SimpsInns take gold at 2012 DRAM Awards

It’s official. SimpsInns landed the gold medal at last week’s glittering DRAM Awards at the Grand Central Station Hotel in Glasgow. The Ayrshire family business picked up the 'Benromach Award for Success' at the ceremony themed on the Olympics.

SimpsInns owners, Malcolm and Karen Simpson, were delighted to have come out on top when up against such stiff competition.

“This is unbelievable news,” beamed Malcolm Simpson after scooping the top award. “To receive recognition for all the hard work means everything to us. Although SimpsInns is enjoying a busy period of accelerated growth at present, the family business ethos we started out with remains at the heart of everything we do today.”

“Special mention must go to all our team for without their dedication and commitment we would not be receiving an award like this. It is also for our loyal customers, which we are fortunate to have built up over the years and who continue to enjoy the SimpsInns offering.”

This time last year SimpsInns operated The Gailes, Irvine and the Old Loans Inn, Troon but later this year they will have five very distinctive venues.

The Irvine husband and wife team recently bought The Riverside Inn, just south of Ayr on the outskirts of Minishant. The original farmhouse building is now a quaint restaurant and bar set on acres of unspoilt countryside. The new owners introduced brand new menus with some great new dishes and the ever popular Simply SimpsInns menu.

Better still, there is an introductory 2 for 1 meal offer currently running at The Riverside Inn where all are welcome come and sample the latest SimpsInns venue and take advantage of this great promotion. (see www.theriversideinn.co.uk for further details).

Last October The Waterside opened in Seamill, West Kilbride and has proven a great success with people travelling from far and wide to enjoy the stunning water’s edge location and great food on offer.

Later this year the £2million Si! Cafe:Restaurant:Bar development will open at the site of the former Golf Hotel on the Kilwinning Road in Irvine. Si! will be a contemporary build with a distinctly European/Mediterranean theme. Downstairs will house a vibrant, yet informal, bar and restaurant while upstairs will be the Italian restaurant.

Such growth within the privately owned company means the owners also had to invest in new people. First off they added to their senior management team. Kevin MacGillivray, the highly regarded chef formerly of the Marine Hotel in Troon, joined SimpsInns as the group’s Food Operations Manager, while Adam Cosgrove joined as Operations Manager after a number of high profile hospitality roles in Glasgow and Arran.

Plan B have been providing online support for Simpsinns businesses for a number of years now including provision of content managed websites, suport for social media activity and the integration of the Bookassist booking engine for accommodation reservations.

Downloads and Links

Gailes Hotel Website
Old Loans Inn Website
SimpsInns group website
Riverside Inn Holding Page

Customer Service Matters Most

What makes you leave a service provider? Well it normally takes a lot because the hassle and time involved in shifting bank accounts, or Broadband, or telephone makes it so scary that you end up putting up with the poor service as better than the thought of losing your connection, or direct debits or incoming payments.

The opposite is however also true and we use social media and customer review sites more too often to criticise bad practice rather than promote good service. I know I do.

So when you get something as exceptional as the service I've just received then you really should share it.

Yesterday I received a text from my business mobile company O2 in Irvine saying that I now had access to a Guru named Stuart. Great idea I thought. This morning I got a postcard from O2 in Irvine giving me more detail and advising that I now had access to Stuart via a mobile number or an email address. Great reinforcement of a great idea!

Now for two weeks I've been trying to figure out how I could synchronise my Google Apps for Business. driving me absolutely nuts and I spent seriously eight hours, maybe more, trying to fix it.

So with nothing to lose a quick email to O2 Guru Stuart; the first reply suggested that he couldn't help as it would require changes to certain things that he couldn't fix. Five minutes later however a phone call saying that he had reread it and would come back to me if there was anything he could find.

Another five minutes passed and an email arrived with a techy type link but with easy to follow advice on what I'd done wrong. Ten minutes later, mild punching of the air and a fully synchronised communications network now working between Google Mail, iPhone and outlook on the the laptop.

Now when BT next phone me up from a call centre somewhere asking me if I'd like to switch my mobile, landlines and telephones back to them what do you think my response will be?

