Posts Tagged "tony jolley"

By tjolley on Jul 7, 2009 in Tonyversity View | 0 comments

Travelmole.com reports today (7th July ’09) that a company called ‘The Holiday Team’ is calling for far more co-operation in the teeth of this crisis in which company budgets are under such pressure (because, as we all know, the fastest way to produce a profit is to cut costs): “At a time when agents are reviewing costs on every level suppliers to the travel trade need to be innovative and offer something extra to help agents increase their profit in difficult times. Now is the time for businesses with shared commercial interests to work together to develop plans which will help to boost sales. This week we launched a commitment to our travel agency partners to assist them with marketing advice and support. And on a selective basis we’ll even offer a financial package to help with marketing.” Although glad that this sort of approach is finding greater favour nowadays, it is somewhat galling that it hadn’t ‘caught on’ in the industry far earlier as there have been no end of good examples and templates. For donkeys’ years we have been stuck on a roundabout (or ‘in a rut’, as you prefer) of cut-throat, dog-eat-dog competition where the thought of co-operation or ‘co-opetition’ is anathema. We are belatedly realising in this crisis that there are other avenues open to us, largely because we are discovering how wasteful all-out competition can be and that we have little alternative but to cooperate at some level because the budgets are no longer there at the level of the individual business. Good to see this cooperative approach stimulated, in this example, by the private sector, because, in fact, (and perhaps somewhat surprisingly), the public sector has, for some considerable time, been leading the way in developing Tourism partnerships and cooperative ventures and offering opportunity for the private sector tourism industry to get involved.  Take the Dorset and New Forest Tourism Partnership, for example: a visionary partnership initiated by all the local authorities of the region with the intermediary assistance of Bournemouth University and other NGO partners providing considerable ‘seedcorn’ monies up front over a period of years now, then securing EU matched funding to generate a considerable range of opportunities for the Tourism...

Crisis…. what crisis?

By tjolley on Jun 25, 2009 in Tonyversity View | 0 comments

Several things strike me the moment anyone talks about ‘the crisis’ or ‘La Crise’: things seem to be going on to all intents and purposes pretty ‘normally’ outside the office window the irresistible urge to say ‘Crisis?  What crisis?‘ after the title of a famous 1975 Supertramp album (Not that I can remember anything about the album, bar Roger Hodgson’s rather squeaky voice and his sneakily simple piano melodies that go round and round in your head whether you like it or not). with remarkable prescience, Captain Edmund Blackadder (with no little help from Messrs. Rowan Atkinson, Ben Elton and Richard Curtis) got it about right in the trenches in 1915 when he put it most elegantly that:  “This is a crisis, a large crisis. In fact, if you’ve got a moment, it is a twelve-storey crisis with a magnificent entrance hall, carpeted throughout; twenty-four hour porterage and an enormous sign on the roof saying: ‘This is a Large Crisis’. And a large crisis requires a large plan. Get me a ruler, two pencils and a pair of underpants.” Blackadder Goes Forth. Final Episode: ‘Goodbyeeee‘. (1989) The Tourism industry is worried.  Already there are rumours of large airline collapses and suggestions and projections of $9bn losses for the airline industry worldwide this year (I personally think that will prove to be an under-estimate).   Ryanair posted a loss of some $239m in June.  If that is for a June-June period then it includes 4 or 5 months before the ‘Crisis’ fully hit (if to the normal April year end, then 6 or 7 months)- and that is one of Europe’s two most successful low-cost operators who have generally been outperforming the flag-carriers for a number of years.  Ryanair’s principal competitor, easyJet posted a 6 month loss of some £129.8m in April this year.  If the fastest-growing, most popular and lowest-cost operators are performing at this level…. what are we likely to see of the others? For years Tourism has been considerin g itself a ‘necessity’: in a busy world, where the pressure is mounting on employees in a globally competitive environment run by technologies with which we are not equipped to keep up, then ‘downtime’: holiday, clearly becomes precious.  The...

By tjolley on Jun 25, 2009 in Tonyversity View | 0 comments

[A draft article I wrote  for the British Tourism Society focusing upon the point that it is the contexts and cultures in which ICT is to be embedded which determines how it looks, feels, is used and the degree to which it is successful rather than the technology itself.] Le Tourisme et les Nouvelles Technologies: TNT – just about says it all, really – it has considerable explosive potential.  However, as ever, it is not technology that is the important issue here, so much as the context in which it is employed; a realisation that dawned upon me most emphatically on the evening of my 17th birthday on the old Homesley Aerodrome in the New Forest some thirty-odd years ago when my Dad set me behind the wheel of the car for my first unofficial driving lesson with the words: “This is the first time you’ve had a loaded weapon in your hand – you can kill someone with this if you are not careful”.  The car is not the issue so much as the driver.  In information and communication technology (ICT) terms it is very much the same: it’s not what it is, so much as what you do with it that counts. In 2003, whilst still teaching Tourism at Bournemouth University, as part of the role of my Learning and Teaching Fellowship, I was engaged in talking to other universities about the potential involved in the use of the internet as a support tool for learning in a university ‘attendance’ (rather than distance learning) mode.  As part of this endeavour I was invited to the Université d’Haute Alsace (Mulhouse, France) to address and work with a faculty upon the development of a vision and a strategy for the application of ICT in learning and teaching. Certain things became immediately apparent: the degree of Faculty and individual lecturer autonomy (sovereignty, even) were very much stronger than in England in the light of such independence, the University ‘centre’ found it difficult either to lead or to impose new ICT initiatives and was looking for something to emerge from the faculties themselves. the largely collegiate nature of operation within Faculties and their Departments made it ‘difficult’ for coherent ICT initiatives...

Are you a publisher, co-author or reader of Poetry?

By admin on Mar 26, 2009 in Featured, Who are you |

Are you a publisher, co-author or reader of Poetry written by Tony Jolley seeking access to www.tonyverses.com? Tonyversity will route you via the link below to Tony Jolley’s poetry and lyrics site Tonyverses where you can access what he has written, comment, get in contact, discuss, make offers to publish etc. Tony has been writing guitar music and lyrics since his youth (a fair time now!) and has also published on his site some 250 of his recent poetic outpourings on subjects many and varied. Presently the Tonyverses site is experimental – the template is up and I am ‘throwing’ content at it, but it is lacking a ‘Tonyverses’ masthead, homepage images and some aspects of navigation.  That said – if you are desperate for an early peek – go take a look: Tonyverses...

Are you a university student?

By admin on Mar 26, 2009 in Featured, Who are you |

Are you a university student seeking access to materials upon programmes taught by Tony Jolley at Mulhouse, Colmar and Lörrach campuses? Links will shortly appear below to the various programmes: Mulhouse Students MICAI M1 Intercultural Management (Anglophone) MICAI M1 M2 Recruitment and Selection MICAI M2 Project Management (Anglophone) SCIMEC M1 English SCIMEC M2 English ENGLISH L3 Introduction to Business ‘One-Off’ Lectures Colmar Students LPHT Introduction to Tourism Macroeconomics LPHT Introduction to Culture and Communication in Tourism LPHT Tourism Sustainability LPHT Business Scenario ‘One-Off’ Lectures Lörrach Students Tourism Sustainability Tourism Product and Services Management International Tourism Research ‘One-Off’ Lectures The links (shortly to be) provided in respect of the above may require a login and password.  Should this be the case, I will give you the codes you need at the start of your teaching...