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Cabbies train as city’s ambassadors

A drive to give visitors to Portsmouth a better experience is being spearheaded by a group of ‘frontline ambassadors’ for the city – its taxi drivers.

“Pompey’s cabbies” have been attending a unique customer service training course to improve their local knowledge and sense of city pride to give them more confidence in dealing with customers.

The course has proved so successful that it has earned the two organisations behind it – Tourism South East and Pride in Pompey – a place in the final of the National Training Awards 2004.

The course was created to give tourists a warmer welcome to Portsmouth. Tourism is vital to the city’s economy, supporting 7,000 jobs. But a visitor survey showed it scored lower than average for UK destinations when it came to providing a ‘feeling of welcome’.

Tourism South East, based at Chamberlayne Road, Eastleigh, and “Pride in Pompey” – part of Portsmouth City Council’s department of regeneration and tourism – realised that taxi drivers had an important ambassadorial role to play.

Together the organisations designed a tailor-made three-day course: Welcome Host – covering the importance of good customer service, effective communication and dealing with difficult situations, Welcome All – assisting customers with special needs including wheelchair users and those who are visually and hearing challenged, Local and City Tourism Knowledge – designed to improve cabbies’ knowledge of Portsmouth’s history and services, including guided walks of the city.

“The course was attended by 26 cabbies and proved a resounding success,” said Sue Gill, head of skills and training at Tourism South East. “In a 2002 visitor survey, the feeling of welcome was rated as good or very good by 87 per cent of Portsmouth visitors. The course has definitely improved relations between the council and the taxi trade.”

Celia Denton, chair of Portsmouth’s Taxi Driver Federation, said: “The training programme has helped restore our faith in the City Council. Until then we felt like ‘third class citizens’ and that the council had no interest in us, except to interfere in our working practices.

“Overall, the taxi trade representative felt the training should be compulsory for all cabbies as training is certainly lacking within the trade.”

Some cabbies are now asking for an advanced course, to include use of foreign language and Portsmouth’s bus drivers on tourism routes will also soon be offered their own special training courses.

The tourism course has been so successful that it has been recognised as ‘best practice’ by Malta’s national tourism board, which sent 10 drivers to Portsmouth to shadow cabbies who had been trained.

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