Almost without exception I have found the support from O2 Business to be exceptional. Exceptional may be hyperbole or not but customer care is only tested when things are going wrong. It's how you handle the negative issues that determine all of our future relationships with a client or supplier. When things go wrong with O2 - and they have - the ethos is let's sort it together.

So here I am feeling better about myself this afternoon because I'm praising someone! Feels great! And if it gets up the line to O2's customer service team then even better because Stuart in Irvine has made my working day, week prhaps even my month infinitely smoother than it was looking at ten o'clock this morning.

Edinburgh Tourism Accommodation Audit 2012

Key findings from the Edinburgh Tourism Accommodation Audit 2012, undertaken on behalf of ETAG in partnership with Scottish Enterprise were released last week.

The audit, hailed as the most comprehensive analysis of Edinburgh’s visitor accommodation provision ever undertaken, shows that the city hosts 12,910 bedrooms in 529 establishments in the serviced accommodation sector (hotels and related types) and 7,353 bedrooms in the non-serviced sector (self-catering, apartments, hostels etc) throughout the year.

The audit also shows that the number of additional rooms available during the Festival period has increased substantially, rising from 20,437 to 27,504, with the biggest growth coming from the campus, self-catering and hostel sectors. This allows the city to accommodate over 50,000 visitors per night during August.
Compared with the previous audit carried out in 2006, Edinburgh has seen growth across all accommodation types, providing an additional 6,422 rooms in total. The single largest growth area has been seen in the non-serviced stock, with the serviced apartment sector showing the biggest increase, from 630 to 2,019 rooms, an increase of 220%.

The report also identifies that there are currently 765 new hotel bedrooms under construction and which are due to open in 2012/13.

The audit highlighted a number of key issues, such as the need for the city to maintain a balanced accommodation portfolio to meet the demands of both the leisure and business markets and ongoing concerns about the perceived high cost of accommodation in Edinburgh, particularly during peak seasons such as the August Festival period and Hogmanay.

These issues will have to be addressed in order to keep in line with the goals of the National Tourism Strategy for Scotland but the outlook for Edinburgh is positive and with continued and growing tourism to the area, visitors will be encouraged to explore Scotland’s other treasures, resulting in a healthy and growing hospitality industry nationally.

VisitScotland Social Media - Yup They Get It!

Warning.

This is a rant and if I was Irish I'd be saying fecking quite frequently.

So please feel free to fill them in where you think appropriate.

One paragraph of background first.

It is hard to quantify what the public bodies have spent on VisitScotland.com since they embarked on their "new" digital strategy ten years ago but it could be well in excess of £30 million quid all in when you take all the externals, buy outs, redesigns, restructurings, pay offs, legal bills, salaries, consultants, EC meetings; they will maybe contest the detail but you get the picture. It's been a shed load of investment. The current campaign for Brave which is by VisitScotland's own hyperbole the next big thing for Scottish Tourism has had £7 million earmarked on it. We heard maybe more.

Scene set?

The UK/European launch of Brave took place in Edinburgh on Saturday with a host of stars and politicians and media - and remember that £7 million that VisitScotland have invested in joint marketing and the recent all singing all dancing launch of the new VS digital strategy - and here's how it is represented online with VisitScotland. First Facebook:

Yup that's right folks, we're with you all the way on this new fangled social media stuff and we'll tell you about on Monday when we get back into the office. We understand the immediacy of social media and we recognise that we can get access to pictures that others can't and we'll tell you about it on Monday. We also recognise that our Chairman and First Minister have fronted a publicly funded £7 million campaign and we'll try and get it online for you but it may be after morning coffee as there's a lot to talk about first.

Seven or eight posts on their Twitter account and not a word on Facebook? (Not even a Facebook post to say why don't you follow us at the event on Twitter. Too obvious?) Too much bother having to write real sentences or something? No blogs. No website feature pages. Nothing on the industry website. Nothing on LinkedIn.

SEVEN MILLION QUID - the difference is in the detail. How often have we heard it's the little things that we do that diffeerentiate us from the competition. There was a whole tourism strategy launched last week based on such differences.

