“Hola, soy Karen, estudiante de turismo, ¿puedo hacer mi practica en tu empresa, por favor?”
Eso era más o menos mi primera conversación con Inge del Hemelbrug. La llamaba en enero porque mi practica con Intersoc estaba cancelado, y ahora tenía a buscar una otra.
Escribé mi trabajo final sobre el glamping y la sostenibilidad y por tanto Hemelbrug me aparecía perfecte para mis cuatro meses de experiencia profesional. Hemelbrug es un lugar que organisa reuniones y formaciones de equipos (teambuilding), pero durante la crisis de Covid-19 también organisaba vacaciones de glamping. A Inge y Guy, los proprietarios, les importa mucha la sostenibilidad. Me parece una buena idea simplemente llamarlos y pedir una practica. No me arrepiento de esa decisión.
Inicialmente, Inge estaba desconcertada. Nunca tenían trabajado con estudiantes et no sabían si sería bastante interesante. Pero al final me ofrecían la practica. Y creo que a ellos tampoco no se arrepientan de su decisión.
The workload has been very diverse. The first few months the main guests were glampers, which meant most of our work was hands-on; making the beds, preparing breakfast, washing up after breakfast, stripping the beds, washing and ironing the bedlinen and vacuuming the tents.
But as the pandemic improved and the restrictions eased, our inbox flooded with emails from businesses to book meetings and teambuildings, as they desperately needed a change of scenery to boost their teams’ morale.
A lot of our work is concentrated in the back office. I set up a price calculator in Excel which sped up the making of quotations, made some changes in Outlook to improve its efficiency, designed posts for LinkedIn and compiled a list of businesses in the area for us to contact and introduce to Hemelbrug.
July and August are normally quieter months, as businesses tend to slow down over the summer while employees enjoy their holidays. But that is also different this year, and even these two months are filling up with bookings. This caused Inge and Guy to scale back the glamping side of Hemelbrug and focus on B2B. If anything, the last couple of months have been very dynamic, as the focus of the business has shifted along with the pandemic.
