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Enhance Visitor Experience

Measuring Visitor Attendance

Person-visit information is useful for communicating the extent of the demand for heritage places, for calculating the economic impacts of these places, for operational planning and for obtaining contextual information about the potential environmental effects of people on natural resources.

Parks Canada’s national person-visit information is based on data collected from 128 reporting units (36 national parks, two national marine conservation areas, and 90 national historic sites and exhibits administered by Parks Canada). At 61 of these sites, the number of person-visits is counted directly. However, in the remainder, the number of visits must be estimated because multiple uncontrolled points of entry make a precise count of the number of visitors impossible. In these cases, the estimate may be counts of vehicle traffic in the park or site and periodic surveys. The surveys identify the average number of people travelling by vehicle, the reasons for visiting and the number of people re-entering the park on the same day. Similar kinds of surveys can be undertaken at the places where visitors arrive on foot (e.g., the Forks National Historic Site of Canada in Winnipeg or the Fortifications of Quebec National Historic Site of Canada in Quebec) or by boat (e.g., Rideau Canal National Historic Site of Canada, in Ontario).

Parks Canada is committed to continually improving its procedures for estimating the number of person-visits, particularly at the 20 parks or sites that attract 78% of visits. Each location is expected to have a methodology that leads to confidence in the data, which is defined as having estimates of the number of visits from all access points and a survey to adjust counts of visitor traffic within the last ten years. As of March 2007, 17 of the 20 sites with the most person-visits meet these criteria. The frequency with which sites are able to review and update their methodology is the major issue in meeting these commitments.

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