- People more ‘Digi Savvy’ - Amenable to tech
- Leisure /Entertainment - Now has become A BASIC NEED
- People Value ‘Getting Out’ More - People are valuing their FREEDOM
- More ‘Experience’ Focused - Creating MEMORIES
- More ‘Friends and Family’ Focused - Creating MEMORIES
- People Valuing what is on their doorstep - LOCAL market
Making Every Visit Count - Hints & Tips
Purpose
In this time of extreme difficulties, recovering from the pandemic, and re-adjusting to the ‘new normal’ and the new environment that Attractions, Leisure and Hospitality businesses find ourselves in, it is vital that we employ tools and processes which ensure that every visitor or guest experience is valued and the maximum benefit to the business in the present and the future business success.
The Challenge
Ensuring that your business has enough guests or visitors to sustain the business, at the right time, coming in or visiting at the right price is essential and is the yield management quandary. Ensuring that each and every visitor has the best experience and feels that they have had value for money, will recommend/visit again, whilst ensuring that for you as a business you have created the right environment for that visitor to have spent the optimum amount of money, is the balance which needs to be right. This balance will impact your business in the short, medium and long term, and will only come about with the correct planning.
Coming out of the Pandemic
Coming out of the pandemic, some factors may now come in to play which either had not been considered before, or are now have impacted to a greater or lesser extent than before.
People are reappraising what they want from their free time
What is the opportunity for your business?
- Is there a desire for More VALUE ADD?
- Is there a desire for PREMIUM products?
- Is there a desire for more PERSONAL products?
- Are people more Discerning?
There will be a need for you to adapt to the above, in order to maximise the opportunity for every visitor.
Visitors are now wanting, demanding and potentially will be prepared to pay for more:
- Information
- Transparency
- Comfort
- To be ‘looked after’
Capturing the Opportunity for your Business
It is imperative as you come out of the lockdown period to reassimilate your product and your service, and to ensure it is still relevant.
Your Product:
- Why do you do what you do?
- Why do people come to your Attraction?
- Is it the right price/does it offer the right value?
- Point of difference/USP/Advantage vs competition?
- What are the Barriers to entry?
- Is your Brand (ing) still relevant?
- Did you Pivot? What elements will you keep?
Your Marketing:
- How has your market changed?
- Different visitor Expectations
- Consider how important loyalty/repeat visits/community is now
- Is your Marketing relevant to your new market? Digital/Traditional? Your digital offering – is it still relevant? How can you capture the ‘Digi Savvy’ behaviour change?
- Different people – local/community/ regional not international
Your Operation
In relation to the recovery, many things will have had to have changed within your operation. It is worth re-evaluating this now, to ensure that the change in the operating processes and practices are not stifling the guest experience and ultimately, the guest spend.
- SOPs
- Standards
- Customer Metrics
- What changes are working?
For example, Covid-19 regulations constantly change, managing expectations such as timings and capacities. How do you measure satisfaction in customers? And are the changes you decided to keep still worth keeping? i.e. pivoting ideas, timed ticketing, opening times and capactiy reduction
Your Goals to Make Every Visit Count:
Be specific with you Goals & then have a plan of action, timelines and accountabilities:
- More revenue from Customer
- Ease of Transaction
- More people/visitors/guests
- Safety/Security
- Ops efficiencies/Simplicity/Flexibility/More Human?
Maximising Visitor Spend
There is no one solution to maximise visitor spend, but there are key areas which must be explored in your business to ensure that you are giving yourself every chance to maximise visitor spend, and promote loyalty, repeat visits and customer recommendations.
Visitor Engagement:
It is proven that customers will spend more in any business when they are engaged and the service anticipates and meets their needs, and often exceeds expectations. To this end, every change you decide to make MUST be focused around improving the visitor Engagement and the experience and ‘Guest Journey’ not only when they visit, but initial experience through the booking process, pre and post visit communications.
When considering changes to your product, your service and guest-facing decisions in order to maximise the average spend of your customers, visitor Engagement needs to be the first priority, and decisions made with customers at the core.
You will only know that you are succeeding in engaging your customers, and creating high NET PROMOTER SCORES (i.e. recommendations) if you measure the feedback and learn about what drives your visitors to you, and drives their behaviour and enjoyment whilst in your Attraction/Experience by asking the right questions, and then acting on the answers to create a constantly improving and engaging visitor experience.
High visitor engagement will drive sales in all areas of your business, and this must be the first priority in all aspects of business development.
Visitor Experience:
Post pandemic thinking will no doubt have affected visitors and their perception of their experience in your Attraction or Experience. There are lessons which Visitor Attractions and Experiences can learn from the Digital giants such as Amazon, Google, Facebook etc particularly in the retail economic environment, e-commerce etc, and this may be turned to your advantage to enhance visitor spend.
Personalisation
In his 1936 book – ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’, Dale Carnegie famously states that ‘A persons name is, to that person, the sweetest and impost important sound in any language’. Consider how personalisation has been at the core of the digital giants and the digital retailers who have taken advantage of the post pandemic behaviours of the global population. Think about how personalisation can enhance your visitor attraction or leisure experience and how it can grow your visitor spend as a result.
