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BigQuestion


What useful information do park guest surveys provide? What don’t they reveal?


Chris Thorpe, Elitch Gardens, USA: Guest surveys and quantitative research provide us with significant information in consideration of identifying opportunities to tailor our experience to the needs and desires of our guests. Surveys help us identify our next big attraction, our next entertainment option, even our next trending food or dining experience. They are critically important to respond to the ever-changing desires of our guests. Although this mass of data is useful, sometimes it can be daunting to interpret clear direction which is why it is equally important to support the research with qualitative data like focus groups, one-to-one conversations with guests in the park and front-line seasonal employee insights, as our employees have learned so much from our guests every day.


Hogne Høstmælingen, Hunderfossen, Norway: Our guest survey is an ongoing check of the quality we deliver every day. We keep a majority of the questions similar from year to year so as to compare and be sure that we catch up on trends and changes in our guests’ needs. Our surveys don’t tell us too much about all the smaller visual details in the park, however, therefore a very important task for our managers is to continuously walk around the park, both to talk with the guests and also to look 360° for enhancements.


Mike Fehnel, Carowinds, USA: This year we listened to guests from across the Carolinas, and their feedback was extremely valuable to us. You could say that guest feedback was our northern star, to make sure we were headed in the right direction from a customer experience standpoint!


Michael Collins, Leisure Development Partners, UK: Guest surveys can provide great insight for park operators in diverse areas including guest satisfaction, price sensitivity and reinvestment decisions. Most parks satisfactorily address these areas in their surveys, but many fail to see the potential depth of benchmarking and profiling information surveys can reveal and the benefit this can have. By knowing where their guests come from, whether they are visiting as tourists staying away from home or as residents, parks can track their market mix and market penetration. Just comparing this year’s performance with last year’s tells operators very little, but


continually tracking their ever-changing source markets and market penetration reveals a lot and can show untapped potential within certain segments. This information can be invaluable in a variety of ways such as allocating marketing budget or developing reinvestment plans to target underperforming market segments. We encourage our park operating clients to dig into the make-up of their guests in all their surveys and then marry this up with a good understanding of their markets and industry benchmarks in order to develop performance improvement strategies.


Figures of Fun


33


hectares – combined space of Europa-Park’s (Germany) planned indoor/outdoor waterpark. Possible themes include either the local Black Forest or a Scandinavian forest


37.5


metes – height of new Dive Machine being constructed by Bolliger & Mabillard at Efteling in the Netherlands. It is one of two B&M dive coasters from Swiss manufacturer opening in Europe next season (the other at Gardaland, Italy)


425


number of confirmed exhibitors at this month’s Euro Attractions Show in Amsterdam


17,000 66,000


new daily attendance record at Flamingo Land, England, set on 24 August


new weekly attendance record at Skara Sommerland, Sweden, set in late August


SEPTEMBER 2014


5


24 26 28 50


32 20 3841


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