After attachment for one month at Farmosa Holiday Tour(S), I found that I do not match work in front-of-house especially counter sales department. It was because I need to face to face with customers. Since I have been working as an accountant before, I felt like pretty comfortable with accounting career. However, I have learnt upselling skills that I have never been taught in school and have made 30 over tour bookings of variety countries during this period of time. To name a few: Hong Kong, Macau, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Phuket, Ho Chi Minh, Taipei, Korea, Genting, Kuala Lumpur, Pulai Desaru Beach, Batam Island and so forth.
Short-term goals : - To learn and practice more on variety tour booking of certain country, Malaysian VISA, diverse flight bookings, and familiar with Travel System (Abacus and Amadeus System).
- To improve networking, job performance and communication among colleagues.
Mid-term goals : To achieve good mark on SIP Program.
In addition, I felt in this company, some the colleagues were disgruntled and even worse that they did not serve their customers friendly at all. Their service-oriented was far beyond customer’s expectation. I could understand them that the reason why their service-oriented like this. It might be probably because they did not receive any commission of every single booking and over-time paid. Of course, they did not felt to push themselves to upselling and increase the sales. Also, I noticed that the company’s business was so good due to lower mark-up of the tour packages. So many walk-in customers wanted to make tour booking & flight booking on every single day. That’s why they liked to let-off their pressure to new comer and intern students.
On the fifth week, I was the top seller among the other interns. By that time, I was really aggressive to make a lot of booking in one day. I would usually ask my seniors to assist me whenever I did not familiar with the tour packages. If I could handle the problem by myself, I would rather solve it instead of seeking help from seniors. And finally, I discovered that my strength point. It was that I dare to ask for help from my seniors, no matter how busy they were.
The other point was networking and communication between colleagues. Even though, some of them like to critic others behind them. Nevertheless, I personally think that was just rumor and may affect my job performance and communication breakdown among colleagues. Therefore, I have to be limiting socializing with other colleagues, avoiding gossip & rumor and keep go beyond my objectives of this internship program.
Last point was being on time, I was able to use my time efficiently not only in school but also during working life. Time management skills were actually not unfamiliar for me anymore that I have learned it from The Tourism Academy @ Sentosa. For instance, due to so busy of working at counter sales department, I had set up on my alarm to remind me to start work on time every single day. Being start on time so that I could exceed my expectation by making five or six bookings in a day efficiently.
Besides strength point that I have, I also discovered my weakness. I did not pay fully attention or double check for my job. In my experience, I still remember when I did data entry or menial work for updating price list on the tour packages. On account of using time efficiently, I usually get the job done first rather than spend a little bit of time for double checking the job. I committed that what I had done so far and discovered early. Thus, in the future I will double check on my work whenever it was. This is very important thing for me to train into a good habit starting from now on. It is because not only in this industry must provide the right selling price for customers but also in accounting career should be always ensure every single figure is correct.
Last e-journal, I have shared the environmental friendly in terms of wasting paper resources. Besides that, I noticed that in ticketing department have two computers for one user. Not like other companies that I have been observing during my lunch time. I went a trip to visit my friends’ company to see how they work and company’s working environment. All the companies were actually having only one computer instead of two computers for user. I think in this case, this should be decrease till one computer to save energy resources.
However, by comparing among my company departments, I found that counter sales department lacked of computers for users. In my experience, I actually share one computer with other intern during this one month attachment. It was very time consuming to wait for other intern while checking and follow by me to make a booking. Till now, the front-liners are more than computers so that I would suggested the extra computers may move over to counter sales department in. If every staff has each computer, they will definitely be working even more efficiently.
Moreover, I noticed myself have improvement in terms of doing work even more efficiently, carefully but still have minor mistake. Also, I am even more familiar with the geography of certain country nowadays such as Hong Kong, Macau, Thailand, Taiwan, Malaysia, Australia, Vietnam and others.
Last thing was the most important thing compare to others which is location & accommodation of the product knowledge. It was because I have served with so many diverse guests, they usually almost asked the same things. They would probably ask: “Where was the nearest accommodation from MTR or town or city?” So far, I have learned so lot of it and I would be able to describe them to customers in certain destination places.
