We taught at properties, in canteens, in whatever room was free. Half the class vanished every session and we blamed the students.
For the first two years the hospitality courses went to the resorts. It seemed obvious: the staff are there, the room is there, the boat is ours to catch rather than theirs. It did not work and it took us far too long to admit why.
The first problem was the room. A class in a staff canteen is a class with people walking through it, a television somebody will not turn off, and a table that has to be cleared at a fixed time. The class is visibly the least important thing happening in that room, and students behave accordingly.
The second problem was the rotation, and this was the real one. A single fixed session a week guarantees that everybody on a rotation misses roughly a third of the course, and the ones they miss are not spread evenly. Somebody loses weeks three, four and five, which is where the whole structure of the course sits, and then spends the rest of it lost. We wrote those students down as dropouts. They were not; the timetable had made it impossible.
The third problem was operational reality. A group arrives early, a boat breaks, somebody calls in sick, and a manager quite rightly pulls four people out of an English class. That happened in a majority of sessions. It is nobody's fault and it cannot be argued with.
So the course moved here and was rebuilt around the rotation instead of in spite of it. Every week runs on three different days, and a staff member attends whichever one falls on a day off. A week missed entirely is picked up in the matching week of the next intake at no charge. Our office hates this: it means tracking which week each person is on rather than which class they are in. It is also the reason people finish.
We still teach at properties, but only for twelve people or more, only in a real room with a door, and never in a canteen. Both of those limits came from getting it wrong for two years, and we would rather print them than quietly repeat them.