LooLa Adventure Resort started operating in June of 2000 on the island of Bintan, Indonesia. The owner, Dr. Marc van Loo, vowed from the beginning to have a fully local staff and to involve them in all aspects of management. It has been a long road towards incorporating a full team of local staff and inspiring them to become proud stakeholders of the project. Over the years Loola has been very successful in incorporating the local community, creating pride among their staff and supporting local community development projects.

Written by Loola Adventure Resort on 2 Nov 2011 with 0 comments. Be the first!

After back-packing for a year in South East Asia in 1989, I wanted to return to Asia from my native Holland, and make a resort that combined the natural charm of the real Indonesia with some of the comforts that most visitors expect. The idea was to contract the staff from the local village, nurture their uniquely Indonesian charm and hospitality, while familiarizing them with foreign visitors' expectations.

The National University of Singapore offered me a chance to return to Asia through a scholarship to finish my PhD studies (in Cosmology - hence the telescopes at LooLa). I spent much of my PhD in a happy bliss, waiting for mathematical inspiration to strike, in a hammock with a gorgeous view on the tranquil sea at East Coast of Bintan (a beautiful Indonesian island with a rich history, on a 1.5 hour ferry journey from Singapore).

Added to this happy picture, at this time I also met Isabelle, my wife, a fellow travel enthusiast who was teaching French in Singapore. I got a teaching job too after finishing my studies, and soon after this we decided to use our teaching experience and the income it earned us to start an adventure resort focusing on educational trips and eco-conscious families, on the island of Bintan that I had grown so fond of.

With this decision made, my friends in Bintan helped me to find a gorgeous idyllic beach location in the island's most sparsely populated part (there are only about 300 people in a radius of 5 km around us, 35 of whom we now employ full-time).

When I saw the location, it was love at first sight - and the love affair has never stopped. We had an endearing chat with the village owners of the land (who have been part of our staff ever since), and bought the land the next week. We started building in December 1999, finished construction in March 2000, and started operating in June that year, at the same time our first son was born.

We were lucky to start during the Asian financial crisis, as it helped keeping construction costs well within the limits of what we had saved, in particular since we decided to build using exclusively local expertise capitalizing on local building techniques. A second bit of luck was that educational travel, in particular from international schools based in Singapore, was picking up, and that schools at that time weren't as obsessed with safety as they are now. This gave our staff - all drawn from the local village - the time to learn the job on the go, adjusting to the more demanding expectations that developed in educational travel in the decade that followed.

From the start, the staff managed, as we had hoped and expected, to endear themselves to our guests with their natural Indonesian hospitality. As our clientele grew, it became more important that professional protocols were developed and followed, which wasn't always straightforward as Indonesians favor the spontaneous over routines. However, we could succeed because of one of Indonesian's strongest characteristics: their natural curiosity and openness to new ideas, their love of round-table debates, and their strong preference for compromise solutions that keep everyone happy.

Next we had to work on developing a sense of true ownership amongst our staff, in particular since my wife and I are based in Singapore and only go over a few times a year. More generally, we resolved to engage our staff, the local community as well as the local government, as true stakeholders.

Concretely, we called on the government to empower our village staff and teach them how to process local licenses and to overcome their shyness in the face of officialdom, as we did not want to go down the road of paying exorbitant fees to professional agents to grease various mills. We also called on the local government's help with our private-public partnerships where we attempted to engage local communities (more about which later). The local government has consistently sympathized with this approach and always made friendly, idealistic and patient staff available while charging only the bare basic admin fees for services. Things may have gone a bit slower this way than by engaging consultants, but the approach ensured that the government was always forgiving of administrative errors (easily made in the (still) fairly complex administrative system) and that we could problem-free continue to operate while the admin issues were being sorted out. They also loved our ideas to engage the local community, often coming up with original ideas to enhance the experience. Help was not always equally efficient, but the upside of a round of less efficient assistance was that they always felt a moral obligation to make up for it the next time.

As for the local community, there was a natural opportunity to create an all-round win-win situation: many of our clients being eco-tourists or educational guests, they are often keen to contribute to, and interact with, the local communities, so we propose to our guests a minor surcharge, typically between US$ 10 - 20 pp, to engage in intimate community projects such as building roads, upgrade houses of poorer villagers, install mosquito nets, plant trees, build beds, interact with local schools, or engage orphanages in a way that truly benefited the local communities.

It took a while for both our staff and the local community to develop realistic expectations of what could be achieved within the time and funding available, and to truly grasp what we intended (especially that we did not regard it as impolite on their part to counter-propose alternative projects, but that, to the contrary, this kind of involvement and engagement was exactly what we wanted). But progress was steady to the point where our local communities and staff now look forward to such meaningful, lively and fun interactions as much as our guests do.

Finally, and most crucially, to get our staff to become fully professional stakeholders was a long interesting journey, rich in experimental dead end roads, narrow trails, and occasional highways. Local village and family hierarchies had to be dismantled in favor of "Dutch-style" horizontal governance, in which all voices were freely heard. Traditional short-term thinking had to be replaced with long-term thinking. Employees had to start feeling like owners, and embrace the somewhat novel notion of pride in work.

Sparing the reader the details of many less successful attempts, here are some of the things that have worked well for us:

• We pulled women into the management and throughout all departments, as they traditionally not only understand long-term thinking better than men do, but because it is far more fun for everyone if men and women work together in a happy mix.
• Since we (in Singapore) charge our clients a single package that covers all transport, accommodation, food and activities, we encouraged our staff to open their own business selling drinks, snacks, cigarettes, phone cards and whatever else guests might want to buy. This business took a long time to become profitable for them (mostly because the male staff had a tendency to raid their own store and enjoy a Heineken or two), but again, since women took charge of the shop, things took a turn for the better.
• We set up a private system of health insurance and retirement benefits whereby staff were encouraged to take ownership and contribute a little bit voluntarily to their retirement, in which case the company would top up up to 5 times that amount.
• We set up a transparent system of describing what jobs needed doing, what qualities the company is looking for, and how achieving certain benchmarks would be rewarded financially.
• We had our staff administer a work calendar in which off-days and work-days are clearly listed, including a clear and transparent description of the nature of the work each day, also for senior staff.
• Generally, we insist that whatever systems we adopt, all staff understand the perspectives of all stakeholders, and participate fully in devising a system that benefits all stakeholders.

We have come a long way over the last decade: as the Tripadvisor reports confirm, our staff is universally admired for their level of service, we have become the market-leading overseas destination for Singapore-based schools, and we believe by the end of 2011, our staff should be ready to take over the entire resort, not just running the client operations as they have done all along, but also take complete charge of all maintenance and financial management, whereby we - as a Singapore-based travel agent - will pay them simply a package price per guest, and let them handle the clients, salaries and maintenance.

We hope to welcome you at LooLa so you can see for yourself!

Visit LooLa Adventure Resort for more information.