Delivery of holidays

We are here for families facing tough times. More than half of the families we support are experiencing mental ill-health, almost a third have experienced domestic abuse, and in a fifth of them the children are young carers.

We know that on average the families we help are experiencing four additional challenges like homelessness, isolation, disability, terminal illness, or bereavement as well as coping on a low income. 

We’ve worked hard to acknowledge and reflect this in our services by making our processes quicker and simpler and offering help and reassurance over the phone to reduce the worry some families feel about going away.

We can help them create happy memories and introduce them to tourism in a way which motivates and supports them to prioritise a holiday with a new perspective on the benefits it can bring to them. To help us do that it matters that we understand what makes a great tourism experience for families and work hard to deliver it.

Where have we done well?

We had originally planned to pilot offering support with the cost of food whilst on holiday because families told us it was harder to shop economically in a new environment. But in the context of the rapidly rising cost of living we decided to extend this help to all families so that the expected cost of feeding the family whilst away wouldn’t cause additional stress or prevent some families from accepting our support. 

Because of feedback from families and referrers we’ve changed our way of working. Instead of being offered holiday dates and locations by email, families and their referrers now contact a call centre staffed by specially trained booking agents and follow a straight-forward booking process They can choose from a wide choice of available UK destinations, accommodation types and dates, as well as transport options, with agents helping families to think about and choose the holiday that will best suit them.

And what have we learned?

The opportunity presented by significant government grant funding has been transformational for the charity. It required us to rapidly scale our operations to deliver more holidays to families in the first half of 2022 than we did in the whole of the previous year. We on-boarded new suppliers and implemented new ways of working, all whilst delivering to a tight deadline.

Inevitably this meant we learned as we went along and the pace and scale of change to our operating model was hard for our staff team to cope with and tested our digital infrastructure to its limits. We employed a dedicated project manager to deliver the grant-funded work. But the highest demand on the team’s time was in assessing applications and providing frontline customer service support given the number of families travelling in a short period. 

We’ve used these learnings to restructure our Experiences and Impact team so it can scale more dynamically and effectively in responseto future opportunities.

What’s next for Family Holiday Charity?

• Launching our updated Theory of Change - this will see the charity clearly setting out the connection between our activities and our impact goals to move forward with focus and purpose.
• Engagement with the travel industry and government - their support and actions are a fundamental part of facilitating inclusion in tourism for all families.
• Our new CRM - our fundraising team will be using it to drive automation and personalisation in our supporter journeys.
• Updating our holiday application and delivery system - to improve the customer journey for referrers and families.
• Acquiring new donors - we have exciting plans to launch a new holiday twinning product aimed at engaging travel agents and their customers