Our Operations Department ensures that all the component parts of our holidays are in place. This is achieved only through assiduous attention to detail and effective time planning.
Operators deal largely, though not exclusively, with our suppliers (hotels, restaurants, airlines, rail companies, coach companies, ground handlers, museums, wineries, embassies, box offices, village priests, local guides, private homes, gardens, archaeological sites.) The work can begin up to two years before the holiday begins and the operator retains responsibility to the day the holiday ends. They ensure the lecturer and tour manager are fully briefed and compile the documents distributed to clients for the tour. Each tour is assigned an Operator and so everyone has exposure to the full range of tasks.
Teams of Operators run our large-scale music festivals. These are complex projects for up to three hundred clients and are innovative and exciting both for the audience and the staff involved. In addition to the tasks attached to operating small group tours can be added those of managing a music festival: contracting artists, transporting instruments, sourcing venues for concerts and receptions, chartering ships, dealing with lighting technicians and caterers.
Understanding our destinations and how our holidays work is essential and we encourage our Operators to accompany at least one tour or festival each year and to join familiarisation trips organised by tourist offices or overseas agents. They also undertake the prospecting needed to introduce new holidays to our programme.
Operators are responsible for costing our holidays, keeping to budget, and for proofing the text in the brochures and on our website.
We work with around forty countries across Europe and the Middle East, and the USA and wherever possible deal in the language of the destination. We are interested in people with fluency in Italian, German, French or Spanish, with a proven interest in the subject matter of our holidays: the visual arts, architecture, early and classical music, the Arab world. You need to be conscientious, able to think on your feet, cope with high volumes of detail, happy to be an ambassador for the company and be able to smile come what may.