London Report - Professional Enhancement Activities (Part 1)

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Professional enhancement activities such as this trip, supplement the academic curriculum and help us prepare to participate actively in the professional community.

Preparing the whole trip involved applying some of the techniques we’ve learned in classes and made us enhance practical knowledge. All the activities we organized to raise funds and the trip organization was, by itself, a very rewarding task in terms of developing skills.

The awareness on how one of the most visited cities in the world works and how tourists are treated and attracted to it was very enlightening.

We really consider this to be a professional enhancement because in London we could observe and develop practical skills, attitudes and behavioral schemes truly significant in Tourism.

The Planning

The first step was to perfectly define the trip objectives.

1.    Provide us with tools in the English language.

Through verbal tasks on site (asking for directions and information and interacting with the locals, getting information from a travel agency, introducing ourselves to the hotel reception, ordering food at restaurants, getting information at a counter at the airport, a bus station or subway, etc.).

2.    Open new cultural and touristic perspectives.

Finding out the main tourist sites of London as well as the cultural, historical, artistic, social and all other reasons for which they are known;

3.    Discover new customs of a civilization, in many ways very different from our own;

4.    To live and witness the English-speaking environment for three days.

A unique event necessary in the life of any good professional in the tourism field;

5.    Develop our organizational skills.

With the need to communicate in English with some frequency, and to put into practice the knowledge acquired in various disciplines that we attended and still attend;

6.    Develop the communication component, in order to obtain sponsorship and advertisement in local and regional media.

I'm thinking on writing other posts here regarding the analysis of the visit, in a cultural, social and in a marketing perspective. But please!!! Feel free to contribute and comment this post.

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This article is composed by 3 parts:

Part 1/3 - The Planning

Part 2/3 - Cultural Perspective

Part 3/3 - Social, Communicational and Marketing Perspective

Miguel Silva

Triénio 2009/2012