Indigenous Cultural Tourism at the Grampians: Benchmarking Visitor Satisfaction at Brambuk The National Parks and Cultural Centre
The conduct of customer and visitor satisfaction studies is the key to understanding if individual expectation and satisfaction levels are being adequately met in both the competitive and the public goods markets. In leisure markets generally and especially those involving free public goods, data collected from visitors is skewed towards satisfaction and the reporting of aggregates can miss the underlying discontent or signs of dissatisfaction.This study attempts to benchmark visitor satisfaction against criteria relating to organisational objectives and their operational performance or implementation. The focus of the study is to develop a visitor value management approach and a market based performance evaluation model. This approach is objective based and encourages the collection of visitor data that is centered around operational objectives that relate to various activities and programs.The organisation performance is judged by visitor responses and measured against benchmarks set by management, for the organisation's activities and programs. This study reports on a visitor satisfaction study and identifies the extent to which service quality standards have been reached. The study identifies operational objectives that may be in need of reconsideration and renewal and program performance that may be in need for improvements and enhancement. The overall levels of satisfaction experienced by visitors was very high, as is generally expected in leisure markets and especially in relation to public goods or free services. Some areas of concern for visitors were the ease with which visitors could get information and advice; the signage and labelling; the knowledge and accessibility of staff; and the opening hours. The overall visitor awareness of the Centre (pre visit) was poor. For people visiting the area for the first time only 41.4% of domestic and 43.6% of overseas visitors were aware of the Centre prior to their visit to the destination. Word of mouth was by far the most important and the most influential in the decision to visit, with 27.8% of all visitors citing 'friends and relatives' as their major source of information. The second ranked on the 'influence scale' and second most popular source were the 'Roadside Signs' with 24.5% of the visitors identifying this as a sou ce of information and influence on their decision to visit. For Overseas visitors, the most influential sources of information were 'Travel Agents' (40% 'Guide Book' (21.5% 'Friends Relatives' (15.4% and 'Tourist Information Centre' (7.7% Other sources, including the 'Internet' were only marginally utilised. While overall satisfaction experienced was high, a range of operational, service quality and service delivery aspects were identified as needing attention and improvement.