Website

I think it’s something like around seven /eight  years now since I first started using website, and in particular the forum. Forum has never been that easy to use, clunky, time consuming, won’t let you do certain things, some of features have never worked. But at least the rest of the website, including bookings worked fine. But these last few months, the whole website is shocking to be honest. My OH logged on for first time in a couple of years, and he said it was so bad, it was like going back to the days of dial up!

Despite endless complaints to Club HQ, nothing in terms of real long standing improvements gets done. It’s a shocking front window for the Club to be honest. It’s the only website we have issues with.

Quite agree TTDA. Lots of members pay good money for fast wifi/fibre/broadband etc. but this makes no difference when using this forum. 

The Caravan club posts revenues in excess of £100million and employs some very well paid people to run it. I find it incredible that the website is so appallingly slow and at times quite unusable. It seems to have been like this on and off for some time. If this was a real world business of this size, especially in the hospitality sector, it really would not be tolerated and management would be held to account for this shortcoming. Can I, therefore ask our Director General what is going to be done to fix the problem. Thank-you.

Very much doubt that you'll get a reasonable response, especially posting on here. Perhaps an email direct to the DG might just produce a reply.

What none of us know,even me as a moderator, is what the "Club" ie Executive and Club Council think of this forum? They will know how many people generally access this forum as opposed to the Facebook page and may well think is it worth spending a large amount of money on something which relatively few members use on a regular basis. I can understand the chicken and egg argument that more would use it if it were more "user friendly" but we can't guarantee that. They may also look at a lot of "knocking copy" against the Club and think do we want to encourage that. They may also note that so many threads end up being closed because some members can't follow fairly simple T&C's so where is the incentive because some of those elements won't improve however brilliant a platform is. Many of you might not agree with my prognosis but I would suggest a long hard look at what happens on this forum and then put yourselves in the shoes of those that hold the purse strings. One final observation. Some of you are aware that the C&CC has a forum which is not as well used as this and in many ways is even less featured than this. One thing they insist on is people use their real names, rather than user names, and that seems to temper a lot of the debates, should we do the same here?

By all means try your luck with Nick Lomas, although I would suggest a proper letter sent by recorded delivery. I think an email is too easily intercepted by others lower down the command chain. 

David

but David, the website aside from CT isn't great either, it works, but only just. 

I would agree with most of that David except recently the whole web site has been dysfunctional and the forum section "faults" pale into insignignificance if the main web site is failing as badly as it has been doing.

It also seems naive to rely on Facebook as the main communication medium, I can't imagine many other leisure companies doing the same. Websites are the flagships of companies and apart from updating sessions most work well.

Regarding posts on the forum which are detrimental this seems to be a common disease with outbreaks on many media outlets. 

DK wrote: "By all means try your luck with Nick Lomas, although I would suggest a proper letter sent by recorded delivery. I think an email is too easily intercepted by others lower down the command chain."

If you mark the recorded delivery "Personal & Confidential" it will usually make it up as far as the head honcho's PA and elicit a response from the top. I've used this tactic in the past with other companies.

Agree, and that’s the big issue. It didn’t matter when it was just the forum bit that was clunky, but now it’s the whole website.

We don’t use Facebook for our primary information research. In fact I usually walk away if something is via Facebook rather than a proper website. Appreciate others love it though.

It is absolutely the whole website and to point the finger at a few forum users is inappropriate as the rot goes much deeper than that and blame must be shared by all - management, forum users, staff, moderators, council members, IT folk et al. The performance of the website is just one symptom of the root and branch reform that is needed within the club and the forum is just one small part of the website.

No, David, I do not believe we should use real names here. Obviously you are happy to but many are not because it leads to security breaches. We give away much about ourselves here and it is often only the lack of a real name which allows us to retain our secure stance. Having discovered the real name of a poster on CT from his identical posts on C&CC enabled me to obtain his address, history of directorships and employment and to google earth his house and see his van parked on the drive. I hasten to add I did that only to prove how easy it was and not from malicious intent. That is the reason you won't find me posting on C&CC and why I believe it would be a disservice to members to do the same here.