Owner of the Chocolate Boutique Hotel Gerry Wilton with students and staff

In an experience akin to the adrenaline rush of pitching to the worldly dragons on dragons den, BA (Hons) Events Management and BA (Hons) Leisure Marketing undergrads from BU’s School of Tourism have been pitching their ideas to Dorset’s top businesses.

Three of the business which have taken their chosen students idea forward includes Aruba, the Chocolate Boutique Hotel, and The Captains Club Hotel.

This involved the Events and Leisure students being given a project brief, preparing a consultancy report identifying a gap in the market for a new event or leisure product and outlining a fully cost effective business case.

The team who won Matthew Piovan, Operations Manager at Aruba’s attention proposed to bring ‘Ascot to Aruba’, with the students already working with Matthew to make the event a reality this Autumn,

“Every year the students manage to come up with wonderful new event concepts for Aruba that give me the ideas and inspiration for events that we can actually carry out throughout the group. This year was no different with an excellent range of ideas, well thought out, researched and presented.”

Owner of the Chocolate Boutique Hotel Gerry Wilton was so impressed by the winning events students proposal he is already in the process of organising their idea, a chocolate festival for families in line with national chocolate day.

“I was surprised and pleased by the quality of ideas that were presented to me. Detailed thought was given to the theme, marketing and finance of all ideas and most importantly profit.”

Other ideas being carried forward by the dragons include a Titanic black tie event this coming October at The Captains Club.