News

‘First of its Kind’ new Mystery Visitor Benchmarking Programme launches

ASVA is delighted to announce a very exciting new partnership with award winning tourism insight consultancy BVA BDRC, to provide members with the opportunity to take part in an innovative new Mystery Visitor Programme in 2022.
 
As members may recall in the summer of 2021, BVA BDRC worked with ASVA to conduct mystery visits to 20 Scottish visitor attractions across a range of sectors and regions.  The project assessed the full range of how visitors experience their sites including, pre-booking and adherence to COVID protocols.  With identical assessment criteria across all attractions, the programme was able to benchmark individual venues against the rest of the sector and inspire with examples of best practices at each. 
 
Following the success of the summer programme of visits, we are continuing our partnership with BVA BRDC and in 2022 they will be rolling out a mystery visitor benchmarking programme across the UK.   The assessment criteria has been put together by a group of stakeholders within the attractions sector and will cover areas such as:

  • Pre-booking & arrival
  • Queues and visitor management
  • Staff engagement
  • Cleanliness, health & safety
  • Retail & Catering
  • Green credentials & messaging

Benchmarking is a central feature of this programme, making it a first of its kind. It allows attractions to understand their strengths and weaknesses and see if these are shared across the sector or whether they have outliers of quality or improvements needed. Unlike other Mystery Visit programmes, individual assessments will be benchmarked against the sector, so you can work out what ‘good’ really looks like. Individual venue results will, of course, be confidential, but through sharing examples of best in class, we hope to help raise standards across the industry.  

As ASVA has partnered with BVA BDRC on the creation of this exciting new programme, we are delighted to advise that our members will receive an exclusive discount if they choose to participate. ASVA members will be charged the accessible price of £175 per visit, with an incremental discount for additional visits.

For more information about this first of its kind programme and to read more about the results of the pilot visits undertaken in the summer, please click here.