August 1995 Newsletter

WHAT INFLUENCES VISITOR ENJOYMENT?

How many people are too many within the Marine Park? This question is often raised by Reef managers and operators. Projected tourism trends assure us the `how many' question will be in managers and users minds for some time yet. A CRC project to understand what influences visitor enjoyment is being undertaken by Scott Shafer, Graeme Inglis, Vicki Johnson and Nadine Marshall at JCU.

Natural features such as coral and fish together with helpful, trained staff are the biggest influence on visitors travelling to the Reef, according to this CRC Reef research project.

Day visitors to all types of Reef destinations are the largest single user group and there is a particular concern about their influence at high-use sites. The CRC study into visitor enjoyment (task 2.1.8) is discovering how numbers of people using these sites influences the social and biological resources each provides.

A pilot study conducted with day visitors using four commercial operations in the Marine Park's Cairns and Central section asked one hundred and sixty eight (168) visitors to score 27 condition items, based on how much each item influenced their enjoyment on the day. These conditions ranged from the amount of coral they saw, to water temperature and the number of other people on the boat. Two of the operations participating in the study are relatively large, carrying between 100 and 200 passengers on the days we sampled. The other two are smaller; one carrying 30 to 40 people per trip and the other 10 to 15.

The results are early but patterns are already emerging. For the purpose of summarising the data, four composite conditions were created from the 27 items.

The four conditions are:

1. natural features (eg - colour of coral, types of fish, amount of coral),
2. staff (eg - information provided, helpfulness),
3. physical conditions (eg - air and water temperature, visibility) and
4. number of people (eg - number of people on the boat, number snorkelling). Visitor scores were averaged by the type of operation (large or small) for each of these four conditions.

Results indicate visitors who travelled with large operators are not highly influenced by the number of other people on their trip. The data suggest that conditions related to natural features will remain very influential across operation types but that conditions related to number of people will play a more important role in visitor enjoyment on small operations than on large ones. This phase of the research is scheduled to continue for the next 12 months. Results of the final study should provide insights into how different conditions (eg - weather, tides, currents, site type and number of other people) influence visitor experiences on the Reef.

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