'We need to tell everyone how much fun our industry is'
Julie Shorrock, the newly-appointed chair of trade association beam, tells M&IT about her plans for 2024, the state of the sector, and much more...
Julie Shorrock, MD of Hotel and Travel Solutions, has a long history at beam and its former incarnation the HBAA. A former vice chair and a board director for many years, it made perfect sense when she succeeded Sian Sayward as chair in January.
I grabbed her for a chat about her plans for her time as chair and we discussed her plans for greater collaboration between associations, how to attract young people to the sector, and the big changes to beam's structure with the introduction of a brand new vice chair position...
PH: What are your key areas of focus for beam in your year as chair?
JS: I'd like to see more collaborations between associations. I think we work better together. When another association's doing something good, I think we could do a lot more sharing and collaborative work. We’ve already started with IACC, with BTA, and I look forward to developing those relationships this year.
We all agree that we're all having some of the same struggles in the industry and we're going off in our own committee groups or our own working parties and putting things together when if we actually share what we're all doing and endorse what each other are putting into place, we will be a lot stronger and save on time and resources.
Julie Shorrock
Julie Shorrock
What else is on the agenda?
We don't want to be an association that's just known for our events. I'd like us to be more forward thinking and show more leadership, it would be great to get more white papers being written and analysing data. That's one of my main ambitions. I'd like to see at the end of this year that we've produced materials that our members will be able to use and find beneficial. It's about being more proactive and responsive in getting information pulled together and sent out. When things start to hit our members, then we need to be in a position to react, quickly.
Are costs still the number one issue for beam members?
Massively so. It is still very crucial to us. Recruitment, salaries and obviously the minimum wage increases are going to hurt us as well. We can't deny that.
It's also about attracting people back to our industry. We lost an awful lot of talent and expertise during Covid, some of which have come back and some sadly, are gone for good.
We need to start at school and college level to get the attraction back in. Since Covid we've all become a little bit more insular, so the thought of working in hospitality is not on anybody's remit at all. We need to change that perspective and tell everyone how it is an exceptionally fun, albeit hard working industry. We need to get that element back out there again.
I go to my local high school to talk to 15-16 year olds, trying to sell them the dream that hospitality, business travel, venues and agents, is the world to be in. We've got to start young and I do think we need to start working a lot closer with the education bodies in getting business travel onto the curriculum. It seems to get forgotten.
Getting more recognition from government is a battle that we have as a sector, especially since Covid - do you see that happening this year?
It's going to be slow. It is a matter of talking to whoever's in charge, and it's almost irrelevant which party it is. It's getting in front of the right people and getting them to listen, and I don't think that's going to be one person. I think we need to hit it from lots of different angles, lots of different MPs.
If you get more and more MPs talking about it, then you get the momentum going. If you're just trying to target one, that one person's probably already got their hands full and then you're a very quiet voice. It's a matter of all of us keeping in touch with all of our MPs so that when we need something, the momentum's there and our voice can be heard a lot louder.
When you took over you said beam is currently buoyant, thriving and has plenty of momentum - how will you keep that going this year?
Coming out of Covid all of our members have had their own difficulties in rebuilding, getting people to events. Getting people involved has been a challenge, because they’re ridiculously busy. Of course, we need them to be engaging with us to be able to help them and listen to what their challenges are.
At our gala dinner in January we had higher attendance than we did in 2020 before Covid. That rubber stamps that people are now back, they’re ready. The atmosphere and the buoyancy at the gala dinner was just amazing. It was superb to see.
Do you have an idea of what success will look like at the end of your year?
I'd like to see the momentum of new events such as our finance forum, and our ESG event, carrying on this year. Coming out of Covid we’ve made sure that we run events which are targeted to the various audiences in our membership. We're putting like-minded people in a room together.
For the finance forum, for example, we ask the primary member of beam to come along, and bring with them their finance director or their finance representative. These people are usually the ones that are sitting back at the office, they don't want to come out. And we dragged them out with their primary member, and it was fantastic. We couldn't shut them up!
This year we've made the finance forum a full day event instead of half a day because there was just so much content and agenda that they wanted to talk about. We did the same with the ESG event, and again it was a huge success.
We’ve got the leaders lunches that we've been doing for a few years now, where we have about 15 or 16 business owners around a table for lunch and we talk various topics. They're absolutely fundamental to our business owners. We've got very clever now with the events that we're organising and who we're targeting to attend, and we need to promote that more to our members. We need to be telling them who they should be sending and why they need to be attending them.
If I can finish the year with a number of white papers on hot topics, and to get the members to realise that the events calendar we put together is focused specifically on people within our membership, I'll look back and I'll be pleased with my year.
Do you think it's going to be a good year for the sector?
Yes, I do. I think I think we're still seeing conferences and events coming back. When I look at my own client base, there's still some big events that haven't come back yet that I'm hoping will come back this year. There's an awful lot more small meetings that I'm seeing through my business, which is great, but I want those bigger events back again. So it's going to be good, and it's going to be tough.
For our clients, negotiating the rates and explaining the cost increases is going to be a continuous challenge, as it was last year. We've all seen that London rates are high, so it’ll be interesting to see if that stays as high or whether they start to to balance out a little.
Tell us a little bit about the new position that you've announced within beam, the vice chair.
Back in the HBAA days, way before Covid, we used to have a smaller board and a large executive committee. We decided to expand the board to make it less of a heavy responsibility on the chair.
We're all volunteers and many of us have businesses to run. Being chair dominated the working day, so we expanded the board. We're now up to 13 members. We also made a change in that we invited venue members to join the board for the first time. We have a 40:60 split on the board in favour of agents.
We seem to be able to make decisions a lot quicker now, whereas when the board just consisted of agents, we had to go out to the venue members to get them onside with what we wanted to do. Now they're at the table and we can all discuss it, which is proving absolutely fantastic. There is so much more understanding and respect on both sides of the coin, which is good for us all.
Previously we had the chair, who was an agent, and we had the venue chair as well, so that we had the balance. When we broadened the board we decided that it wasn't necessary to have the venue chair, because we now had venues on the board. But with such a large board and so much that we're doing now, we decided we needed a vice chair.
We've agreed that if the chair is an agent like myself, then the vice chair will be a venue and Ryan Doyle from Swift Hospitality is our vice chair this year. I've been working with Ryan for a good couple of years now, looking after membership within beam and we work very well together. If the chair is a venue the vice chair will be an agent so you always maintain that balance of viewpoint. It’s a great display of collaboration and its working really well for the association.
That would be a big thing for beam if the chair was a venue, wouldn’t it?
Very much so. If there's any feedback that I've listened to since being in heavily involved back in 2016 is the venues saying that they needed a voice. We are an agency-leading association, that’s our core aspect. But getting the venues onto the board means that we can make changes much quicker and have a combined and consolidated membership. So yes, this is new. This is a big change and it's it's very exciting.
It's evolution. It's what's needed. You know, we're 25 years old, it needed to be recognised. Having a chair and a vice chair of either agent and venue absolutely rubber stamps and consolidates what it is we're actually trying to achieve.
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