UMaine CenTRO Developing Tourism Survey
Contact: Harold Daniel, 581-1933; Thomas Allan, 581-3164; George Manlove, 581-3756
ORONO — The newly formed University of Maine-based Center for Tourism, Research and Outreach (CenTRO) is developing a customer satisfaction survey for Maine campground visitors, which will help the state’s tourism industry get a comprehensive look at how well it is doing to attract and retain visitor traffic.
CenTRO began a pilot test in July, an email and Web-based questionnaire to be sent to visitors who have recently been at one of several campgrounds participating in the pilot study. Once the survey questions and research methods are refined, plans are to broaden the field to include as many of the state’s campgrounds as possible, according to UMaine business professor Harold Daniel, director of CenTRO, and Thomas Allen of the Department of Resource, Economics and Policy and senior research scientist for CenTRO. With success in the state’s campgrounds, the resulting approach to data collection will become a model for similar research among customers of the entire lodging industry in Maine.
Daniel, Allen and CenTRO staff members are in the process of refining survey questions and methods, and developing a process that assures a consistent and objective measure of the quality of experiences of Maine’s tourists. State economists, tourism authorities and owners and managers of campgrounds and lodging establishments are keenly interested in the research. The results will indicate how well visitors’ needs are being met and whether they are enjoying their visits enough to return.
The electronic campground survey will be the first in Maine to use email to reach visitors at home in a timely fashion, Daniel and Allen say. Currently, some large hotels and campgrounds use expensive market research firms to gauge customer satisfaction, and some smaller, family-owned campgrounds rely on an unscientific post-card questionnaire to get a sense of customer satisfaction.
Any costs that may be associated with the CenTRO surveys, to cover data processing expenses, will be much less than commercial customer surveys, according to Daniel and Allen.
The research, Daniel says of the camper survey, “is intended to give a lot of people insight, from the individual campground operator to the state’s policy makers, and those in Maine’s tourist regions. Customer satisfaction surveys help measure product quality. The survey helps address the most basic of questions: How are we doing?”
The surveys can become “an ongoing monitoring system to track the quality of visitors’ experiences over time,” he says.
Richard Abare, executive director of the Maine Campground Owners Association in Lewiston, says the fact that the camper survey is being conducted by the university gives it both credibility and relevance in the eyes of campground owners and the visitors who respond to the surveys.
“The ability to be able to bring this to the individual Maine family-owned and operated business is what gets me excited,” says Abare. “I know a couple of my campgrounds, my constituents that are in the process of distributing the survey, are very excited about it.”
CenTRO also is beginning a second survey that focuses on the experiences, spending habits and other information about overnight visitors that can give campground owners and innkeepers a better idea of who is visiting their establishments, as well as what visitors expect for services and activities during their vacations.
Unlike the pilot test campground survey, the broader, year-long visitor survey is based on a well-established pencil and paper questionnaire. It should yield findings about the impact of tourism in Maine across its eight tourism regions. Allen is working with 55 participating establishments to disseminate questionnaires to overnight visitors.
“A goal of the overnight visitors survey is to provide the data for regional as well as seasonal economic analyses,” Allen says.
CenTRO is a University of Maine System project housed within the Maine School of Business in the UMaine College of Business, Public Policy and Health. The center is the focal point for coordinating university system and state government research, outreach and educational programs related to recreation and tourism within the state of Maine. CenTRO includes tourism experts from other university campuses. Charles Colgan, professor of public policy and management in the Edmund S. Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine, is the center’s associate director.