Comparing Visitor Perceptions, Characteristics, and Support for Management Actions before and during a Pilot Timed Entry System at Arches National Park

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This research manuscript is well-written and discusses an important and meaningful topic. I would suggest that the authors propose some hypotheses and use relevant literature to support those hypotheses before conducting the t-test comparison. The authors directly compared the items but didn't explain why there could be a difference. Another suggestion is to extend the conclusion section. More managerial implications could be included. Overall, good work!

Author Response

Thank you for your thoughtful review. We appreciate the time the reviewers took to make sure this was a speedy turnaround.

This research is extremely novel and provides unique insights into an approach for managing visitation in sustainable ways that is seldom used in the US National Parks System. We wish there was more literature to inform hypotheses, but this area of research is just developing. This is the most comprehensive examination of this issue to date, and because of the novelty, the research is inherently exploratory. Hypotheses would be overly prescriptive at this point in the development of this body of work. Additionally, we do lay out a variety of research question which are raised by these managed access systems as specified on page 2 lines 51-56. However, as already stated, these are inherently exploratory. We think this more clearly addresses the purpose of this work and will lead to a variety of new avenues for future research, including hypothesis driven inquires.

As stated in the previous paragraph, expanding relevant literature is not possible due to the scant and novel nature of this research topic. This also directly conflicts with the comments from an additional reviewer, who stated that any expansion of the literature is unwarranted.

We also largely disagree that the results are not discussed thoroughly – as did two other reviewers. One reviewer commended our ability to interact with what scant literature was available to discuss the findings of the statistical analyses. This is evident in the paragraph between lines 300-315, as well as 315-324. Much of the discussion of why these findings may be present are fairly speculative. That said, we did add the following to the discussion section:

• “The reason for this shift is unknown, but it may be related to visitors wanting more certainty in their travel planning.”
• “Additionally, greater availability of parking and reduced congestion during PTES (Tendick et al., 2023) may reduce the need for visitors to return to the park at a later time to access desired areas.”

In line with the novel and exploratory nature of this work, managerial recommendations are intentionally left open. The unique position of the co-authors and their relationship with the agency also warrants ambivalence regarding managerial recommendations.

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

Congratulations on this nice piece of work. I had a chance to go through it and I can see the flow throughout. The finding is helpful as it offers some important information to managers considering managed access systems like timed entry. The methodology is well-explained, coherent, and succinct. The quantitative analysis adds value to the overall work and it shows validity and reliability. The conclusion is clearly articulated and it shows how the objectives of the study were achieved. The purpose of this study was to identify any changes related to visitor experiences, characteristics, and support for management actions before and during the PTES at ARCH. 

Author Response

Thank you for your review. We appreciate the thoughtful response and quick turnaround. We are looking forward to seeing this in the literature.

Reviewer 3 Report

This is a very clear and „straight to the point“ research paper with basic statistical analysis which I like very much. I have enjoyed reading it. The sample size is large and the results give us valuable insigth into visitor perception.

I would just like to suggest that the authors add a map of the study area. I know this is not the main focus of the paper but I believe it is a necessary addition. Some may argue that a litereature review section is also necessary but the authors did a good job of mentioning previous research on this topic in the discussion section. Therefore I do not think it is necessary.

Author Response

Thank you for your response. We appreciate your swift review. 

The study area is already included in Figure 1. To address the comment of the reviewer, we have reformatted Figure 1 to clearly highlight the study location, and relabeled the title of figure one to say "Map of Arches National Park and the local area"