Uluru climb closes to tourists. Good or bad news?

Huge crowds scrambled up Australia’s Uluru for the final time on Friday 25th October, ahead of a ban on climbing the sacred rock. The giant monolith – once better known to visitors as Ayers Rock – will be permanently off limits from Saturday 26th October

Uluru is sacred to its indigenous custodians, the Anangu people, who have long implored tourists not to climb. Only 16% of visitors went up in 2017 – when the ban was announced – but the climb has been packed in recent weeks.

The final climbers faced a delayed start due to dangerously strong winds – one of many reasons Uluru has been closed to people wishing to reach the top over the years. The walk can be hazardous, with dozens dying since the 1950s. The high temperatures in the area, which can reach 47C (116F) in the summer, mean visitors have died of dehydration and other heat-related events.

But the steep and slippery climb to the summit – which stands 348m (1,142ft) high – can also prove dangerous. Just last year, a Japanese tourist died while attempting to ascend one of the steepest parts of the rock. (BBC News, 2019)

Is the closure good or bad news? If so, then for whom? Does this represent long overdue recognition of sustainable behaviours at natural attractions? What are the triple-bottom line implications of this decision? Should Uluru ever have been a climbable attraction in the first place?

Seaworld and the Orca controversy…

In January 2019, Kayla died. She was a 30-year-old killer whale living at SeaWorld Orlando. If she’d been living in the wild, she’d likely have lived into her 50s, and possibly as old as 80. Still, Kayla lived longer than any captive-born orca in history.

It’s not clear what she died from (SeaWorld hasn’t released the results of her necropsy, and by law is not required to), but her immediate cause of death may not tell us much anyway. Often orcas technically die of pneumonia or other opportunistic infections that take hold because the animal is already weak.

70 orcas have been born in captivity around the world since 1977 (not counting another 30 that were stillborn or died in utero), according to records maintained by experts. 37 of them, including Kayla, are now dead. Only a handful of wild-caught orcas have lived past age 30. No captive-born orca yet has.

SeaWorld to stop breeding orcas following controversy

Orcas don’t do well in captivity. Here’s why

Is the use of wild animals in captivity unacceptable at visitor attractions? Is there an increasing animal welfare education that challenges these issues? What role does the media play? Are there alternatives?

Are Zoos now an outdated concept as a visitor attraction?

Inspectors have called for the owner of a zoo to face prosecution after the revelation that nearly 500 animals in its care had died in less than four years.

A damning report into conditions at South Lakes Safari zoo in Cumbria, which is home to more than 1,500 animals, found that 486 inhabitants had died of causes including emaciation and hypothermia between December 2013 and September 2016.

One African spurred tortoise named Goliath died after being electrocuted by electric fencing, while the decomposing body of a squirrel monkey was discovered behind a radiator. The zoo had a death rate of about 12% of its animals a year.

Zoo inspectors said they had found “significant problems caused by overcrowding, poor hygiene, poor nutrition, lack of suitable animal husbandry and a lack of any sort of developed veterinary care”.

They said the local authority should consider prosecuting the zoo’s founder, David Gill, under the Animal Welfare Act for allowing animals to suffer, adding that the entire blame for the attraction’s problems could be laid at his door.

Guardian article

Has the growth of public education regarding animal welfare influenced opinions about Zoos? Do they contravene sustainable principles of sustainability? How will visitors be able to engage with animals at attractions in the future?

How important is interpretation to the success of a visitor attraction?

Done well, interpretation can enhance the visitor experience. Furthermore, by improving the attractiveness of a site, interpretation can lead to economic benefits for the wider area. Done badly, it can inaccurately communicate the meanings of
the site and alienate those who visit. It can also physically damage the material if poorly specified and installed.

The link below gives a Museums and heritage perspective of how interpretation should/could be approached.

Creating new interpretation

Discussion points: Is interpretation important to an attraction’s success? How can attractions approach the interpretation process? What approaches are applicable? E.g. panels, actors, interactive technology, audio/visual, demonstrations. What are the challenges for attractions in developing effective interpretation techniques?

Museums urged to adopt AI as technology comes to the forefront

For museums to succeed, they must adapt to the ever-expanding presence of artificial intelligence. That was the message delivered to delegates at the 2018 MuseumNext European conference, in London.  Speaking at the event, Sara Boutall a museum technologist and an account executive at data analytics company Dexibit, asked the question of how AI plays into the museum sector, laying out several roles the technology will, and in some cases already does, play.

Robotics, machine learning and natural language processing are among the key AI applications for museums. In that context, these technologies already help to forecast visitor numbers, respond to guest queries and better catalogue digital collections. Through the use of big data analytics, the sector is also developing an ‘in the moment’ view of the present.

A number of projects have already shown good use of AI in a creative way. San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art recently introduced Send Me – an SMS service which acts as an art discovery tool where users text a number with a keyword or emoji. In response, they will receive a related artwork with a caption.

In Philadelphia, the Barnes Foundation art gallery used machine learning to interpret art, pairing digital work together using ‘visual identity’ to recognise art style, objects and even images of Jesus, which users could then access online to view the artificially generated art collections.

