How does your garden grow?
by Vincent Ciccarello
Visitors to botanic gardens in almost every Australian capital city are getting the chance to say what they like – and don’t like – about the gardens in a current research project.
Led by Dr Gary Crilley from UniSA’s new Centre for Tourism and Leisure Management, the project aims to determine what visitors expect from a botanic garden and how well the garden meets those expectations.
"Australia’s botanic gardens manage around eight million visits a year – that’s 42 per cent of the population – and yet there has been little research done into visitor service quality," Dr Crilley said.
"It’s well-known that customer satisfaction is positively related to the customer’s willingness to recommend the service to others. This will be the first real attempt to benchmark customer satisfaction in Australian botanic gardens."
Under Dr Crilley’s supervision, staff and volunteers at botanic gardens in Hobart, Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth began surveying visitors in March.
More than 2000 completed questionnaires have been collected so far. The data is being collated and analysed, and individual reports have already been presented to the managers of the Sydney and Brisbane botanic gardens. Others will have individual reports by mid year, with a single comprehensive report to be presented in September.
The survey results will allow garden managers to better target services, facilities and operations to meet visitor expectations.
A 2005 report prepared for the Adelaide Botanic Garden found, for example, that the service quality that would most persuade visitors to recommend the garden to others was that "the garden is physically comfortable and pleasant".
Interestingly, the clear majority of visitors surveyed gave recreation or leisure rather than learning, education or conservation as the main reason for visiting.
"Since many botanic gardens are publicly funded to engage visitors in the role of learning and appreciating conservation messages, that visitors didn’t rate ‘learning about nature’ high on their agenda might warrant a more detailed examination," Dr Crilley said.
Since 1990, Dr Crilley and his team have been providing quality management reports to the leisure industry using their CERM Performance Indicators® Project. Around 150 sports and leisure centres and 20 golf courses in Australian and New Zealand pay an annual fee to take part.
"The CERM PI Project has a broad application in many areas of the
tourism, recreation and leisure industries,"
Dr Crilley said.
"With the History Trust of SA, we’ve recently completed a report for the Migration Museum, Maritime Museum and National Motor Museum.
"Some very interesting findings came out of the motor museum, in particular. It seems men love going into the place but women don’t, and will often sit in the car and wait for their partners to come out.
"This is the kind of information that is vital for facility managers, to enable them to make better decisions about the services they provide and how they promote them."