Your Club in Your Region - Luton - Report
Margaret and I headed south down the M1 to the above meeting today. It was nice to meet the likes of Peedee and Trucker4steve from Club Together and Phil a fellow Champion and also to have a good chat with the Club Chairman and Vice Chairman.
The afternoon was split into three seminars, the first hosted by Andrew Morris who runs the Club Media IT. He outline the recent changes to the Club website to make it more modern. There were some amazing figures on how many hits the site gets. He acknowledge there were issues with the revamped website but he said that with in the next week many of the issues raised on Club Together will be resolved.He mentioned that future work would involve making the site more assessable to smart phones and tablets.
Next Ken Faulkner went through the Club's Overseas offer including site and ferry bookings. Some members raised the issue of costs of the longer crossings. He warned that these crossing don't make much money and they are threatened by new rules which require the use of more expensive and cleaner fuel and there were worries whether these route would survive these changes. Margaret's ears pricked up when he mentioned an escorted trip to St Petersburg in Russia as she would love to attend the ballet there.
Last but not least Nastasha gave us an interesting and informative talk on the Club booking and cancellation system. There were lots of stats which were very interesting. She explained how they gather feedback from Club Together/Member Surveys/ Misc Feedback. Although having collated all this data there is little firm evidence that a change in what we currently do would actually solve the perceived problems. The introduction of the 72 hour cancellation has reduced the numbers considerably but not eliminated them. No shows are at a low level of about 0.5 of total bookings.
All in all it was a worthwhile session although a little disappointing that only about 50/60 people attended. Even more interesting that in that number how few actually have use Club Together.
David