Mar03Tried&True

Anyone who operates an attraction knows how hard it can be at times to communicate effectively with guests, even when you speak the same language. Imagine, then, the challenge facing the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum in New York City, which draws more than 650,000 visitors a year, literally from all over the world.

The core of the museum is a restored aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Intrepid, along with military aircraft and two sister ships. There’s a lot to see and a lot of information to impart. The museum accomplishes this with an audio-tour system that allows guests to go through the museum in any order they wish, at no cost to the guest, and it is available in eight languages.

The system, by Acoustiguide Corp-oration, was installed in 2000 after the museum conducted some market research, says Mark Albin, the executive vice president for marketing and business development. “We commissioned a group to help us understand our audience, and the feedback we kept getting from people was that they wanted to know more about the museum.

Multiple Languages
“Even though we had graphics throughout, we wanted more. The panels were written in English, which a lot of our visitors do not read very well. And to put each panel in eight different languages would take up a lot of space and be awkward,” he says.

The museum looked for alternatives to the English panels and explored options from a taped tour to an in-house radio system. However, offering a taped tour could create guest organization problems, and installing a radio system would carry with it constant wave interference and antenna conflicts, Albin explains. “We thought that the random access program we use provides the best of all worlds and is the simplest to run,” he says.

Here’s how the system works: After guests pay their admission, they are invited to step over to a counter where they receive a handset a little longer than a typical TV remote control. Guests can pick from eight languages: English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Hebrew. Each exhibit has a code. Guests punch the code in on the handset keypad and hold it up to their ear to hear about the exhibit, complete with sound effects and music. The English version uses such well-known speakers as Tom Brokaw, Walter Cronkite, Mike Wallace, and Sen. John McCain.

Just Change the Chip
The brain of the handset is an interchangeable memory chip that holds the audio tour. “We prepare some in each language,”Albin says, “but it is easy to change them out. There is a suitcase full of each language chip so we can change them as the ebb and flow of the day goes. Some days we have a lot of European visitors and some days a lot of Asian visitors. “It also gives us the ability to change a message to the visitors daily, so we can make announcements about a special program we may have that day.”

Albin uses the distribution of languages in his marketing plan. “If we know that we are getting a lot of visitors from Italy or the U.K. during certain times of the year, it helps us to work with tour operators, and sometimes we place advertisements in international publications and it is helpful to know when they are making outbound trips to the New York area,” he says.

Audio tours have been used for some time at museums, zoos, and historical sites. But unlike the vast majority, the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum offers the audio tours for free. The museum decided this when it first hired Acoustiguide. “They told us that we could rent the tour and we could expect that five to 15 percent would go that route. Or, we could make it part of the paid admission and make it complimentary and have a much higher rate of use, which is what we wanted to happen.”

The museum wants its guests to learn Intrepid’s stories of heroism and inspiration, and to reach as many audiences speaking as many different languages as it can. “It was more important for us to get more people exposed to the message of the museum than to make it a revenue producer that served a smaller percentage of people,” Albin explains.

The museum covered the cost by raising its admission price $1, he says. “It’s invisible to the public when you raise the price by a buck. We didn’t get any complaints at all. We have had tremendous response from the public. Everybody loves it—not only international visitors who feel comfortable having something explained in their own language, but local people who come back to take the audio tour and see it as a great complement to what we offer.”

—Frank Elliott