Sundance Vacations, Corporate Headquarters

Start your engines for an exciting night of fun. Sundance Vacations Speedway is holding an Employee Day on Saturday, April 18.

Employees - FREE ADMISSION
Guests: Adult - $10
Children 10 & Under – Free

The employee sign in will take place from 4:30-6pm. The grandstands will open at 5pm. Racing will follow. Please make sure you sign up with your manager. We hope to see you there!

Do you have a favorite local driver that you’re excited to see?

A few Sundance Vacations employees including Founder Tina Dowd have been working on core values and designing a corporate culture that will be beneficial to the company. While at a conference in Las Vegas, Tina attended a seminar given by CEO Tony Hsieh from Zappos. Mr. Hsieh explained 10 solid core values that act as a formalized definition of their company culture. Zappos core values weren’t formed by a few people from senior management that sat around in a room at a company offsite. Instead, they invited every employee at Zappos to participate in the process. That’s what we hope to accomplish at Sundance Vacations. What matters to you? What values do you live by daily?

The final list Zappos collectively came up with include:
1) Deliver WOW Through Service
2) Embrace and Drive Change
3) Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
4) Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
5) Pursue Growth and Learning
6) Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
7) Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
Do More With Less
9) Be Passionate and Determined
10) Be Humble

The cool thing about the Zappos core values is that they can be used as personal values as well. The Zappos CEO explained that his core values work because, his employees live by them. We want you to come up with a set of core values, or even just one. If you live your life by a certain value and you think it would benefit the company, we want to hear from you! According to Robert Bundy, “If there are no common values, there can be no image of the future.” Please be an image of the future for Sundance Vacations!

What core values are important to you?

Sundance Vacations Founders John and Tina Dowd are currently attending the American Resort Development Association (ARDA) conference in Orlando, Florida.

ARDA promotes the growth and development of the travel industry through a variety of capacities: Advocacy, Networking, Business Partnerships/Bridge-Building, Outreach, Knowledge, and Support/ Development. ARDA and its members are committed to the highest standards and ethics in resort, vacation, recreational, residential and community development for the benefit of the public.

The Dowd’s are at the conference receiving the latest industry news and learning new techniques that might be valuable to the company. While many companies have been forced to close their doors due to the recession and banking crisis, Sundance Vacations remains thankful for our position in the market. We value our customers and strive to ensure their happiness with our product.

Have you heard any good stories about the travel industry lately? Do you have any fresh ideas for Sundance Vacations?

Sundance Vacations experienced a huge loss on Thursday March 5th. A long term employee Helen Koval passed away from an illness. Helen was employed as the Assistant General Manager of Sundance Vacations. After running the Wilkes-Barre dayshift for many years she soon took over the Inbound and Confirmations Department. Helen touched the lives of many employees and everyone was deeply saddened by the news. “You don’t meet someone like Helen Koval every day. She was so much more than a coworker, she was a best friend. We shared secrets, dreams, and goals. I’m very fortunate to have worked with her for so many years. I’ll miss her more than words will allow me to express,” said Christina Allen.

There will be a memorial service in Helen’s honor on Tuesday, March 10th at 2:30. The service will be held at the corporate office, and all employees are invited to attend. If you have any memories or stories of Helen that you would like to share, please do.

Sundance Vacations sends their deepest condolences to the Koval family during this difficult time. “As a GM, Helen touched nearly every employee. She had incredible natural talent for managing people which made her extremely well loved at every level. We are distraught and saddened by the loss of this extraordinary woman. We ask for our customers understanding as we regain our composure and say goodbye during the memorial service set for Tuesday,” said Sundance Vacations Founders John and Tina Dowd.

Helen Koval and Christina Allen pictured at a Sundance Vacations Cristmas Party.

Sundance Vacations was selected as one of the best places to work in Pennsylvania on December 2nd, 2008. This was the second year the company participated in the program. Sundance Vacations placed twelfth in a statewide poll for the top 50 large companies. Competition was fierce as employees anxiously awaited the ranking alongside Sundance Vacations founders John and Tina Dowd. Nearly 45,000 Pennsylvania employees (a 100% increase over last year) filled out the survey. The combined scores determined the top company’s final ranking. The ceremony was held at the Hershey Lodge and Convention Center in Hershey, PA. The attendance at the dinner topped over 1,100 people from 100 companies throughout Pennsylvania. “There are many companies who are disappointed, because they did not make the list,” said Acting Secretary, Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development, John Blake. Sundance Vacations is pleased with their ranking, but let’s keep striving for the number one spot!!

What do you think would improve our ranking for next year? We would love to hear some of your suggestions!

Sundance Vacations is moving up on the information super highway ladder. Sundance Vacations IT Staff have been working on creating a companywide Intranet. The brand new Intranet is powered by Joomla!. The company Intranet will provide a mainstream way for all employees to receive company information. Joomla! offers many great tools to allow Sundance Vacations to find out what their employees like or dislike. Users will have the option to view breaking news on the front page, to downloading time off request forms. Employees will now be able to access and view handbooks and other useful company information. Joomla! will provide a companywide calander as well as a Permission Marketing Calander. These calanders will provide important dates and allow employees to see what events Sundance Vacations will appear at. Stay tuned as Joomla! is still in its infancy stage. Details will be provided once the site becomes available for employees.

