Mind your pees and queues.
5 things that can improve the visitor experience at heritage sites and museums.
1/ Mind your pees. I have an archaeology and world heritage academic background but also I have been working as a tourist guide since 2010. While training to become a tourist guide one comment by the British Museum trainer stuck to my mind: “you can know the history of the whole world, be able to tell the difference between the black and red-figured Greek pottery and identify all the Egyptian gods, but if you don’t know where the toilets are nobody is going to listen”. Arriving at a museum or heritage site with any size group, from a family to a coach-load, and negotiating the toilet break is the single most stressful experience for visitors and tourist guides alike. Accessible, quality facilities, in plentiful supply (particularly for the ladies), offer the best first impressions of any heritage site or museum. Toilet access is so important that the most used app on my phone is Flush [Flush Toilet Finder].
2/ Mind your queues. I have written before [What is in a virtual queue and The future is bright, the future is a-social] about how important it is for heritage sites and museums to identify congestion hotspots and find ways to ease overcrowding. Again using my training as a tourist guide, I will often tailor my commentary to take into account overcrowding issues. For example, while waiting with my clients to visit the Crown Jewels at the Tower of London, I will use the waiting time to explain the history and importance of the Crown Jewels, keeping them informed and entertained. I am doing what is described by Zhang [Zhang et al.] “offering entertainment and interactive activities near queues…may also increase the experience value”.
3/ Mind your social media. The top-tier of heritage sites and museums are either actively engaging with their audience via social media, or examining their ratings on review platforms. Often though this review examination concentrates on the negative reviews only, with the actions concentrating on how to minimise them or increase the positive recommendations. This can lead to ignoring positive reviews that might still be highlighting problems such as overcrowding and lack of facilities while remaining overall satisfied with the experience. Regular analysis of review platform comments coupled with visitor satisfaction surveys can be a great method of avoiding negative visitor experiences.
4/ Mind your interpretation. Interpretation is big news in the heritage sector and a great amount of emphasis is being given to the subject. Often though interpretation is equated with just an improvement of object captions or providing long-winded introductory texts. In my experience, interpretation is first and above all story-telling delivered by humans. Texts are important of course, but cannot in real-time answer questions or make valuable and illuminating connections with other objects, or parts of the site. Having a human explain with knowledge, empathy, and appropriate training the history of a collection or an object can offer an invaluable and a great experience for the visitors.
5/ Last but not least, mind your spaces. We have all heard the expression “museum feet” and even experienced it ourselves when visiting a museum or gallery. There are several reasons for this phenomenon, which include hard surfaces, standing for long periods of time rather than energetically walking while simultaneously concentrating. There is a very quick remedy to that which is to create resting spaces and offer plenty of seating. And if combined with a cafe or retail space it can even bring in much-needed revenue.
Minding these five things is not rocket science. What is surprising though is how often and how badly wrong these 5 simple things are addressed.
Sources
Flush Toilet Finder App Apple or Android
Yingsha Zang, Li (Robert) Xiang, Su Qin and Hu Xingbao: Exploring a theme park’s tourism carrying capacity: a demand-side analysis, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2016.08.019
