Importance-satisfaction analysis for marine park hinterlands: A Western Australian case study ABSTRACT Tourist use of national and marine parks continues to increase worldwide. Effective management depends on being able to evaluate the quality of visitors' experiences, as well as protecting the natural environment. In tourism management, importance-performance analysis (IPA) has been used as part of quality management. It has recently been applied to national park management. This paper re-conceptualises this analysis to one of importancesatisfaction, enabling a focus on the quality of experience. Two methods, importanceperformance analysis and service quality gap, were modified and applied in the hinterland of Swan Estuary Marine Park in Western Australia. Both provided data useful for evaluating satisfaction, with the choice of method depending on the end user's resources and requirements as well as cognisance of each method's limitations. For most of the Marine Park attributes, satisfaction exceeded importance and hence no management attention is needed. Exceptions were the condition of the Swan River and associated footpaths, and the presence of litter and wildlife. For these, satisfaction was lower than importance suggesting management attention is needed.

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Ph: 08 9360 6484 2Visitor satisfaction analysis as a tool for park managers: a review and case study Abstract Visitor satisfaction has long been an important area for leisure research and increasingly so for park management. In order to achieve this a number of approaches have been adapted from consumer research including importance-performance analyses, gap analyses, threshold performance targets and overall satisfaction. This paper reviews these approaches with respect to park management. It then draws on focus group research with protected area agency staff to obtain their views on the usefulness and robustness of the analyses associated with these approaches. Yanchep National Park (Western Australia) was used as a case study, with the results from a recent visitor survey providing the data for satisfaction analyses. To provide a more accurate summary of the range in results, confidence intervals were included in the analyses output to illustrate the variation in responses. The analyses results emphasise the importance for leisure managers of accessible, usable data on visitor satisfaction.

Visitors to parks and protected areas are not a homogeneous group. Therefore, it is important for managers of such areas to have an understanding of the diversity of these visitors. One technique applied to understanding the diversity of visitors is segmentation whereby visitors are clustered based on variables of interest. Through a partnership of university-based and protected area agency researchers, this study segmented visitors to 33 parks across the Western Australian protected area estate. Using both psychographic and behavioural variables, four clusters were identified and these were subsequently discussed and validated with agency staff. These discussions identified opportunities for using the segmentation results to inform park and site planning and for marketing and potential re-distribution of supply and demand across the park system to better match visitor needs and the management resources available. Collaborative research efforts such as these, including validation by managers, can contribute to robust findings with a greater chance of being adopted by protected area agencies.

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