English Lakes Directors Attend Disney University

In 1994, a number of our directors travelled to Orlando, Florida, to attend Disney University and take part in a programme called The Disney Approach to Quality Service. The visit provided an opportunity to study Disney's approach to customer service and consider how elements of its service culture could be applied within English Lakes Hotels. Our company history records the programme as one of the key developments of the 1990s. The programme had a practical influence on how we approached service after the directors returned to the UK. Contemporary academic research into quality management in hospitality records that, following the four-day Disney University experience, English Lakes developed its own expectations policy and a method for communicating its quality-service philosophy to employees. Rather than attempting to reproduce Disney's operation, the experience provided ideas that could be adapted to our own hotels and teams. It became part of the development of a more structured approach to customer service within the business during the 1990s.