Do you have any ideas for the new Joomla! Intranet? What would you like to see?

I recently read a vacation article in USAWeekend about the importance of leaving work behind while on vacation. The article reports that nearly 25% of American workers check email and voice mail while on vacation. This is something John and I are intimately familiar with. Some of our management members are tempted to call the office and answer emails while they are supposed to be enjoying a vacation. Out of respect to their vacation time, we often try to intercept their calls and scold them for calling in. We feel confident in doing this because we believe we have built responsible teams who are quite capable of handling issues without them for a few days. We travel a lot, so we see the ugly results of checking email and voicemail while on vacation. Our kids definitely notice when we are preoccupied with work and it ruins the atmosphere that a family vacation is supposed to instill. They can feel ignored and unimportant if work infringes on “their” time. We don’t like this for our own kids or other’s.
So, what is the solution.
1. Set expectations. We have found that if we expect the business to function without us, it usually does.
2. Start by telling clients and co-workers you are away and designate an alternate contact person. When we do this we are amazed at how empowered our staff becomes to handle everything.
3. Ask your spouse and children to remind you to detach and disconnect from work.
4. If you have to check email/voicemail set a specific time and then resume your vacation. We find that the hour after the kids go to bed is a good time to check in without disturbing the flow of the vacation. But remember not to let issues bleed into other times.

We don’t always practice what we preach, but we try very hard. We have left work totally behind and it is very liberating and healthy. The CEO of the Stress Institute reminds readers that “taking time for vacations and leisure is not luxury. It is necessity. The chronic stress of work can lead to emotional and physical illness.”
We’ll be celebrating our 15th wedding anniversary this fall. I can assure you that John will be leaving the laptop and cell phone behind (if he wants to make it to our 16th anniversary that is.)

-Tina Dowd

The Sundance Vacations customer service division is trained and ready to answer a wide variety of client questions about our product. We recently came across a more unique type of question from one of our customers.  The blogger from New Jersey questioned how Sundance Vacations can stay in business by offering such economical vacations.  He was happy with the price but expressed concern that if the company continued to offer this pricing structure we would become insolvent.  The exact words were “bankrupt.”

Not to worry.  We have a healthy profit margin.  Although our gross revenue and profit continue to grow each year we also control our costs in many ways. The really simple explanation that many customers will understand is that we own (and therefore control the price of) a lot of our own vacation inventory in many of the most popular vacation areas.  Over the past 17 years we have often taken profits and re-invested in the future of the company by purchasing resort real estate when it was smart to do so.   The current economic downturn is actually a positive event for Sundance Vacations who is ready to scoop up deals as prices fall on real estate nationwide.

We also protect customers through our fee structure.  How does a fee structure protect customers?

Well, because we don’t incur all of the vacation expenses upfront, you don’t pay all of the expenses upfront.  See one of our very first blog posts on this subject:  http://sundancevacations.typepad.com/sundance_vacations_corpor/2006/10/fees_facts.html

The fee structure guarantees that the company will always have a revenue stream to fulfill vacations.  Do you have a particular question about Sundance Vacations that you want answered?  Send it to pr@vacmail.com or simply reply with a comment to this post.

The Association of TeleServices International recently honored Sundance Vacations with the Call Center Award of Distinction. Sundance Vacations was recognized at ATSI’s 2008 annual conference held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in St. Louis, MO.

The award of excellence is a ‘mystery shopper’ program that provides individual testing for quality assurance in customer service levels. After six months of testing, a panel of judges scored call-handling skills for “enhanced service” applications focusing attention on customer relation management (CRM), courtesy, etiquette, and the use of proper call techniques, as well as response time and accuracy, the cornerstones of the Call Management Industry.

“We congratulate Sundance Vacations for their achievements,” said ATSI President Allan Fromm. This is the second year Sundance has received this honorable award. Be sure to congratulate the marketing team on their hard work!

Among the awards Sundance Vacations have received, what awards means the most to you or to your office?

Sundance Vacations is slowly nestling into their new home, located at 264 Highland Park Blvd, Wilkes-Barre PA 18702. The building is HUGE, and was a bit overwhelming the first day. It was similar to the first day of school, after getting lost a few times, I finally found my way around. I was glad I knew everyone; otherwise it would have been a nightmare. After all of the unpacking, we faced a few minor problems. Sundance Vacations had a glitch in their “network” system due to a problem with the company’s server. We’re always being told, “save everything you do to the network, and not to “my” documents.” Well, just about everything that I have ever worked on was saved to the network. As most people, I freaked out, which was an expected and normal response to the problem. However, I have a tendency to overreact and I’m almost positive, I did that day. After asking IT a few questions, I was told the problem should be corrected, and anything saved to the network in the past week might not be recovered. WHEW! That was the best news, I’d heard in a long time.

I want to thank the whole IT Team and those who helped with the set up of computers and repairing the network, Tom Berger, Jenny Yuhas, David Wehr, Courtney Long, Chris Woodside, and Sundance Vacations owner, Tina Dowd. Without these people, we wouldn’t be operating, and I certainly wouldn’t be writing this blog! Please salute IT and their helpers as they completed an almost impossible mission!

Tell us about your first day at the new office? What were your malfunctions?

-Amanda Miller