Thursday Thoughts: New Visitors?
Providing ideas and insight that can inform agency and partner strategies for improvement of park, recreation and hospitality operations and assets
Photo Credit: Outside Magazine
New Visitors - New Opportunities
The arrival of COVID 19 has brought numerous operational challenges and yet, it has also provided public agencies exposure to new visitors. Agencies are finding that some new visitors arrive to their sites with different perspectives on recreating in the outdoors and as a result, new management strategies are required. Additionally, these visitors provide new insight as to visitor experience needs. Provided below are three simple ideas for consideration over the course of the next two months.
Visitor Management: The #recreateresponsibly coalition was quickly created to provide resources to public agencies on seven factors that could provide improvement in visitor management. The graphics are downloadable in multiple languages, and their Blog posts provide some great shareable content. Consider leveraging these ideas for your agency.
Visitor Profile: Despite public agencies experiencing high visitation and challenging staffing, this is a time to learn more about your visitors. Most of this will be qualitative, but it is worth focusing on these issues, even if it is for a short period of evaluation (e.g., one week per remaining month).
If you have entrance gates, what can your seasonal staff tell you about “new” or “different” questions being asked?
Can your staff identify areas in the parks that are getting used differently?
Visitor Geography: Can you take your overnight accommodations data and run some year over year analytics such as: zip codes, group size and average length of stay (“ALOS”)?
In the midst of this pandemic’s operational challenges, it would be nice to look a back and also find that your organization has expanded your visitor market and knowledge of visitor use.
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