Peak season has started and Fougères castle is again experiencing an influx of visitors. This is a godsend for NEOMA Business School which headed down there on 4th – 6th July to ask them about their experience. This visitor research is part of the European Research project VISTA AR, which aims to introduce virtual and augmented reality into tourist sites.
Sylvie Jolly (Tourism Expert), Elsa Gatelier (Economist) and Jean-Baptiste Suquet (Professor of Organisation Studies) tested a questionnaire designed to gather the experience of visitors. This questionnaire will be used until the end of the season in Fougères, and its English counterpart will be used at Exeter Cathedral.
The data collected will on the one hand allow for an evaluation of visitor experience before the first protypes are put into place in Spring 2019, as a way of being able to measure the impact of these. On the other hand the data will mean that researchers at NEOMA BS and the University of Exeter will be better able to characterise visitor experience in order to develop in the long term tools capable of collecting and analysing this data automatically.
The first step in some great development work. Watch this space…
