Founded forty years ago, Tourism for All is an independent charity on a mission to make travel open to everyone, no matter what disability or extra needs they might have. We teamed up with TFA to create a unique platform aimed at training up staff across the country to offer a specialist, accessible experience for all.
30+
Courses
50+
Organisations
500+
Users
People remember people
TFA’s disabled friends said they were much more likely to revisit a place, and recommend it to others, if they’d had a welcoming experience and service from the people who work there. They said it was just as important as the facilities provided. The way staff behave, and the service offered, can bring huge benefits to businesses. TFA saw this as an opportunity to provide better training in this area and asked if we could create an online platform aimed at inspiring and educating people on the possibilities of accessible tourism.
Exploring far and wide
During the Discover & Plan phase AB helped define the brief and scope the platform requirements. Whilst we considered off-the-shelf platforms we felt creating a highly tailored solution ourselves would provide the best user experience and scope for future enhancements.
Training with a difference
The new platform offers a bespoke toolset, allowing TFA to build online courses covering all aspects of customer service – from disability and awareness training to more specialised and technical courses. The platform uses a modular approach to course creation, with each module containing interactive features to let students learn at their own pace by discovering knowledge, rather than simply reading information. There’s also a test function at the end of every module, allowing students to recall what they’ve just learnt and receive a certificate when they’ve passed. The modules are assembled into courses – each with their own introduction – and can easily be adapted depending on the training required. You can choose your own content, text, images, video and sound clips.
Larger organisations can host their own specific training courses within the platform, complete with their own branding. This allows them to present professional, tailored courses to businesses, branches or outlets. Companies currently hosting their own courses include Visit England, Visit Scotland and the British Beer & Pub Association.
The bespoke platform also allows the course hosts to collect and visualise data on who’s been using what, when and how successful the training was.
Commissioning AB to build our training platform has proved to be very cost effective – and a real success. The training platform AB built for us has all the flexible course building functionality we were looking for – and no complex (and expensive) functionality that we won’t use. And because it is tailored to our specific requirements, it is easily usable and manageable by staff and volunteers from all backgrounds and with all levels of experience.
Raymond Veal – Chief Executive Officer, Tourism for All UK
