SOCCATOURS
Training camp planning

<p><span>There are plenty of reasons why you would be confronted with this question. Perhaps you’ve already been in the football world as a coach for years and your team arranges a training camp each year because that’s just what you do. Or you only recently took over a junior team for the first time and you want to make the best of your first season. In any case, you’ve been toying for some time with the idea of organising a training camp to help your team achieve its objectives. </span></p>

<p><span>Take a few minutes to search the web for companies that offer football training camps – you’ll see that there are plenty of them. However, most of them aren’t tour organisers (which create the product); instead, they are merely travel agencies which purchase the finished products of organisers and sell them to sports clubs at a premium. In times when the margins of travel agencies are declining, they’re more than happy to tack on a few extra euros to group tours. And guess who pays this additional cost. You’ll also find some hotels which try to attract groups. It might not be a bad product in individual cases, but all you’d be getting is a general marketing presentation of a single offer.</span></p>

<p><span>If you still have your Google results page open, then you’ll see that there are two types of results: generic results – that is, websites which are deemed important by the search engine – and purchased listings (‘sponsored results’) above and to the side. These are nothing more than advertisements of providers whose importance is considered not particularly high for various reasons.</span></p>

<p><span>A few organisers – like us – specialise in football training camps. Others offer training camps on the side, in addition to normal tourism services such as package tours to Crete and flights to Paris. We recommend that you stick to the specialists, as they are dedicated to making your trip a success – as are all SOCCATOURS staff members. They are familiar with the football pitches and hotel managers and know what their customers are paying for. See for yourself and simply ask if they are personally familiar with the hotels that they sell. Do they know about the quality of the natural-grass pitches? How does the quality of the pitches change in February or March, not long after the rainy winter, if a number of teams want to practise on them at the same time? And what sort of social programme does the local area have to offer? You’d also expect your car dealer to know the ins and outs of your dream car, right? To put it clearly: unfortunately in this business there are downright dilettantes out there who, due to a lack of either football expertise or tourism know-how, are simply not able to provide the level of service quality necessary and who therefore do damage to the industry’s reputation. So our tip for you is to have a critical eye, dig deeper and ask your ‘adviser’ loads of questions. We look forward to answering your questions!</span></p>

<p><span>We visit our most popular destinations multiple times per year, speak with the hotel managers, sleep in the rooms, check out the fitness and wellness areas, test everything the buffet has to offer, closely examine the training conditions and inform ourselves in detail about how the football pitches are cared for and which renovation projects may be upcoming. For us, there isn’t much worse than when a coach, disappointed by the hotel or the pitch conditions, gives us a negative review amongst their colleagues and negatively impacts our reputation in doing so. This is why your satisfaction is our top priority – this will be clear to you when you speak to us on the phone and when you read our emails, because we want you to come back next year. So if a destination no longer meets our or above all our customers’ expectations (which we find out about particularly in the testimonials), then we remove it from our programme without delay.</span></p>