A leading Northern Ireland marketer has advised the hospitality sector to improve their customer service for the increasing numbers of tourists coming to the province.

There were 178,000 rooms sold in hotels in June 2012, an annual increase of 11%. While businesses in Belfast enjoyed the biggest boost, other parts of Northern Ireland are seeing the benefits.

Customer Sense’s Lynda Willis believes that tourism in Northern Ireland is taking off and that the hospitality sector needs to wake up and provide worldclass customer service. 

"It is great news to see more visitors enjoying Northern Ireland," she said. "We want these visitors to enjoy their time here and stay here longer.  We are naturally friendly people but we need to focus more on providing a warm welcome to our visitors.”

Lynda works with the Northern Ireland Tourist Board in delivering the internationally acclaimed WorldHost Programme to the hospitality sector here. 

“After people have visited our topclass visitor attractions such as Titanic Belfast and the Giant’s Causeway Visitor Centre, we want them to have topclass customer service in our hotels, restaurants and bars.  With this increase in visitor numbers, Northern Ireland is now very clearly on the world tourism map so we need to ready to meet and greet them.  Programmes like WorldHost can really help with this.”

The WorldHost Programme is a two day course focusing on the principles of customer service and increasing delegates knowledge of their local area.  For private businesses in the hospitality, tourism and passenger transport sectors, the course only costs £20 per delegate with the Department of Employment and Learning kindly funding the rest.

To find out more, please email lynda@customersensetraining.co.uk.