Episode 418: Coen Bertens talks about starting with people, shifting culture and creating one fan a day

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8d ago 53:51

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Coen Bertens is the owner of Coen Bertens Consultancy, where he partners with leisure and hospitality operators on operations, leadership, and guest experience. After beginning his career in banking, Coen joined Efteling in the Netherlands, where he moved from finance to operations, ultimately serving as director/CEO of the park. During his tenure, Efteling earned national recognition for guest friendliness and advanced a long-term, story-driven resort vision. In this interview, Coen talks about starting with people, shifting culture, and creating one fan a day.

Starting with people

“How you treat your people is how you treat your guests… you have to start with your people and change them into ambassadors.”

Coen explains that Efteling’s transformation didn’t begin with guest-facing tactics—it began by equipping employees. Guided initially by advice from Lee Cockerell, the team built a “personal compass,” a single digital place where employees sought and shared feedback, identified talents, and aligned those talents to both personal growth and organizational contribution. Rather than pushing a hospitality script, leadership focused on pride, ownership, and talent development so that frontline teams would naturally deliver better experiences.

That shift also meant moving decision-making closer to the work. Managers stopped “running and doing all the tasks,” and responsibilities—like resolving complaints on the spot—moved to the frontline. The results compounded: ideas surfaced faster, confidence grew, and service recovery became immediate instead of hierarchical.

Shifting culture

“We knew that if you want to be the most guest-friendly company… it’s about changing the culture.”

Culture change started with clarity of vision. A survey revealed that only a small slice of leaders could articulate Efteling’s vision; nearly everyone else operated without clear goals. Coen’s team distilled the vision into a simple, memorable “nine-plus organization”—akin to striving for a five-star standard—and recruited 50 internal ambassadors to spread it. Leaders repeated the vision constantly and connected it directly to tools like the personal compass so it lived in daily routines, not just on a wall.

Empowerment mechanisms reinforced the shift. An Innovation Lab replaced the “idea box,” inviting students and staff to pitch solutions onstage to a centralized steering team. One standout idea—using VR to let guests with disabilities experience the Dreamflight dark ride alongside their families—came from a student, not management. Coen also shares a pivotal New Year’s Eve story: when buses failed to arrive after midnight, employees self-organized to drive hundreds of guests home. That response—spontaneous, generous, and owned by the frontline—became a living metric of culture more powerful than any dashboard.

Creating one fan a day

“Keep it simple: create one fan per day… everyone has the time to create one fan per day.”

A hospitality professor’s advice became a durable operating principle: small, intentional moments scale culture. With ~800 employees a day, one fan per person translates into more than a million fan moments annually. Crucially, it’s not about giveaways; it’s about personal attention. In Efteling’s Fairytale Forest, for example, an employee simply walks a parent and child to the restroom through winding paths, turning wayfinding into a warm, human interaction.

Coen ties these moments to financial outcomes with a simple restaurant story: when service anticipates needs: right table, timely drinks, favorite refills, guests happily spend more and tip more. The message to teams is direct and doable: limit training topics, interact far more than you lecture, gamify learning, and repeat small behaviors daily until they become instinct.

For inquiries and further information, connect with Coen on LinkedIn—he welcomes messages and is happy to share tips.

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