Are Tourist Railways "welcoming" enough?

The results for the current round of Visit England's quality guarantee scheme are now out. To be a member of this scheme it is necessary to submit to an examination by a professional inspector against laid down criteria and thus differs from the amateur and sometimes capricious "Tripadvisor". It is not easy to qualify but over 1,000 attractions do, among which are quite a few tourist railways.

It is in the next level up where I have concerns. Participating organisations can aim for various accolades such as "Welcome", "Best Told Story" and "Quality Cafe" Above these is the overall "Gold" accolade, Last year one railway obtained a Gold Accolade and another a Welcome Accolade. This year, just the Gold Accolade winner and no other.

I can quite appreciate that not everywhere wants to put the effort and expense required for each of the categories. Yet I would have felt "Welcome" involved very little expense. Are tourist railways going backwards in this respect?

PH

 

I wonder how many of our heritage railways would even be aware of this "visit England" promotion? and what is the criteria that is used to judge each venue, and what marker is it judged against for instance is it on the presentation of customer first impression, for instance would a row of derelict wagons in the siding visable across the platform, mark you down, where as a row of restored wagons add points? is the platform in good repair, or potholed? and how do you judge Best told Story? if the station is a mix of styles , ie restored wagons in pre grouping liveries whilst the station is in BR guise? to me the marker has to be on how welcoming you are made to feel, and that has to be down to first the ambience, the attitude of staff, the condition of facilities , and finally do you leave thinking, i must make a return visit .

 

Firstly, quite a few lines do belong. They have to meet a certain minimum standard in order to and this standard is not a low one. "Welcome" starts before the visit begins, with things like advance publicity and the website. Of course how people are treated is an important factor. Things like condition of car parks, platforms and paintwork plus cleanliness are taken into account. Don't expect the Inspector or the general public to be too concerned with minutiae of liveries but I did meet a lady visitor recently who knew nothing about trains but quite a deal about regulator movements in clocks! Can't define "Told Story" better than "telling people what they are looking at in terms they understand".

Lastly, get rid of that linear scrapyard.

Paul H

 

That displays the current list of organisations belonging to the scheme. I am very anxious not to "name names" but if you can be bothered you will see only two railways listed with any sort of accolade. Now there is only one which is regrettable but it needs to be emphasised that to be on the list at all, you have to be good.

PH

 

Its interesting to note that places like Blist Hill score very highly where i would say you have a very clearly defined attraction i'm surprised to not see the Bluebell railway up there .

 

Better still, keep the scrapyard; put a fence around it with enticing signs saying 'gricers - this way'; and charge extra to go in. We'd all pay.

 

I will reply privately

Paul

 

In my case, only if it included use of gas axe.

Paul h.

 

most lines are fine and welcoming if you know they are run by Volunteers and make allowances for amateur staff rather than professionals. If you don't know, you might expect more

 

It is not for me to say who is or is not getting it "right". I am only pointing out that tourism professionals, definitely not the same as railway enthusiasts, do not seem to think things are getting better but, arguably, worse.

PH

 

Arguably you might expect amateurs to be better. I would cite a scene I once witnessed of a guard assisting a very frail visitor off the platform whilst the locomotive took water. The guard was an amateur but a very professional one.

PH

 

Oh look it's the IOW steam railway - what a surprise....

 

This is getting tiresome. I am not going to "name names". The point is that the official tourist body for England thinks that only one tourist railway achieves the best standards. Not good.

PH

 

This is exactly why I did not wish to name names.

PH

 

Years ago, I was asked to do a "mystery shopper" exercise for a Tourism organisation. It involved going to stay in a hotel and rating various factors against a pre-prepared list of criteria. So I spent an evening looking for things that frankly I couldn't care less about (but which were items to be rated on the scoresheet), while having to ignore some issues that were significant to me, but unrated. Ever since, I have been profoundly sceptical about rankings based on meeting a defined checklist thought up by someone in an office.

Whereas with Trip Advisor - like it or hate it, what it gives you is direct feedback from people who have actually voluntarily visited a given attraction, about what mattered to them, in their own words. A single rating could be misleading, but when an organisation has scores or hundreds of comments, you pretty well see what the broad picture is, and which are outliers.

Bottom line: when I am planning to visit an attraction that I have not previously visited, I'll start at Google and look up the reputation and comments on TripAdvisor. I can't remember ever being swayed by - or even noticing - an official rating scheme. I suspect vast numbers of other regular visitors do likewise.

Tom

 

Without seeing the criteria set out by VisitEngland it is hard to go into too much detail, but if it anything like hotel star ratings there will obviously be more expectations (of products &a services) the further the up the list a railway will go. It will include things such as staffing, volunteers are pontenially at a disadvantage here as chance are they won't receive proper customer service and service quality training compared to fully paid staff at an attraction. There also the facilities on offer, most railways are stuck with what they've had (facilities wise) where as attractions have been purpose build with certain facilities in mind. Although this is improving with many heritage railways investing in new facilities which is good and what they should be doing.

There's also the expense of participating in a scheme such as this, it is really up to each railway to compare and weigh up the cost compared to the benefits. Another factor to consider is that there are multiple organisations operating schemes based on quality for the tourism sector, so a railway may not appear on the VisitEngland list but could potentially appear on another list somewhere else.

You also have to think about who VisitEngland are targeting, Inbound visitors or Domestic. VisitEngland do both but a scheme such as this I would say is aimed more at Inbound visitors trying to attract them to the destinations, from where they can research other things to do via a local tourist board where a heritage railway is likely to feature.
Domestic visitors are more likely just to google/go on trip advisor so see if an attraction is any good as chances are they have a basic knowledge of what an experince will be like as chances are living in the same country there will be similar experince near to where they live.

These are just my thoughts with a bit of an academic study background to it.