OCEAN CITY – The city’s first attempt at better getting to know their visitors kicked off at Springfest with a trial run of a visitor profile survey.
Ocean City’s new endeavor of conducting a Tourism Strategic Plan began its efforts to create a visitor profile by surveying the resort’s visitors at Springfest, held May 1-4.
The purpose of the Tourism Strategic Plan, being conducted by Lyle Sumek, is to engage the members of the Tourism Commission and other key stakeholders in developing a five-year strategic plan for tourism and a one-year action agenda work program, as well as define outcome-based tourism goals with performing standards and measures, to establish a tourism framework and tools to assist in making decisions and investments including target markets and guests, to develop a tourism work plan for one year, and to institutionalize a tourism strategic planning process with a monitoring and recording mechanism.
An accurate profile of visitors will be a key piece to the final strategic plan in learning who Ocean City’s visitors are and how to reach them.
“We did a trial run of our visitor profile survey during Spingfest. We had almost 100 respondents,” Tourism and Marketing Director Donna Abbott said.
The survey was conducted on an app using an iPad and all answers collected were sent directly to a database.
The zip codes collected of those who participated in the survey at Spingfest were primarily in the Washington D.C., Baltimore and surrounding areas. The majority of participants were in the age group of 46 to 60 years old.
The number of times they visited Ocean City was about equal with none to one or over six being the highest response but when asked over the last five years how many times they had visited Ocean City almost 50 people responded over 20 times.
Few answered they came to stay in Ocean City for just one day. The majority of participants responded two to three days, four to five days, with six-plus days being the highest response.
Few participants reasoned coming to Ocean City as a tradition, a conference or convention, special events, family events or other. Most participants responded they came to Ocean City for a vacation. A few answered they stayed in a motel or with friends while most respondents stayed in a single-family residence, followed by a condo, vacation home and hotel.
The reason for selecting Ocean City ranged but most respondents selected the beach, Boardwalk and special events and are spending under $50 to $100 daily besides on accommodations.
The two categories selected the most when asked how Ocean City could enhance the visitor experience were more special events and festivals and expanding performing arts and cultural experiences.
“Most people go where everybody is and that is at the end of the Boardwalk, and there certainly is a lot of people down there. That is not a real good sampling of the people that are coming to Ocean City,” Mayor Rick Meehan said. “We need to do it in different areas throughout town, such as Movies on the Beach, to get an idea of the people who are staying and not just the people who are coming on a Saturday. We need to get a true sampling of people.”
Abbott responded weekdays, weekends and holiday dates have been selected to conduct the survey, as well as at different special events and multiple locations.
The next step in conducting the Tourism Strategic Plan, on top of ongoing survey efforts, is Sumek will be contacting Tourism Commission members and business stakeholders in Ocean City to conduct phone interviews within the next few weeks.