Today we hosted four pupils from each of our local high schools including Gairloch, Ullapool, Dingwall and Plockton for a day of hospitality experience and and a hotel blogging challenge. Rohaise had organised and designed the day to give some of our time back to the industry and encourage young people to come into hospitality. The pupils were given an introduction to The Torridon; how we got to where we are, what we do and what we would like to achieve in the future. The event was hosted jointly with Gillian Unger from Skills Development Scotland and ourselves with  representatives from Springboard. The day was a mixture of tasks and challenges designed to make the pupils investigate the different departments in the hotel and speak to staff about their experience.

All the staff were great, helping the pupils with their questions and pointing them in the right direction. There was great enthusiasm from all sides and for a first time event, it exceeded our expectations.

The day was designed around a challenge where each team had to create a  blog post around a particular theme. Having explained the importance of online marketing, whether it is a website, social networking or writing posts for a blog site, the pupils set about their posts, talking to staff and taking photos.

Dingwall focused on the daily menu, Plockton looked at the new refurbishment, Ullapool wrote about what was like to work at Torridon and Gairloch created a piece on Winter mountaineering activities.

The ideal blog post is supposed to be 200-300 words long, written in an informal way, trying to communicate to the reader, being either informative or entertaining and – for The Torridon – try to entice the reader to visit the hotel in person, whether for the first time or by keeping in contact with people who visit the hotel regularly.
All the schools took this onboard and created some great posts with the help of their teachers, Skill development Scotland staff and ourselves. There can be only one winner and it was the girls from Dingwall Academy who came up with a unique post based on our daily menu from the point of view of the lamb itself. For their great efforts we will be putting their post on the site following this post and we hope you enjoy reading it as much as we do.

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