Alec Coles on what 1.7M WAM visitors think

Alec Coles, 1.7 million actual visitors can’t be wrong…, Linked in, May 2024

The Western Australian Museum is the State’s premier cultural organisation, housing WA’s scientific and cultural collection.

If all publicity is good publicity, I should be celebrating the fact the award-winning Western Australian Museum was listed amongst the most boring tourism attractions globally. If you’re not sure what I am talking about, thank yourself for being lucky to have not been swept up in the latest click-bait marketing strategy by a gaming company, which used a self–proclaimed ‘boredom scale’ from Google reviews to develop a ‘Top 100 most boring tourism attractions’ list – and some people swallowed it, hook, line and sinker.

The gaming company apparently searched Google reviews for a selected list of attractions, excluded any venue that got less than 2,000 reviews (automatically excluding less-visited and less-loved attractions) and did a keyword search using 11 keywords (including ‘boring’!). We have done a similar search and found that less than 0.005% of our Google reviews included these words.

We have found ourselves in good company alongside a number of Legoland attractions and MONA in Tasmania. Of course, I can take a joke, but sadly, people reading the headlines may not bother to find out the truth, making this headline potentially damaging.

So, let me set the record straight: Credible and independent research shows an overwhelmingly positive response from visitors:

Boola Bardip currently rates 4.5+ stars (out of 5), from 3,509 Google reviews.
Boola Bardip scored 90.8% in ReviewPro’s Global Review Index. This is calculated from Overall Score reviews collected from 140+ online travel agencies and review sites in over 45 languages. A score this high is almost unheard of.
Boola Bardip was named best Major Tourism Attraction and best Cultural Tourism Attraction at the 2023 Western Australian Tourism Awards and was Highly Commended in the Australian National Tourism Awards.

Since opening in November 2020, Boola Bardip has attracted nearly 1.7 million visitors and has consistently recorded customer satisfaction scores between 95% and 99% percent in regular 360-degree surveys.

I prefer to trust the views of nearly 1.7 million actual visitors, rather than unsubstantiated click-bait. I hope you do too.