ACKMA Journal No. 17. December 1994. Pages 10-12.

This crowds into a few minutes something that should take hours and deals with several things. The first is visitor satisfaction, and here, the most important problem to recognize is that the factors which satisfy people are generally different factors from those which dissatisfy people.  You don't get satisfaction by getting rid of dissatisfaction; you don't necessarily get dissatisfaction by failing to deliver satisfaction. 

But let me be more precise about that by giving examples.  Suppose you come to Jenolan and you stand in a queue to get your ticket for 23 minutes.  That’s a cause of irritation and dissatisfaction.  If you didn't stand in that queue at all, if you just walked up and got your ticket instantly, that wouldn’t be satisfaction, it would just be the proper service that you normally expect.  It’s not a satisfier, it’s just getting proper service.  Similarly, if you try to have lunch at the kiosk, and wait too long for poor quality food, you are very likely to be dissatisfied.  The solving of problems in delivery of these very basic ervices is not going to greatly increase satisfaction.  What might increase satisfaction is if, after having done a cave tour, the guide says "Why don’t you walk down along the river below the Blue Lake and have a look at the scenery there?" That might increase someone’s satisfaction with their experience here at Jenolan currently, partly because of what they saw as a result, and partly because the guide was interested enough to talk with them personally and help them to enjoy their visit. 

Sorting out what the satisfiers are and what the dissatisfiers are, is very important. I suspect, here at Jenolan, that one of the reasons why the visitor numbers tend to be flattening out is the increase in the accumulation of dissatisfiers. I think, from my observations here over many years, that although some things are most satisfactory. there has been a real increase in the number of sources of dissatisfaction and no matter what is done by the guiding staff to improve the quality of the visitor experience, someone or something else is contribution dissatisfiers. I think this is something that has to be looked at pretty carefully in terms of future planning to improve the quality of service. 

Next, I want to pick up on crowding and the like, both in principle and in relation to decision making.  A cave experience is something that is new to most people and over a very long time cave managers have trained cave visitors to judge their satisfaction in terms of what we have trained them to expect.  So measuring satisfaction is really pretty incestuous stuff, because it says, what we are training people to expect is what we are delivering so they will inevitably be satisfied.  We  leave out all the wondrous things we should offer but do not.  Visitor satisfaction and visitor numbers both have to be put in a broader context so I’m now going to try to show a planning context you might use. 

This will also show why it is that 1 wish we had never borrowed that awful term "carrying capacity".  If we talk to agricultural scientists, they tell us that they wish the term had never been invented, and yet we borrowed it from them.  Let me start with a few brief quotations from Stanley & McCool: 

.....the term "social carrying capacity" no longer does justice to this -field of research, nor does it adequately describe the task of managers…..  Managers develop, maintain, or restore where necessary the desired social (and resource) conditions need for specific types o recreational opportunities. 

The term capacity implies that limiting numbers of visitors can solve problems of impact and satisfaction such an implication may seduce one into feeling that a problem may have been resolved (through limiting use) when intact it remains or emerges in some other form. The question, "how many is too many?" may no longer be appropriate or heuristic.  We suggest that the term is no longer use" in guiding research or management. 

Now, let me look at the question of how many visitors and a context in which we can place it for planning purposes.  Here is a very simple little planning model, which I sometimes call the PRAM circle, which can be used in many social planning contexts, and certainly can serve us well in determining the number of visitors who might be provided for at Jenolan, or indeed in any park situation. 

The model essentially suggests that the number of people to be served must be in balance with a number of other issues - specifically, what you are setting out to accomplish, how you plan to do so, and what resources you have available.  If you double the number of people, and if all these other things stay the same you are going to be in trouble, but if you can change what you are going to achieve, or change the method you are using to achieve those aims, or provide some more resources to deal with the more people, then you may get them back in balance again. In other words, there is no decision that can be made about numbers that means very much unless it is located within the context of what you’re aiming to do, what your methods are, and what your resources are.  So "carrying capacity" is to static as a concept. 

