Practical trainee reportVisit Bugøynes As

Riikka Turtiainen

Practical trainee report08/2016Restonomin koulutusohjelmaMatkailu- ja palveluliiketoiminta

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Sisältö

1 Introduction...........................................................................................................3

2 Visit Bugøynes As...................................................................................................3

3 The business analyse.............................................................................................4

3.1 The keys for success.......................................................................................4

3.2 Couple things to improve...............................................................................5

3.3 Cultural differences........................................................................................6

3.4 Entrepreneurship...........................................................................................7

4 Working assigments...............................................................................................7

5 What did I learn.....................................................................................................8

6 What was challenging............................................................................................9

7 How the trainee affected me?.............................................................................10

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1 Introduction

In this report, I tell you about my instructive “adventure” in Norway, where I accom-

plished my first practical trainee. First I tell you something about the company, that I

was working at and little about the charming village of Bugoynes. After that I dive

deeper to the business itself and analyse it´s profitability. In the end of the report I

focus on telling you more about my personal working experience, what kind of as-

signments I was given and how this whole experience affected me. I also wanted to

add some pictures, that I took during the summer, to give you better picture from my

adventure.

2 Visit Bugøynes As

Visit Bugøynes is a company runned by a lovely Norwegian family and it was found in

2015. During the summer, I actually got very close with these people and they be-

came like another family to me. Their company provides hostel type of accommoda-

tion, local produced food from restaurant called Bistroen and rent boats for “sea

hunger” customers. The company also provides king crab safaris, which are very pop-

ular in Norther parts of Norway.

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Figure 1Bistroen

Bugoynes, the village where the family company locates, is a small fisherman village,

which situates next to the arctic ocean and where lives approximately 200-250 per-

manent villagers. Bugoynes itself, is part of Sør-Varangen municipality and belongs to

Finnmark province in Northern part of Norway. The charming village gets its main

incomes from fishing industry but also from tourism business. Despite from its small

size, there visits almost 8000-10 000 tourist during summer and 4000-5000 during

winter time.

Figure 2 The village of Bugoynes

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3 The business analyse

3.1 The keys for success

As mentioned before, Visit Bugoynes is located in a small village, isolated from busy

and grounded lifestyle. The remote location offers many advantages for the com-

pany, like a good marketplace. Because there aren’t many competitors around the

same area, the company can easily keep the service prices profitable. For example,

Bistroen is the only place in Bugoynes, which offers food, so because of the less avail-

ability, the customers will buy their meals despite the high prices.

In Bugoynes, you as a customer can have the feeling that the time has stopped.

When you walk around the village, only things that you can see are the old, colourful,

wooden houses, that have remain the same look since the second world war. The

village also has only one place to shop and the main amount of the permanent villa-

ger are pensioners. These kind of elements create authenticity, that attract tourists

to the village. The customers goal is to escape the everyday busy lifestyle and travel

to Bugoynes to enjoy the peaceful and carefree atmosphere.

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Figure 3 The peaceful village

Also Bugoynes and of course Norway itself, is a very safety place to travel. In my

opinion, these kind of not so common travel destinations are going to be more popu-

lar among the tourists, because of the restless situation in Europe. The recent terror-

ist attacks spread fear and many common destinations like Turkey struggle to attract

more customers to the country. In my opinion, in the future people are looking more

forward to travel to destinations like Bugoynes, where they don´t have to be afraid of

their lives.

3.2 Couple things to improve

Personally, the company members could follow trends and the media related to

tourism more regularly. When anyone of the members haven’t had any education in

tourism field, this way they could get more ideas to their own business. They could

also collect more information about their competitors and define their customer seg-

ments more closely. In addition, I would focus more on the marketing side, when the

company has so isolated location. However, Visit Bugoynes is still very young com-

pany and I believe that sooner or later they fill fix these problems. I will follow the

growth of this business curiously.

