RC4VETS:“Business Empowerment for Pescara”

8 min readFeb 22, 2023

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I. Executive Summary
II. BEP Challenge
CHALLENGE DESCRIPTION
BUSINESS PARTNERS INVOLVED
HOTEL & TOURISM MANAGEMENT — HTMG SRL
B-PLANS SRLS
EXPECTED RESULTS
ACTIVITY SCHEDULE
III. Contributions from partners
ONLINE COOPERATION
Specific tasks and responsibilities of each partner
SubMeet
BRCCI
CIFP César Manrique
DIEK Glyfadas
PCO
Proandi
Learning, teaching and training activity in Pescara
IV Annex — Infographic

I. Executive Summary

The project “Real Challenges for VET Students” (RC4VETs) is based on five challenges which engage students from Bulgaria, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain to work on real business cases, led by local companies.

This was the third challenge under the Erasmus+ project “Real Challenges for VET students”, intended to create a Business Empowerment Plan (BEP) in Tourism business in Pescara.

The local companies involved were HTMG (Tourism Consultancy) and B-PLANS (Tourism Accommodation), which gave all the involved students real data and info to work on and assessed all the work done during the learning teaching and training activity celebrated in Pescara.

Each local team developed a specific part of the BEP and everything was finally collected and combined in the final plan during the Italian LTTA, with the support of the local companies involved.

The final output contains interesting hints, which the local companies considered as highly valuable for their businesses.

II. BEP Challenge

CHALLENGE DESCRIPTION

TITLE: business empowerment plan in Pescara.

IDEA: involving trainees and staff in a transnational work team to develop a business empowerment plan in Tourism sector.

PRODUCT: business empowerment plan, supported by our senior tutors and endorsed by local Tourism SMEs.

PARTICIPANTS INVOLVED: students and staff from each Partner Country from Tourism, ICTs, Marketing fields.

DESCRIPTION: we cooperated with SMEs active in tourism management, tourism marketing and business development; our location (Pescara) is a famous touristic destination with almost 1 million stays per year, therefore tourism is a great business attractor and a focus for VET education too.

We created a transnational team of students, coordinated and supported by our experts and tourism SMEs experts too, which defined, prepared and developed a whole business development plan to be implemented in Pescara by our partner SMEs.

BUSINESS PARTNERS INVOLVED

HOTEL & TOURISM MANAGEMENT — HTMG SRL

HTMG is a SME providing services to tourism business, such as:

Check-up & start-up, SWOT analysis (identification of plus and minus points )
Assistance in the start-up phase and the identification of functional components with respect to costs.
Yield Management.
Identification, management and motivation of human resources in order to optimize the services offered by the property.
Implementation of marketing plans related to communication: web-marketing, letters, newsletters, price lists, brochures and press releases.
Hotel Buying/Selling in Italy and abroad with a business check-up Italy and abroad.
Wedding management and wine & food programs: we offer a complete plan for the promotion and marketing of events packages, particularly suitable for charming residences, Castles, Villas, Relays. The plan includes the following points: Territorial analysis (SWOT) Resort analysis, SWOT, Markets, PR and Press Office Plan, Study tours & workshops.

B-PLANS SRLS

B-PLANS is a SME focused on managing holiday homes and apartments, B&Bs, and residences for tourists. Through the brand “Downtown Accommodation”, B-PLANS manages accommodations for tourists mainly in Campobasso and Pescara. Along with this, B-PLANS deals with the following activities:

promotional and marketing activities.
activating distribution channels, creating commercial, cultural and social initiatives for tourists.
events, fairs, cultural initiatives, congresses and exhibitions to promote tourist offer.
welcoming tourists and / or tourist animation initiatives on site.

EXPECTED RESULTS

A full business development plan.
Tourism business qualification, acquired from OJT (On the Job Training).
Enhancement of VET competences, resulting from a practical insight of reals business cases.
Follow-up and monitoring reports.
Dissemination of RC4VETs through challenge participants’ activities.

