CTA member Alpine Travel’s Chris Owens reports on the company’s successful re-focusing of its work towards supporting its local community:
“When this pandemic started to hit mid-March it was very apparent that we were going to have a large number of fantastic loyal people within the business with very little for them to do, and this was before furlough was introduced.
“It was already being announced that older and more vulnerable people within the community should reduce contact with others, self isolate, and the great unwashed started to panic buy causing chaos in the food supply chain.
“With my colleague Beverley, our marketing manager, we decided that we should initially go out to our holiday customers and offer to help, perhaps take them shopping before general opening, collect prescriptions, etc.
“We started to run out a social media campaign to our coach holiday customers, but the posts were shared far and wide; enquiries and take-up was enormous.
“As the climate and what we could do for people whilst ensuring the safety of our staff has changed, we have adapted our approach and we are now simply delivering prescription orders, click & collect, plus food bank parcels.
“We are now making 600-700 deliveries per week to socially-excluded and vulnerable people in our local communities.
“The Here to Help programme is something owned and managed by Alpine Travel/Jones Holidays, we are not helping on behalf of others and it is completely voluntary.
“Fortunately, the government announced the Furlough Scheme towards the end of March and all of the staff managing and delivering parcels are doing so on a voluntary basis whilst on furlough. We are of course running 5-6 vehicles every day making these deliveries and we are making up the salaries of furloughed employees to 100 per cent in way of thanks to our fantastic and loyal workforce.
“I am ensuring that we speak to every member of staff each week to check on their health & well-being and this scheme is helping keep us in touch with our workforce. Coach drivers are very sociable creatures and lock-down is seriously affecting their mental health.
“The take-up has been so great that we now have far more people wanting to make deliveries than we have deliveries to make!”
