Science has proven it—Canada’s national parks are popular with visitors.
But while the parks’ natural beauty is the main factor most responsible for drawing in millions of visitors each year, a new study in an academic journal says the quality of visitors’ experiences seems to be driving satisfaction levels more than the parks’ services. The findings could show Parks Canada where adjustments might be best made to improve service quality and enhance visitor satisfaction.
For example, keeping facilities clean and organized and hiking trails well maintained will likely push visitor satisfaction higher, helping to mitigate somewhat concerns over crowding, traffic, and bad weather.
Two researchers, Alireza Zolfaghari and Hwansuk Chris Choi at the University of Guelph in Ontario, said they sought to determine why Canadian national parks are popular and what drives visitor satisfaction by focusing on content generated by the visitors themselves on the social media site TripAdvisor. Nearly 40,000 individual reviews were gathered and sorted according to keywords and common phrases.
Breathtaking views of the sort Public Parks experienced on a past trip to Glacier National Park in British Columbia certainly help. But the scholars say they unearthed eight core “experience attributes” and seven “service attributes” from the trove of TripAdvisor data. The authors of the study published in the Journal of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism said their findings have “clear managerial implications” and valuable lessons for park managers to consider.
“The extracted attributes were used to identify the most important park visitors’ satisfiers and dissatisfiers,” the authors explained. “Findings showed that experience quality attributes are stronger satisfiers than service quality attributes.” By contrast, negative reviews or complaints tended to focus on negative perceptions of service quality, like unkempt facilities.
The data set is skewed somewhat. The vast majority of the TripAdvisor reviews surveyed in this research were about Banff and Jasper National Parks in Alberta, two popular destinations located relatively close to major urban centers. However, sampling covered ten national parks located across the country, from Pacific Rim National Park on Vancouver Island to Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland and Labrador.
A strong majority of reviews, nearly 65 percent, rated the parks at a 5, the highest rating.
Visitors overwhelmingly expressed satisfaction with their Canadian national parks’ experiences, as well. But not everyone left a park perfectly happy. The research found that visitors most often complained about problems with the weather disrupting their visits, crowding, and the process of being admitted to the parks.
The data also showed that visitors tend to have high expectations with regard to available events or activities during the busiest times of the year and that they’re willing to complain when they believe there isn’t enough to do to distract them from the large peak season crowds. “Thus, park managers need to better manage activities during the high seasons to prevent dissatisfaction,” the authors concluded.
The researchers recommend that park officials plan ahead and develop better strategies for keeping visitors happy even when the weather turns south, even as the weather is completely out of Parks Canada’s hands. “They need to develop and implement strategies to mitigate negative emotions and provide alternative activities during bad weather,” they wrote.
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