Artificial concierges are also a new innovation. The Smithsonian Institute, for example, is developing Pepper – a 4-foot-tall interactive humanoid robot. The first museum in the world to experiment with the technology, Pepper can answer visitor’s questions, collect information, dance, play games and pose for selfies. The robot can also display images, text and video on a tablet mounted to its chest. AI can also be used for more practical day-to-day tasks in the museum realm.

“AI doesn’t have an embedded sense of ethics,” she said. “When Microsoft launched Tay, the AI Twitter bot was shut down within 24 hours due to concerns with its inability to recognise when it was making offensive or racist statements it learned from other users.

“We need to embrace AI. It’s a growing part of our lives, we need to teach it to our children. We can use it for the world of museums to make them better, more agile, more open and more flexible.”

Attractions Management.com (2018)

Link to Attractions Management article

Discussion points: Should attractions increasingly embrace technology in their products and services? Is this what customers want? Is there a trend towards embracing technology and will this continue? What are the benefits but also the risks and dangers? Do the Igeneration/Generation Z want increased technology?

 

Sustainable attractions – A must or the exception to the norm?

Spanish theme park Port Aventura has pledged to rid all three of its attractions of disposable plastics by 2020. From January 2019, plastic straws and bubble wrap will be replaced with paper alternatives at the Spanish resort near Barcelona, which is home to Port Aventura Park, Port Aventura Caribe Aquatic Park and Ferrari Land.

Through 2019, the company will also gradually begin to replace disposable materials used in its self service restaurants in favour of sustainable alternatives. The move is part of Port Aventura’s wider sustainability project, which also pledges to use only clean
energy sources at each of the three attractions on site. 100% of its electricity
supply is currently from renewable energy sources without CO2 emissions.  (Visitor Attractions.com, 2018)

Should all visitor attractions consider their responsibility towards sustainable/responsible behaviours and actions? How can they do this? Is sustainable attraction management solely about environmental issues?

How important is social media and market segmentation to visitor attractions?

         

78 Derngate and Towcester Museum are heritage attractions in Northampton and Towcester respectively. 78 Derngate is an integral part of Northampton’s ‘Cultural Quarter’ and uses key social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as part of their marketing approach. Potentially, the attraction does not attract enough visitors from the younger/student demographic. Conversely, Towcester Musuem may have an issue surrounding a lack of awareness that the attraction actually exists!

How can these attractions best utilise social media to promote themselves and to capture new markets? Equally, how should they approach market segmentation or should they be trying to entice the mass market?

How do UK attractions perform on social media?

78 Derngate website

Towcester museum website

Thai caves where school boys were trapped to be turned into a museum

Several media sources have reported that the cave complex in northern Thailand where 12 schoolboys and their coach were trapped in June 2018 is to be turned into a visitor attraction. Narongsak Osottanakorn (2018), who co-ordinated the recovery mission stated that “This area will become a living museum, to show how the operation unfolded.”

Film makers are also rushing to secure the rights to turn the story into a potential blockbuster movie. The use of the site raises several potential questions given that a diver died during the rescue mission, the site is in a remote part of Northern Thailand on the border with Myanmar and the cave network is also incredibly dangerous. Is this  a case of potential greed over ethical issues? Is this a dark tourism site or an attraction celebrating a ‘feel good’ story? Should it be allowed? What’s your angle/view?

Independent article (2018)

 

 

English Heritage launches campaign after survey reveals children more likely to experience a castle in fiction than reality. Should Attractions increasingly embrace Film, TV and associated media into their products?

English Heritage has launched a new campaign for families to visit its castles, after a survey by the organisation revealed that children’s memories of castles are more than twice as likely to have come from film and fiction instead of a real-life visit.

A 2,000 person survey of both children and adults showed that while most adults’ first castle sightings are likely to have been in real life, almost two thirds of children remember their first memories from fictitious castles featured in the likes of Harry Potter, Cinderella and Frozen.

Of the children surveyed, more than two thirds said that they enjoyed visiting castles, however less than 40 per cent had visited one in the last year, and 12 per cent had never been to one. English Heritage manages 66 castles – more than any other organisation in Britain. In an effort to boost attendance through the summer months, the body has launched #LoveCastles – a campaign aiming to bring more families to these historic sites.

As part of the campaign, English Heritage will offer a variety of events, ranging from jousting tournaments to sandcastle building workshops. English Heritage is also encouraging Minecraft players to visit, hosting on-site workshops featuring the popular video game.

“While most of us can remember our first trip to a castle – whether on a day out with the family or a school trip – today’s children are increasingly likely to catch their first glimpse of a castle on a screen rather than in real life,” said Kate Mavor, chief executive of English Heritage.  “This summer, English Heritage is calling on families up and down the country to reverse this trend, and take a day out to a real life castle, where kids can run around in the sunshine.

Should attractions increasingly embrace Film, TV and associated media into their products? What are the benefits and downfalls of this?

Adapted from attractionsmanagement.com

Tom Anstey (2018)

English Heritage Love Castles video

English Heritage #LoveCastles homepage