Find out what our Guest Bloggers are getting up to. Throughtout the year we will be following the progress of our Guest Bloggers as they find a placement or keep us updated as to what they are doing on their placement. Click here to read all entries from our bloggers or click here to meet them.

Hi we are Heather and Faye and we are going to be sharing our experiences from working at TUI UK through this joint blog. I, Heather am studying International Business and Economics at Aston University. Faye is studying Business Studies at Nottingham Trent University and we are both on placement at TUI UK in their product department where pretty much everything that goes into the brochure is decided; from which hotels to which prices to which pictures to which resorts. There are other placements at TUI UK in the Trading department, where prices are changed in reaction to demand from customers.

So, this week has been a busy week for us…Friday night we headed off on a trip over to France for a company sports day! We started out in a pub in Victoria, waiting to head for the coach over to Dover to catch our ferry. Here we met up with some other teams taking part (from different parts of the TUI group) and after a few bottles of wine!!!…we got onto the coach for a few games as we set off on our travels. After a few drunken antics on the ferry (and a bit of sea sickness – from Heather!!) we all had a nice sleep on our journey to the chateau in Normandy.

After our nap we were ready for the games to commence. We played all the old favourites from school sports days; the sack race, egg and spoon, welly whanging, three legged race, wheelbarrow race, fancy dress relay, sponge dip challenge and tug of war. The personal favourite of ours was the three legged race, Heather and I didn’t really get off to a great start – our coordination was very out of sync and after nearly falling over and hobbling to the finish line we managed to get a point for our team…if only for finishing the race! The boys did us proud in the tug of war even though Tom, our placement manager, had a near death experience with the rope getting twisted round his neck. It really was as bad as it sounds!!

We then had time to catch up on some sleep before the School Disco and BBQ in the evening where we did the limbo and whacked out the crazy dance moves, featuring Heather’s world famous Worm! It was an early morning start on Sunday to head back to England, as we needed an early night to be ready to go back to work on Monday morning.

When we got back to work we had our Winter 10/11 bed briefs. Both of us have resorts which are featured in Winter so this was a really busy and important time for us. In the bed briefs we meet with all the purchasers from overseas and the heads of our department to decide on which hotels will be needed to move the brand forward and suggest which hotels to drop, depending on sales, margins, customer feedback and quality of the hotel as well as which hotels to take on for the season.

Prior to the bed briefs we have to write a product strategy for each resort, which gives a three year gateway strategy for the resort and gives an overview of what will be happening for us there. We both had a chance to do these and get to know our resorts a lot better. In this task we were given the responsibility of analysing all the data, to come up with where we saw the resort going forward. In the bed briefs it was interesting to hear all the different points of view from senior managers who are very brand focused to purchasers who are more concerned with the hotel itself and to see first hand the complications of working with big brands.

After the bed briefs we had to write up the minutes of the meeting and amend the product strategies appropriately before they were sent out to the purchasers and senior managers. Now we are getting ready to go on our ‘educational’ one night cruise on Friday from Harwich to Southampton….