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3.3 Cultural differences

It is said, that the Scandinavian countries remind quite a lot each other, even though

I found out some differences between the Finnish- and the Norwegian culture during

my trainee. If we are not talking about self-evident differences like currency or lan-

guage, the first thing that I noticed was, that in Norwegians don´t rush with the offi-

cial things like paperwork. In general, Norwegians seem to be more relaxed and don

´t take everything so seriously like we Finns sometimes do.

Other thing that surprised me was that in Norway, people don´t have the official

lunch breaks at work or even at school. Employees in Finland are used to have a

warm meal during their lunch hour, but while the Finns are enjoying their portions,

Norwegians bite a small piece of bread as their lunch. This I didn´t know before I

travelled to Norway and to be honest, I was starving the first two weeks of my

trainee. Of course, I couldn´t blame my boss about my empty stomach, because he

was unaware of the dining habits in Finland. However, I loved the way how the

whole family, including me, gathered around a big table to enjoy a warm meal after a

busy working day. Not only, we ate good food but also we discussed and exchanged

pleasantries of the day. In a family company, these kind of food rituals replace the

official meeting that they have in bigger companies.

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Figure 4 Enjoying meal together

After all, Norwegians are very hard working people, but even though they go through

long working periods, they still don’t kill them self with work. They want to have a

small pause during a working day, even if it means keeping the shop closed couple of

hours a day or having a shorter amount of time open during weekends. This kind of

managing prevents them from getting too tired and have some time for them self. I

really admire this kind of philosophy, where you put your health first before the

money and I hope that, some entrepreneurs in Finland could also learn this habit.

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3.4 Entrepreneurship

I grew up in a family business environment myself and because of that, I have

worked my whole life. By following my parents, I have seen the pros and cons of an

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entrepreneurship with my own eyes. Especially, I have seen what kind of things it

demands to run a family business and I have to say, that my time in Visit Bugoynes

just strengthen my previous thoughts.

The business demands a lot of flexibility and nerves from the whole family. Almost

every family member has to somehow take a part of the daily routines of the busi-

ness and sometimes relinquish something that´s important for them. Like normal

entrepreneurship, it demands lot of time from you and sometimes it might be hard

to separate your free- and your working time. To put if shortly, entrepreneurship

gives a lot but it also takes a lot.

4 Working assigments

During the summer, I got a possibility to do versatile assignments, which was of

course good for my learning. I took care of the reception, where I answered e-mails,

made phone calls, booked rooms and rented boats for the tourists. When everything

was handled in there, I moved to restaurant side and transformed myself in to wait-

ress. It was my task to make sure, that everything was ok in the dining hall. I took

orders from my customers, gave them the starters and served them the main course

when it was ready. After the customers had left, I took care of the dishes and started

cleaning. When there wasn´t anything to wash anymore, I either went to clean the

houses, where the tourist had stayed or fill the gasoline tanks of the boats.

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Figure 5 The dining hall

Sometimes, when there weren´t so much customers, I had a possibility to attend to a

crab safari and get out from the village for a while. It was so relaxing to feel the wind

waving your hair and smell the fresh sea air.

Figure 6 Me fishing king crabs

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Also, before I got to Bugoynes, I was asked to remake their webpages. When I had

this so called “free time”, I focused on building up these new pages. Personally, for

me this was one of the most fun tasks I was given, because I love to use my creativity

and see my own handprint. Of course one of my colleagues helped me with the

translation, but I have to say that I was really satisfied from the result.

5 What did I learn

Before travelling to Norway, I had no glue how much I´m going to learn during my

trainee. Of course I had some expectations, like learning how tourism work in smaller

areas or something about Norwegian culture, but it came out that this was just a top

of the iceberg of my learning.

“In tourism business there are no problems, there are just challenges”. This sentence

I will push to my head and keep it there the rest of my life. These words, were said by

my manager many times during my trainee. Every time, when I made a mistake or

some situation seemed tough, this sentence gave me power to continue. Whenever I

face some problems at work or at school, I just have to challenge myself to fix them. I

learned, that whit out problems, we can´t develop as a person or improve as a

worker.

