The Foundations Are Shaky in Hiedanranta

Last Sunday I went with my spouse to the Hiedanranta area, intending to have a meal and enjoy some ice cream. The area’s marketing pages (Tehtaan terassi) list the restaurants of the summer area, but say nothing about their opening hours. The only links point to the restaurants’ Instagram pages — an excellent platform for sensing the vibe, but utter garbage for conveying information — where one doesn’t mention its opening hours at all, one says it’s closed on Sundays, and one says it’s open on Sundays.

On site it turns out that not a single one of the places is open. A festival that ended there the day before might be the reason, or might not, hard to say. The information wasn’t to be found where a visitor would most naturally look for it: on the restaurant page and on the restaurants’ own channels.

Never mind that

Both the manor café and the restaurant Väst are open. The café had nothing more on offer than the counter items once lunch and brunch had ended, but at least Väst has the kitchen open.

That said, many dishes have run out, including practically all of the (already few) vegetarian dishes. Birds terrorize the terrace because of slow bussing.

There’s about a fifteen-minute queue at the ice cream kiosk, but at least there they actually have something to sell. I order two ice cream sandwiches, one of which they manage to make before the ordered ice cream runs out.

I understand, but

I understand that in Finland there’s double pay on Sundays, which forces many places to keep their doors shut on Sundays. I understand that the season sometimes surprises you and products run out. I understand that storage space is limited, and I understand too that accidents happen, and that sometimes you have to queue.

I also understand that every restaurant is its own independent business, responsible only for its own plot.

Still, at a seasonal destination like Hiedanranta — where many come only once a summer, and a great many come for the first time — I would nonetheless wish for some kind of management of the whole. That a minimum level would be agreed on together, and held onto like a drowning child.

When you operate a destination whose season is ultimately just a few fleeting weeks, and where a customer who has a bad experience will surely not return, I would like to see the following:

• opening hours defined for the season, clearly and easily available in one place for all operators
• a baseline offering from every provider (even just a pared-down menu, then), which a customer could use to plan their visit and, say, make a choice during that fifteen-minute queue
• inventory management such that these baseline products are available even if a nuclear war broke out (on top of which you can then play around with whatever daily specials you like)
• collaboration in which the area’s operators would aim to support and complement one another in terms of selection, service, and opening hours

One Sunday is the whole customer relationship

From a single Sunday you of course can’t conclude how a normal day in Hiedanranta works. But to the visitor that doesn’t much matter. Many come to the area once a summer, many for the first time, and the experience on that one occasion is in practice the entire customer relationship — and if the experience is bad, it will likely also remain the only one.

I wish for this primarily as a private customer, but also as a Tampere taxpayer. The area is being developed as an urban development project owned and steered by the City of Tampere, that is, also with the city residents’ money and at the city’s risk. I would like to see us manage to make Hiedanranta a unique experience destination, one people would travel to from near and far.

That requires exceptional offerings and wow experiences, sure, but those can’t be delivered if the foundations are shaky.