You're in a strange city with time on your hands. Your hosts take you to see the sights. You are an "accidental tourist" with the chances of your coming back for another look being zero.Or you're a Civil War battlefield tourist. You make multiple visits. Even small changes will draw you back: new signage, cleared woods, new trails, new subtours.
Which tourist deserves nurturing by the Gettysburg park management? Apparently, number one: the accidental, reluctant, barely interested human statistic.
Wilburn said the museum and visitor center were constructed not so much for Civil War buffs who are likely to go to Gettysburg no matter what and appreciate it, but for people who have little knowledge of Civil War history and need more help understanding what took place.Why? Are they gong to be charmed into writing letters to Congressmen to increase funding? I would try to elicit that from well-cared for regulars instead. Are they going to swell the ranks of rangerdom with knowledgeable applicants? I think you're getting that from the "buffs." Will they make private donations to the private charities that support the park? Or is that more likely to come from the "buffs"?
The maximum possible upside is that the careless, distracted, hurried tourists will tell utterly disinterested friends and neighbors that their trip was somewhat "interesting." That's it. Big win.
And if they somehow were motivated to return, they would fall into the "buff" class to be taken for granted.
This is the only "industry" I know of that proudly teaches its staff to ignore regular customers and then tells newspapers about the policy.
I wonder if we could somehow get these clowns in front of a restaurant owner, a sports team owner, a television network executive, to hear about the value of repeat business and regular customers. Maybe for a day some casino could give them the VIP treatment its regulars get. Maybe an amusement park operator could take a few minutes to help them understand
This industry has already achieved maturity and a very high population penetration rate in the domestic market, leaving operators with the challenging task of attracting high levels of repeat visitors.Repeat visits are a phenomenon no one at Gettysburg is trying to understand.
