ORONO – The newly formed University of Maine-based Center for Tourism, Research and Outreach, or CenTRO, is developing a customer satisfaction survey for Maine campground visitors to help the state’s tourism industry get a comprehensive look at how well it is doing to attract and retain visitor traffic.

CenTRO began a pilot test in July, an e-mail and Web-based questionnaire to be sent to visitors who recently have been at one of several campgrounds participating in the pilot study.

Once the survey questions and research methods are refined, plans are to broaden the field to include as many of the state’s campgrounds as possible, according to UM business professor Harold Daniel, director of CenTRO, and Thomas Allen of the department of resource, economics and policy and senior research scientist for CenTRO.

With success in the state’s campgrounds, the resulting approach to data collection will become a model for similar research among customers of the entire lodging industry in Maine.

Daniel, Allen and CenTRO staff members are in the process of refining survey questions and methods and developing a process that assures a consistent and objective measure of the quality of experiences of Maine’s tourists.

State economists, tourism authorities and owners and managers of campgrounds and lodging establishments are keenly interested in the research. The results will indicate how well visitors’ needs are being met and whether they are enjoying their visits enough to return.

The electronic campground survey will be the first in Maine to use e-mail to reach visitors at home in a timely fashion, Daniel and Allen said. Currently, some large hotels and campgrounds use expensive market research firms to gauge customer satisfaction, and some smaller, family owned campgrounds rely on an unscientific postcard questionnaire to get a sense of customer satisfaction.

Any costs that may be associated with the CenTRO surveys, to cover data processing expenses, will be much less than commercial customer surveys, according to Daniel and Allen.

The research, Daniel said of the camper survey, “is intended to give a lot of people insight, from the individual campground operator to the state’s policymakers, and those in Maine’s tourist regions. Customer satisfaction surveys help measure product quality. The survey helps address the most basic of questions: How are we doing?”

The surveys can become “an ongoing monitoring system to track the quality of visitors’ experiences over time,” he says.

Richard Abare, executive director of the Maine Campground Owners Association in Lewiston, said the fact that the camper survey is being conducted by the university gives it both credibility and relevance in the eyes of campground owners and the visitors who respond to the surveys.

“The ability to be able to bring this to the individual Maine family owned and operated business is what gets me excited,” said Abare. “I know a couple of my campgrounds, my constituents that are in the process of distributing the survey, are very excited about it.”

CenTRO also is beginning a second survey that focuses on the experiences, spending habits and other information about overnight visitors that can give campground owners and innkeepers a better idea of who is visiting their establishments, as well as what visitors expect for services and activities during their vacations.

Information is available at www.umaine.edu/centro.