It’s been a busy, exciting and definitely better than expected autumn so far.

We had our best ever September, with many highlights including a group from Poland for 5 days – who had a brilliant time in Edinburgh and the Highlands – and apparently went home with half a distillery.

We enjoyed a memorable weekend with a group of classic car drivers with a tour that included the Mull of Kintyre, where the sun came out and it was almost warm.

My end of year recce trips all seem to have taken place in sunny weather – watch out for some new additions to our 2008 programme.

Then last week Heather and I fulfilled a long held ambition and flew to Barra, where the airport is also the beach, and the timetable is subject to tides, stayed a night, enjoyed walks on long sandy beaches and some great home-made scones before heading back to Glasgow.

Then, a massive surprise for us, we won our category in the prestigious 2007 Scottish Thistle Awards – known as the Tourism Oscars, at a glittering event in Edinburgh. I can’t believe it ( and haven’t stopped grinning since!) It was especially appropriate that we were able to share the occasion with several different people who have made it all possible – Jennette, Shona, Pam, Arthur and Julie. It was just a shame that Azra, who is currently getting to grips with having a young baby and a toddler was not able to join us.

The next two months are the time when we finalise preparations for the new season and there are plenty of new initiatives in hand, with lots of new holiday ideas of course, as well as an online booking and payment system, new cancellation insurance policy and a whole new back office system.

One thing will not change is our focus on giving our customers great value – our end of year customer satisfaction scores are pretty amazing. For those of you who have travelled with us you will know that we ask you to rate every aspect of your McKinlay Kidd holiday experience. We analyse all scores and take our suppliers through their performances to see where they can improve and to congratulate them (more often than not) where they are proving excellent experiences. For ourselves the key score is whether a customer would recommend our services to their friends – and this year - when we have looked after more clients than ever the recommendation level has risen to a superb 96%.

The challenge now is to make 2008 even better.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 5:43 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.