What are visitor services
Visitor services are probably the single most important group of activities that a community offers its visitors because these activities are what make the visitor feel welcome and well served. They include all the normal city services that pertain to police and fire protection, health and sanitation, public utilities and facilities, as well as the range of services provided by local businesses, civic organizations, and others involved in making your community a pleasant place to visit. Of paramount importance among all the services provided are those included under the heading of hosting.
What is hosting
Hosting is one of the functions of communication. It provides information for visitors on where to go, how to get there, what to see, and what to do to enjoy their visit. It includes being hospitable, knowledgeable, and carrying on the art of all members of a community whether or not they are actually involved in tourism activities. It is an attitude that pervades the community, making the tourist-visitor feel comfortable s a guest of the community. Being a good host will bring visitors back to the community because they will talk to their friends and neighbors about their experience, urging them to visit the community to receive these same satisfactions.
It is the purpose of this publication to address the need for having a visitor services plan as a part of the tourism master plan; the necessary service training that must be given to all persons involved in tourism in the community; and evaluation of the adequacy and nature of the services provided.
Identifying visitor service needs
Tourists sometimes present special problems and not all tourism activities in smoothly. Tourists do get sick, some will have heart attacks and heat strokes, others create accidental fires, cause civil disturbances, and have boating and auto accidents. Some of them will even die. Therefore, a community and its attractions must be prepared to deal with these problems efficiently and effectively.
Consider, for example, that a special event, a sailboat regatta, is being being planned in your community for the US Independence Day on the 4th of July. Inquiries, reservations, and tickets sold indicate that this one event could attract in excess of 70,000 persons.
It will be a long weekend and those attending will have probably driven 160-480 kilometers on a 32 degree Celsius day. By the time they arrive, they will be hot, tired, thirsty, adventurous, fun seeking, careless, anxious, and impatient!
How does one prepare for all of the possibilities of things happening that may not only affect the success of this event, but which might also destroy much of the goodwill and community image building your community has worked so hard to develop? How do you prepare for this onrush of humanity so that each visitor will feel that he is being treated hospitably? How do you look out for, comfort and protect, manage and control, all of these forces, and make it appear orderly, convenient, organized and efficient? You . . .
Develop a visitor services plan
You plan for:
- the number of police and firemen needed and their positioning
- a special crowd control force
- parking and crowd movement
- concessionaires to feed your visitors, adequate lodging facilities to house them
- the sanitation department to pick up litter and provide facilities for personal needs
- paramedics, doctors, nurses, and a treatment station to handle emergencies
- trained tourist information personnel to answer innumerable questions
- programs and souvenirs to be distributed and people to do it
The plans list seems endless.
While the above examples might seem exaggerated, the point is that things do happen during the tourist season which can tarnish a community's image; which can result in inept handling of crowds, traffic, parking, and sickness; which can turn a happy event into a disaster.
That is what visitor services programs are about: the preparation and implementation of a specific plan to insure that visitors are well served by trained personnel when they visit your community. This plan should not only be developed for special events, but also should cover the spectrum of services needed for continuing tourism development.
The manner in which these services are performed affects visitor satisfactions, the image that the community projects, and the very valuable word-of-mouth advertising that brings new tourists.
The visitor services program
The development of visitor services programs generally progresses through four stages:
Stage I—anticipating and planning service needs.
Stage II—determining how these needs will be coordinated.
Stage III—training visitor services personnel.
Stage IV—evaluation of training and services performed.
These stages will be discussed in the sections that follow.
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