Now let me turn to methods, and take the example of a tour which we experienced (a smallish group of about 35).  Guided tours are only one of the methods which might be used at Jenolan, but they are a familiar example.  I want to emphasize very strongly that I am not in any sense criticizing the guides, the guiding staff, or the specific guide who led our tour. I am criticizing the tradition that has grown up and the leadership and direction which has been available in the past.  We cannot even blame the present Trust - they haven't been in the seat long - and it takes a long time to change people’s thinking.  But irrespective of that, it seems to me that what the guide gave us was beautifully done; presentation was great, BUT I had no idea whatsoever of what his aim was and what he was trying to achieve.  There was little bits of everything with no coherent underlying theme.  To me, that is a big problem.  The history of the tour, which goes back a very long way, means that is was characterized by two things - trivialisation and tradition, and that does not make a good experience.  Again, I am not criticizing the guide, who implemented the tradition as well as anyone I have seen. I am being very critical about the fact that nobody has clearly defined what experiential outcomes he was expected to produce for and in the visitor party.  And while that remains, it doesn’t really matter very much, in terms of quality, whether he leads a party of three people or a party of three hundred people. 

This does NOT mean that all tours should have the same objectives. I see it as perfectly legitimate that you might advertise a fun tour in which you say that at 3.30 p.m. there will be a fun tour - we have a guide who will tell you all the accumulated jokes of Jenolan. I think that is an absolutely legitimate offering and visitor experience.  I don’t think every tour has to be educational.  But I would also hope there is another tour that shows the crystal forms in caves and explains why some of those forms are the way they are and which ones we can't understand. Such a tour might well try to open up some of the excitement of trying to puzzle out things that we do not understand, and the excitement that is there in those caves for all of us. I would love to see a tour that says, we are going to demonstrate impacts of having people coming to Jenolan. In other words. as long as we know the aim of any one tour and we share that with our public, I think there is an immense variety of tours which could legitimately be offered.  Coming back to the numbers question. if we are clear enough about aims, methods and strategies, we may have some tours limited to five people and others open to 500 people! 

Having emphasized aims, let me turn to resources.  There are essentially two kinds of resources. One kind of resource is the natural resources.  The other kind of resource is the staff, the money, the infrastructure etc.  Now. we not only need an overall plan for showing visitors what Jenolan has to offer and sharing it with them, we need plans for every natural resource unit within the system.  At the moment, when a visitor arrives and looks around, there is a little of units called caves. I wish they were called tours or routes or something which would not put barriers in the way of good interpretation, but regrettably, names like Imperial Cave, Chifley Cave, Lueas Cave, etc. are a given.  These are the units around which the program is planned and so you have a unit within which any tour will take 15 people, do a show and tell without any clear aim, but hope that people have fun.  The resources essentially consist of some electric lights, a cave and a walking talking guide. (There could be all sorts of other kinds of guides that don't walk and talk!). It is more or less assumed that those nine cave routes are the basis of all program. 

But what about thinking of wild caves, buildings and other constructions, various rock forms on the surface, flora, fauna, water and all kinds of other units. I am not going to come up with a set of answers as to what those units should be around which a program might be built, but  someone has to.  The Blue Lake and river is clearly one that is being used now.  But there are an  immense number of potential resource management units in addition to the high density area. Within each of those units, there is scope for various programs.  Any one of those cave units could offer half a dozen different types of tour each offering totally different experiences for the  visitor.  So. there is immense scope here for increasing the number of people. But, if you do, you must think about it in terms of what that means for aims, what that means for methods, what it means for the financial, human and infrastructural resources AND what it does to the accumulation of dissatisfiers.  That is one of the problems of numbers.  The bigger you get, the easier it is to accumulate dissatisfiers and you must be able to deal with them. 

Finally, the PRAM circle is a program planning model, but the program has to be located within a much broader contest.  At Jenolan, it is the job of the Trust to encompass that broader planning and put the visitor program into the context of the political environment, including the NSW State Tourism Plan, the NSW state environmental policies, the social justice policy. or any others.