Aspiring travel reps encourage college community to get ‘Travel Smart’

Travel and tourism students at Walsall College put their consultancy expertise into practice by running an event to help get students and staff get ‘holiday ready’.  Travel Smart saw 20 Level 2 students take on roles as travel advisors within a pop-up travel agent.

Their aim was to raise awareness of Travel Aware advice and share information about different types of summer vacation, including no frills holidays, sunshine offers, low cost travel and volunteering abroad.  Advice on staycations and free days out was provided too.

Through interactive challenges, event visitors were tasked with demonstrating their geographical skills by naming the capital cities of different countries as well as identifying the countries where specific buildings and landmarks were located.

The atmosphere of an overseas holiday was also bought to life through a mini food shack where international snacks could be sampled.

Lecturer, Suzanne Richards said she was delighted at how well her students engaged with everyone.

“This is the first time they shared their industry knowledge and customer service skills with other people and everyone came across as confident, friendly and knowledgeable,” she said.

Student, Leticia Francis was pleased by the event turnout.

“Everyone loves a holiday so we had lots of students and staff asking about what was available, how they could sign up for alerts on travel advice and save money in other ways,” she said.

“I’m much more comfortable now in talking to people in a professional way.  This is especially after I found myself giving information about coach trip deals, which was something we hadn’t planned on covering.

“We had a lot of positive feedback, which makes us feel we did a good job with everything and worked well together.”

Laurie Melia added that she would love to be involved in similar events in future.

She said: “Until now, we’ve only been able to do practical work together in class so being in a bigger public setting was a huge deal for us.  It’s bought us closer together as a group and shown us what more we can achieve in future.

“Seeing people at our different information stands that were interested in what we had to say and who took our information leaflets away with them made the whole experience worthwhile.