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.

A couple of weekends ago we went on our one night cruise from Harwich to Southampton on one of the Thomson cruise ships, the Spirit. On the cruise there were other TUI employees but also customers. When we first arrived in the ship we had a tour from one of the entertainment team onboard the ship; we got to visit the presidential suite (unfortunately we didn’t get to stay in there but it was nice to have a nosey!), the onboard facilities such as the cinema, swimming pools, spa and restaurants / bars. We then had a talk on shore excursions from the excursion manager which was interesting as we found out the range of excursions on offer such as a one day trip to St. Petersburg and to Jordan, White water rafting etc.

Following the daytime presentations we got to experience the all inclusive buffet which was taken advantage of! In the evening we all dressed up to go to the gala dinner where we went all out and tried unusual foods such as snails..then we went to the Motown show where the entertainment team sang and danced to well known songs which got us all in the mood for the night ahead! After the show we went to the onboard nightclub and partied until 5am! It was a good night, but the 8am departure wasn’t so good and we all felt a little worse for wear on the journey home!

Over the last few weeks we have been doing page and panel sign offs – this is where we need to check all brochure content very carefully to ensure they are accurate. This requires good product knowledge and attention to detail. We also attended a Time Management workshop last week run by Adrian from HR. We both found this really useful as recently we have had a very busy workload and tight schedules to follow so it has given us some useful tips of prioritising and organising our workload.

This week I (Faye) have been heavily involved in the new design of one of our products, so this has meant I have had a chance to give feedback on how I would like this to look and what I would like included. I am a brochure guardian of Simply which is a specialised brand hoping to give customers a more authentic experience of the culture they are visiting. Everyone in our department is a brochure guardian and this has given us a good opportunity to see what goes into the production of a brochure.

This weekend all the placement students, Tom the placement manager and some friends of ours all headed up to Skegness for the Twentys Reunion. We got to see loads of different acts such as Keith Harris and Orville, Pete Tong and Judge Jules. On Saturday night we all dressed up with some of us as superheroes, cartoon characters and Ghostbusters. This was a good chance to see everyone outside of the work environment and was a really fun weekend.