I also learned more about customer service, especially how to deal with international

customers, but one thing that surprised me was, that how much I can learn from cus-

tomers them self. My trainee in Bugoynes didn´t comprehend just sitting behind the

computer in reception, instead I was almost all the time interacting physically with

my customers. I noticed, that by listening my tourists I learn many things that can´t

be ridden from books. For example, I interviewed couple of my customers, who had

been travelling around Norway more than me, that do they specially recommend

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some tourist destinations. After getting some data from them, I recommended these

destinations forward.

In addition, I had a possibility to experience how tourism works in small destinations

like Bugoynes. In this village, there were two main entrepreneurs running tourism

business and it was very interesting to follow the relationship of these companies

during the summer. It turned out, that the companies are the worst “enemies” to

each other, but they still need to do some cooperation to survive in that small area.

This seems to be quite common in destinations that are not so big.

Last but not the least, the two and half month trainee abroad grew me up as a per-

son. I learned many new sides of myself and I got much in depended that I was be-

fore. I worked like a hell during the summer, so it left me feeling that I really can do

anything if I just try enough and believe in myself.

6 What was challenging

At first, I had some challenges with the language cases. Of course, I didn´t have any

communication problems with my “host family”, because they spoke good English

and also some Finnish, but when there came situations where I had to use other lan-

guage than English to communicate with my customers, I really had to focus on what

came out of my mouth. Especially, in the beginning of my trainee, I was a little shy

and nervous, when it was my turn to answer the reception phone, but soon I realised

that the tourist can´t eat me via the phone. Even though I had some problems with

the language, I learned to speak some Norwegian and I also noticed that my English

skills have improved.

Even though, I had accomplished the alcohol passport, I had no previous experience

about alcohol serving or serving itself. I had to learn how to take orders, how to open

the wine bottles, how to pour it to the class and learn which wine fits well with which

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dish. It took a while, when I finally started to get these things and I´m really glad,

that I also got experience from this area.

During my trainee, I also noticed, that how essential is to keep your feelings in gov-

ern, when you are doing customer service. You can´t reflect your bad mood to your

customers, because otherwise you might lose them. Personally I found this quite

challenging. During my trainee I had couple very bad days, for example when one of

my relatives got into hospital and I couldn´t do anything but just to hope everything

goes well. During that time, it was very hard to serve customers and keep my emo-

tions control at the same time.

Albeit, I had some challenges during my “adventure” in North, I think I managed

quite well in every task I was given. I feel it inside me, that I´m a good worker and I

know that I always give 100% of myself to the task I´m given.

7 How the trainee affected me?

Even though, I first thought not to do my first trainee abroad, I´m very proud of my-

self, that I got the courage to exceed myself and accomplish my trainee in Norway.

As I mentioned before, I grew up as a person and I had a possibility to meet amazing

people during the summer. I didn´t get any salary from my trainee, but I got some-

thing much better, a new family. I got very close with my “host family” in Norway and

I´m really thankful for them from the care they provided. Along with the host family,

I got also other important contacts and I was offered work couple of times. The work

offers really lighted the lamp on the top of my head and they made me realize, that

maybe I´m doing something right.

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Figure 7 Me and my manager Trønd

Still the most important thing that I got from my trainee was the working experience

from my own field, that I haven´t got before. I got to see, how the things go and got

plenty of experience that how diverse the work can be. This summer opened my eyes

and made me realize how cool stuff I´m studying. Also, the praises that I got from my

customers just grew the blaze of excitement inside me.

Also, now that I have international working experience, I have much better changes

to get work from abroad. If I have an opportunity, I wouldn´t mind doing also my

second trainee abroad, but now I know, that I might not be the right person working

in hotel. Standing behind the reception 24/7 is not my cup of tea. I need a work,

where the company doesn´t define who I´m. I want to let my personality to shine and

have a work with versatile working tasks and where I actually get to do something. I

would also appreciate to do my next trainee in a place, where my managers have had

an education from the field that I´m studying.