ACTIVITY SCHEDULE

III. Contributions from partners

We created a steering team, composed by key teachers / instructors from each partner, assigned to coordinate the work done at the local level by their own students / staff.

As shown below the steering team, local teams of students / staff developed specific parts of the BEP, based on real data and info provided by the local Italian companies.

ONLINE COOPERATION

We created a shared folder on Google Drive, where all the parts of the BEP have been classified and filed:

Each team could access the whole common folder and share contents, info and products with all the others.

Online meetings has celebrated before the LTTA in Pescara.

Specific tasks and responsibilities of each partner

SubMeet

Submeet played two roles in this challenge:

as CHALLENGE LEADER, we coordinated and planned the whole activity, created the organisational structure, prepared the challenge timeline, chased its progress and created the working templates for each team; SubMeet also gathered the real data 7 info from the local associated business partners for each local team
as WORKING PARTNER, we completed the chapters:

Executive Summary [1]
Company Overview
Product Overview
Pricing
Operating Plan [1]
Financial Plan [1]

BRCCI

BRCCI engaged its team in the preparation of the following parts:

Target Market
Communication
Marketing Activities (in cooperation with CIFP César Manrique)

Their team studied geographic location, buyer characteristics (cultural, social, personal and psychological), target market, target market’s needs.

They also gave interesting advice on how to improve the website of the local business partner and outlined a communication strategy through social media (mainly Instagram and Tik Tok).

CIFP César Manrique

This vocational training institute has placed its students to work on the following parts:

Market Analysis (general idea)
Competitors’ Analysis (in cooperation with PCO)
Marketing Activities (in cooperation with BRCCI)

In particular, they proposed to create three packs of services for different types of guests:

silver pack — accommodation (services related to the chosen room), Touristic bono with city sightseeing included (most important sites of Pescara), transport included (Museum and the beaches)
gold pack — accommodation (services associated to the chosen room), Touristic bono with city sightseeing included (most important sites of Pescara), transport included (Museum and the beaches), recreational activities
students pack — available upon proof of enrollment (university certificate or proof of internship), one monthly payment or bi-weekly payments depending of the contract, students have to put in a deposit for long stay, breakfast as optional

Their team also identified fragilities in the communication tools actually used by the local business partners and proposed improvements in the fonts, colour palette, hashtags, SEO and logo.

They also proposed good ideas for Instagram stories to be posted to attract more potential clients.

DIEK Glyfadas

The Greek Partner developed the following parts of the BEP:

Business Opportunities (in cooperation with PCO and Proandi)
SWOT Analysis

Their team made researches and analysed data from the Italian Statistics Authority and sources provided in the Business Plan Pescara file to create a well-established information base for assessing the City of Pescara’s and the wider region’s touristic capabilities and provide possible ideas for improvement and development. Alongside that a SWOT Analysis was conducted and put together to highlight important strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that Pescara has to address in order to increase tourist influx, hotel room bookings and increase revenue for businesses in the region as a whole.

PCO

PCO worked on the following parts:

Business Opportunities (in cooperation with DIEK and Proandi)
Competitors’ Analysis (in cooperation with CIFP César Manrique)

Their team played a more technical role in ICT improvements of local business partner’s website and communication tools: PCO implemented the solutions proposed together with the other teams and shared with thelocal business partners.

Proandi

Proandi worked on the following part:

Business Opportunities (in cooperation with DIEK Glyfadas and PCO)

In particular, they proposed new recipes and styles for the tourists’ breakfast, based on local products and flavours. Their challenge team was an internal partnership between the trainees of the cooking and pastry course and the IT and Systems technician course. Thus, the two groups put into practice their knowledge and skills to carry out the activities that will enhance the final product.

Proandi studied local and traditional breakfast menus (taking into account the existing products and keeping the Italian breakfast tradition) and prepared the food technical sheets.