Now anyone who has read any of our posts knows we do not beleive that Social Medi is anything but a small part of a hospitlaity business' distribution strategy but with the resources that VisitScotland have to hand you'd think they could at least make a bloody effort.

Does it really matter?

We don't have the clout or distribution and it may be that it will just be written off as another insignificant moan at VS.com but perhaps it should be seen as a clear indication of an organsiation claiming one thing but clearly not getting it. They wouldn't be the first Scottish institution that needed claoer examination. Is it a further reflection of a disjointed digital strategy that has no real understanding of what online destination marketing should be about and reinforces once again that they should just leave this to the private sector to deal with.

Stop playing at being a poor man's search engine; stop trying to sell things online that you have no authentic experience of; stop spending millions of public money on things that others are already doing a lot better.

For a decade, VisitScotland, and the succesive governments funding them, have played at it with millions of taxpayers with no fear of being held to account for more than a decade of failing to get any of it right.

The blog hasn't had an update since 18th of June and this is with the new online marketing strategy in place? The booking engine doesn't work properly, comments we have is that their extranet is more complicated than the one they've just upgraded from; the website is dark and underwhelming and they are in the process of having to contract another third party for the provision of a "channel manager" to handle online reservations through their. It is always was and always will be beyond the public sector to drive an online marketing strategy from the top down.

No-one held account for failure, or the U turns, or the increasing costs, or the missed deadlines and failed deliveries. Now it may not be the scale of Barclays or the RBS or the trams or but you know what it is all cut from the same cloth. A lack of corporate responsibility and accountability.

Plus ca change...

You know posting about a Monday to Friday social media presence may seem a small thing but I'm not sure that there is anything that reflects more clearly on a complete lack of understanding of the media and spotlights the whole fragmented strategy than something so simple.

However does anyone in Scotland actually give a feck?

Golf Scorecard Design For Dragon's Tooth

Lovely wee job done this week for our old friends at Dragon's Tooth at Ballachulish on the way to Fort William.

Having designed their website a few years back Laurence Young asked if we could redesign their course map. The greenkeepers have just completed the addition of nine new tees to provide two sets of tees for the nine greens.

In the week of the launch of the movie Brave it would not be difficult to imagine that the course provided the location for some of the background images of the fantasy Disney film!

We designed the new graphic over the past week and it'll go to print for summer visitors. And it's always nice to get a Facebook plug from clients, "Sneak Preview! The new illustration for the 18 Tee Course has just been received . . . and here it is! Thanks to Steven Timpson of www.planbonline.co.uk for such a clear, attractive and professional production." - you can follow Dragon's Tooth on Facebook too

I played nine holes here during the May heatwave and it was he most enjoyable game of golf I'd had in years so if you're in the area you really have to fit in a round. Great soup and baked potato too!

Irish Open Sell Out!

The Irish Open which is returning to Northern Ireland and being played over Royal Portrush has attracted major coverage this weekend for a number of reasons not least that it may just be the precursor to The Open Championship returning to the course for the first time since 1951.

The Northern Ireland Tourist Board are expecting in excess of 100,000 people for the event and it is reported to be the first European Tour event to have been sold out in advance.

And Scotland will have no official presence at the event.

We asked Alan Grant of EventScotland who are looking after the golf marketing activity at European Tour events who confirmed that there is no VisitScotland presence at the event this year.

He advised that VisitScotland were looking at some online activity - through Google and PPC mainly - around search results for the Irish Open, given the amount of online traffic the event looks like it’s going to generate. This will provide a good opportunity to capitalise and direct traffic towards the VisitScotland website.

He went onto advise that "In terms of presence, our experience of the Irish Open has been very poor in recent years; primarily due to the location of the tournament (away from the main areas of population) and specifically the footfall on to the pavilion when we were present, which was in the low 100s as opposed to the high 100s/1,000s that we experience at other Tour events. Clearly it looks like this year there is a lot more media interest around the Irish Open, however we couldn’t have predicated this at the end of last year when we were planning our schedule of events for 2012."

