Customer care, satisfaction and needs monitoring are common activities that we encounter in commercial practice. Even in the case of monitoring the customer’s needs in the field of nature tourism, it is about the quality of the experience. However, in this case the end result is not a high-turnover consumer product, but an “entity” that sensitively responds to the way and amount of use. The difference compared to commercial marketing frameworks is that in the case of nature, we must take into account certain limits, the so-called carrying capacity of the territory. Knowing and respecting the carrying capacity is an essential part of the nature tourism management process so that we can preserve natural values. Natural resources are often not renewable and their damage or destruction can have an impact on the functioning of the ecosystems present and thus on us humans.
For the sustainable development of nature tourism it is therefore necessary to monitor the number of visitors, but at the same time it is very important to know the views and needs of visitors (qualitative survey) so that the offer in nature tourism can meet the expectations and needs of both sides.
In the framework of the Centralparks project, the Administration of the Protected Landscape Area Cerová vrchovina, in cooperation with the NGO PRONATUR, carried out a qualitative survey of the opinions of visitors to the PLA Cerová vrchovina in the summer months. The questionnaire consisted of 16 questions, which took about eight minutes to answer. 162 visitors took part in the survey, of which 36 questionnaires were conducted in Hungarian with visitors from Hungary. The majority of the survey was carried out in the locality of the Šomoška nature trail, a smaller part in Gemerské Dechtáry and Fiľakovo, in the Gemer region of Slovakia. The results of the survey provided us with valuable information about the perception of the protected area, about the satisfaction of visitors with the existing infrastructure, information and services such as accommodation and meals in the region, and also about what should be improved in the area.
The individual conclusions of the survey are available directly on the website of the Protected Landscape Area Administration Cerová vrchovina.