Parkdean Resorts

Challenge: A new Exec board team had been brought together from outside the industry with one thing in common, very successful careers in customer focused business. The creation of a single business out of intense M&A activity over many years had resulted in a fractured culture based on command and control leadership.

Despite inheriting a difficult and often abrasive culture, many of the teams both in the head office and at the 67 holiday resorts remained passionate about one thing: their customers and the role they play in their time they spend at the resort. Unlocking this passion and putting it to work to improve the business through a better Employee and Customer Experience has been the driving force of our work. 2020 has been the most challenging year known to many of us and so the original project had to become agile and flexible to take into account the pressure on the front of house teams on park and the head office.

Actions: (1) We began with a full Exploring stage that informed the development and articulation of a new vision and values for the business. We talked to holiday makers who visited, lapsed visitors, holiday home owners to understand their emotional and rational investment in the resorts. This allowed us to create clear customer motivational segmentations and the desired customer experience. We engaged a wide cross section of the people of the business to engage them with the development of the vision and values so that they all felt a part of the new business and the culture it was seeking to grow.

(2) We conducted further conversations across the business to understand the current culture, its good and bad elements and to identify pain points and blockers to change. This report helped inform the board about the EX ahead and the support for change across the business. It identified many of the early adoption behaviours that had already started to develop and the critical role the Board members were playing through their behaviours and obvious focus on people.

(3) Covid 19 has delayed the official launch of the programme but the business has been soft launching the vision and values throughout the 2020 season and we have been running continuous online and face-to-face workshops to reinforce the vision and values down to operational level and then feeding back to the Exec board.

Results: - Parkdean Resorts delivered a successful financial performance in the most challenging environment and a level of occupancy unseen in living memory. Throughout the season this ran at over 90%. - The teams on park have managed not just the CX for the traditional customer base but a completely new group of customers who were unable to travel abroad and still had very high expectations of the experience they wanted.

- Holiday home sales have increased both in quality of returns and quantity. - Yield has increased via many of the improvements to the customer experience delivered in 2020 by the front-of-house teams on Park.