Capturing visitors’ comments

We are all familiar with Trip Advisor and its popularity as a site for visitors to leave comments about the hotels, restaurants and activities they experience on trips. As part of the VISTA AR project, we have been viewing the comments on Trip Advisor made about our experimentation and deployment sites, as a way of gaining insight into what visitors are looking for when they visit. However, we wanted to increase the amount of this type of data, and as part of our collaboration with UNAI, designed a review capture platform which is tailored to give us the information we need for our research and will be available online and at our sites after the summer.

This platform has been designed as an additional means to collect visitor feedback in the form of descriptive reviews and visitor rating with regards to different aspects of their experience at heritage sites as well as a cumulative experience score, while adhering to the standards of visitor anonymity. Such information, when fed into the Visitor Intelligence Dashboard, would be instrumental in understanding visitor profiles, behaviour and motivations for visit.

The Visitor Intelligence Dashboard, which will be launched later this year, will offer insights to site managers to inform decisions about the site, such as whether to change the entrance cost, which points of interest are most popular, what groups of people are least likely to visit and how best to attract new audiences.

As part of this research phase, we are asking people who have shown an interest in the project to play a part by leaving a review (real or imaginary) for one or all of our six key sites. We would also welcome any feedback about the usability of the form, and if you work at a cultural heritage site, the potential usefulness of the information. Please click on the site name to follow the link: Exeter Cathedral, Fougères Castle, East Pool Mine, Botallack Mine, Slapton Sands and the Musée sous-marin du pays de Lorient.

Any feedback can be sent to vista-ar@exeter.ac.uk.