Students Billy, Aden, Callum and Jess share their experience of creating their own resort as part of the module.
We developed a 'fun-cational' resort theme park called Howard Castle Resort. The idea was based on guests going on a journey through time, with lands and attractions based on Vikings, the medieval era, and old vintage funfair, and a futuristic steampunk land, all with unique attractions such as Paradox, a dark ride based on a time machine.
In this module, we learned about marketing and how brand identity is something that is highly valuable to a company. We looked at how certain colours convey very different emotions - we then used purple in our resort logo to identify the rich history and luxury of the Greystoke Castle in Cumbria, where our attraction would be based.
Along with being creative, as a group we understood the importance of making sure our attraction was highly accessible so that anyone who visited could have a fantastic experience. We developed concepts such as a sensory bag, with items such as park-specific communication cards and sensory-friendly toys and much more, which was proudly one of many projects we delivered in our presentation to the Alton Towers 'dragons'.
During this module, everyone in our group had different roles during the development of the attraction and during the presentation. These roles varied from hotels, food and beverage director to accessibility director, operations and marketing director, and my role in human resources and guest excellence. Alongside working together, we created fantastic informative booklets which we presented to the 'dragons' and were then used as supporting appendices for our assignment.
So, it reached presentation day on that Friday morning, nerves were high and 'dragons' arrived, and then the main presentation began. We first explained our mission, our competitors, and external factors that may affect the business, and there was a lot of anticipation of who from Alton Towers was coming to watch us present our project. Our presentation started with a quick game for them from our PESTLE table.
Following this, each member of the group had individual workshops and the dragons were split into groups, and each member of the Howard Castle team presented our ideas, explained and gave out fudge until we all finished and answered many challenging questions given to us by the dragons.
Ultimately, this was a challenging yet highly rewarding project which led to all students on the Visitor Attraction and Resort Management course being impressed with one another. The experience and new connections as a result of working on this project will ultimately help us in their future.
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