By Charlotte Greenacre, Emily Reavell, Emily Hockton, Demi Winch, Poppy Lee, Becca Maycock-Clark and Charlotte Lawler.
On Halloween, both the Events Management and International Tourism Management course groups visited York as part of our Space, Mobilities and the Experience Economy module. The trip involved us splitting off into separate groups and completing a list of tasks that would help us investigate visitor experience in York.
As soon as we arrived in York, we visited York St. John University and were given a lecture by a member of the Visit York team, who provided us with a range of interesting information about tourism and events in the city. After this, we formed our groups and began the list of tasks. However, before we did any work, we knew that we had to visit the Facebook-famous ‘York Roast Co.’ – a small shop that sells a Yorkshire Pudding burrito, which was absolutely delicious!
After we had lunch, we made a quick pit-stop at Betty’s Tea Room, where we each had a hot chocolate and some cake. We then made our way to our chosen attraction: York’s Chocolate Story. This was a guided tour, explaining the history of chocolate and how this had an impact on the city. Unfortunately, we did not have time to do this, so made our way to York Minster instead.
As a group, we found that navigating around the city was quite difficult, with a limited amount of signage. Luckily, we had Charlotte in our group, who lives in York, providing us with a personal tour guide for the day! York Minster was beautiful, however, we did not notice that much effort was made to account for disabled and elderly customers – there were many stairs and not enough slopes for these groups to access all areas of the minster. In addition, technology was not really used, and no member of staff approached us when we were inside. We also visited the city wall walk, which was lovely!
Overall, our day in York was a lot of fun! We all said that we would return as it was such a beautiful city with a lot to do. We would definitely visit the York Chocolate Story tour next time, but we still managed to buy some chocolate from the shop anyway