The brand accreditation procedure was very straightforward. We first contacted Sud de France, the Languedoc-Roussillon region body offering an official accreditation programme that would become our quality approach from the project’s inception through to its launch. We answered a structured self-assessment questionnaire containing all the right questions we needed to ask about our service quality: do I have bilingual signage? Do I have a baby changing room? These guidelines showed us the points we needed to work on for brand accreditation. We meticulously followed all the recommendations made by Sud de France, which was a valuable help to us. Once we had dealt with 95% of the questions in the questionnaire, Sud de France sent a mystery visitor who went round the site to see if we complied with the brand’s requirements. So right from the site’s first season, we were awarded the Sud de France label and then the Qualité TourismeTM brand you already have a quality approach, accreditation is very easy.

When we read the brand’s objectives, we found that we were not up to scratch on a dozen points: signage, staff badges, car park organisation and so on. There are so many little details you don’t think about that can make all the difference to the customer’s experience on our site.

The Qualité Tourisme™ brand immediately gave us more credibility and raised our game to a level of service excellence. This excellence is rewarded today by our customers who appreciate the site’s quality and use modern rating tools to let others know. Meeting the Qualité Tourisme™ brand criteria on a day-to-day basis guarantees a good rating on the review sites. We have produced an attractive site by strictly enforcing the brand rules and French and overseas visitors appreciate that. In 2014, we had 35,000 visitors to the site. We hope to see 47,000 this year.