Our concern about this is the Royal Portrush venue for the Irish Open was announced in January of this year and with the high flying Irish golfers holding Majors it was a certainty that this event would be massive. That was never in any question and all you needed to do was ask any of the Scottish based golf tour operators. How come our tourist board can spend £7 million on a cartoon yet can't maintain a presence at the biggest attended golf event Northern Ireland has ever hosted?

Too close to the launch of Brave did I hear you say? Don't want to confuse our market place with mixed messages?

Are we so leaden of foot that our golf marketing bodies cannot divert some expenditure and activity to such a high profile event in such a lucrative "staycation" market place with six months clear notice?

It is so indicative again of the lack of joined up thinking that exists within the marketing of Scotland as the Home of Golf. A whole host of vested interests with fixed plans, aims and objectives and no apparent desire to act quickly to take chances as they arise. And as much as it pains me to ask the question where was the direction from the local and national golf industry bodies on this one too? Are operators again just sitting back and expecting others to do the job for them?

Did it never cross anyone's mind when the exhibition and events schedules were being planned that The Irish Open with Clarke, McIlroy and McDowell all playing may have been worth being at? That there may have been rather a lot of golfers within a two hour reach of our product who could be persuaded to visit again?

Now whilst I think that the private sector should be leading on such promotions, VisitScotland have been doing rather a lot of competitions and offers recently. Why therefore, no thought to a data collecting exercise with the Belfast Telegraph in conjunction with Stena or P&O for a three night three round prize to Ayrshire?

China more important or a visit to Dubai more fun? Causeway Coast not sexy enough as a venue?

The idea, as we approach 2014, that we have got our golf marketing act together is quite ridiculous. We have more golf are and regional groups all over the country doing their own thing with more and more public sector finance and with less and less communication with each other.

It's increasingly now about displacement of visitors pitching destination Highland against Fife against North East against Ayrshire against East Lothian. All spending (public) money to compete against each other and none of the activity fitting into a bigger picture. Duplication and displacement. This is the new lean tourism fighting machine that the new VisitScotland leadership promised. Reality check.

When are the industry going to demand that the situation changes and take greater ownership of their own product marketing? Golf Tourism Scotland - surely it's over to you now?

July 3rd sees the National Forum hosted and organised by Golf Tourism Scotland bringing together keynote speakers from the golf industry to discuss some of the key issues and challenges facing the sector. Speakers will include Fergus Ewing, Minister for Energy, Enterprise & Tourism, John Parker, Ryder Cup Travel Services and Malcolm Roughead, VisitScotland.

Let's hope the industry members attending the event have the balls to ask the questions and demand straight answers.

Food Operations Manager for Simpsinns Ayrshire

Ayrshire based Hotel and Restaurant group have recently announced the appointment of Kevin McGillivray as Food operations Manager.

 

Kevin is a renowned chef in his own right and recently joined the family-owned SimpsInns group as the new Food Operations Manager after his most recent position as Executive Chef at the Marine Hotel in Troon.

Kevin brings a wealth of experience to the role and is currently President of the Federation of Chefs Scotland. He is also a former Scottish Chef of the Year and winner of the prestigious Flavour of Scotland.  His illustrious list of achievements also includes Scottish Hotel Chef of the Year.

 

Kevin  is seen on the right explaining some new dishes to the Gailes Restaurant team.

The position of Food Operations Manager is a newly created role within SimpsInns and is due to the continued expansion and success of the company.

This year the vibrant Si!:Café:Bar:Restaurant will open on the Kilwinning Road in Irvine, while the company recently took ownership of The Riverside Inn just south of Ayr.

The innovative Si! Shack concept – to provide a new food offering in the private garden and covered veranda area - at the Waterside is also due to open in the coming months.  

“One of the big reasons for taking on this new role with SimpsInns was the enthusiasm and passion for food within the company,” explained Kevin at a recent food tasting experience with staff members at the Gailes.

“It is a very exciting time at SimpsInns just now with the new venues to complement existing favourites such as here at the Gailes, the award-winning Old Loans Inn and The Waterside.”