Personalisation will:
- Hook your audience in a more engaging way
- Grow awareness
- Increase loyalty
- Create a more immersive experiences which are targeted, relevant for your guest
- Emotionally motivated, create an emotional connection on an individual level
- Build a bond between guest and experience
And ultimately, a more personal experience for your guests and visitors has been proven to trigger a higher spend, and so enhance sales.
Aim:
- To increase loyalty (repeat visits)
- Memberships
- Referrals
- Higher spend on Retail, food and beverage and upsells/upgrades
- To understand your customers better, and give you information to change your operation and service to impact your customer behaviour – when are they more likely to use/convert/revisit or browse again
The Guest/Vistor Journey and Maximising Spend
Using your Data
It is important to know your potential customer, and knowing what their needs are will enhance your ability to sell to them, and ensure they have value for money for their visit, and are engaged with you. You can get insights and data from your existing visitors, and knowing what you know about them and their behaviours and wishes through your own customer metric data and feedback tools. Your prebooking system will have plenty of quantitative data on demographic, age etc if you collect it, but the qualititive data you gather will inform further decision making on how to further engage with your potential customers and obtain new customers or enhance repeat visits, memberships and loyalty, as well as recommendations which will impact your ultimate goal and Net Promoter Score.
Before the Visit
It is proven by the e-commerce sites that conversion is higher in a more personalised environment, and those customers who are more engaged will also purchase more, resulting in higher transaction values and average spends will result.
The booking process is the first stage of the guest journey – make it as engaging as possible, and promote your brand voice in the way you speak to the customer and anticipates their needs.
Tips:
- Know your audience and engage them on a personal level – know their needs, meet and exceed them
- Communicate well and ensure that your visitors know what to expect, where to buy food, what is available, plan their visit to include all what is on offer.
- Make it as smooth process as possible.
- Offer ‘all in one’ packages – e.g. including food, and retail products to service their needs as well as committing the spend at the front of the visit.
During the Visit
Once again, this is all about anticipating your guests’ needs, and meeting and exceeding expectations.
F&B Retail
If you know that your family guests usually purchase lunch at the peak time of day, which then may impact their enjoyment – e.g. busy retail outlets between 12 and 2pm, why not offer them a special ‘early bird’ discount to have lunch earlier, or merely pre-order so your team can prepare it in advance.
In this case you can lead the customer to commit the spend at the beginning of the purchase when they buy their ticket. This will ensure that they think about their purchase a little more as they are less stressed, and they know that the lunch will be waiting for them at their convenience.
Once again, - take a lesson from the e-commerce environment and think like your customer.
- Which of your retail offerings will enhance the guest experience?
- Why would the customer want to purchase?
- Is it easy for the customer to purchase?
- Is this at the forefront of your communication at the pre-booking stage? During the visit? Afterwards?
It is worth looking at Attractions and Experiences which you admire and seeing how they maximise their spends through retail. The Warner Studios Harry Potter tour in London is a very slick operation, and a very high proportion of visitors will purchase their signature product – the wand (of which there are over 30 specific versions) at over £30 each. Closer to home, the Guinness Storehouse operation in Dublin offers personalised Guinness glasses and many other iconic Guinness items.
- What is your signature product? What proportion of visitors will be purchasing it?
- What is your target average spend on retail? How will you achieve it? (Training, marketing collateral, targeting your team with incentives etc).
Photography
Memories are made and people want to remember this experience. Although personal mobile phone technology is now allowing User Generated Content to be uploaded on to your Social Media pages, which will form part of your marketing campaign and strategy, professional photography has a place and can also enhance the average spend and profitability of an attraction or experience, if done properly.
This can be done in a number of ways:
- In house – where you provide all the facilities yourself and your team execute and deliver the service.
- Part supported – where you engage a professional company to provide the technology and the equipment and your team execute and deliver the service.
- Full service – when a 3rd party professional company implement the service and then run it as a contractor (with a percentage or similar contractual arrangement)
It is worth investigating the potential in doing this for your attraction, and see which may well work out to be the most financially advantageous for your site in the short, medium and long term.
Influencing Guest Spend on site and during visit
This is particularly difficult if you are not in touch with the customer as they experience the attraction or experience, such as a Zoo or a theme park, and there is much to be said for ‘in hand’ technology and apps which can send push notifications and smooth the guest journey.
Ensuring that the guests are in the best position to enjoy the experience, and are prepared for their day is key to ensuring that they engage with your experience, and so the interaction at the start will be vital to their enjoyment and their spend whilst on site.
In this new environment of ticketless interactions, you may now miss the opportunity to welcome them on site at a ticket booth, so giving them information on a map, or explaining what is happening when in person, may now be lost.
You will need to ensure that your visitors are:
- Confident
- Happy
- Clear
- Relaxed
- Comfortable
- Excited
About what awaits them, and so will be more likely to spend as they know what to expect.
Alternatives to the personal ‘Welcome’:
- Pre-visit email with all you need to know, including show times, experience times, and food and drink options, times which will impact them, age restrictions etc, If you do not have in app technology then it is up to your team to interact with the guests as they flow through the experience, and you must ensure that your team are best placed to do so, and are suitably trained and understanding of their part to play in influencing the guest experience AND the guest spend.
- Well trained team members who are happy and confident to approach guests (safely and within C-19 guidelines) to explain the process and ensure that the guests know what to expect. At this point you can point out discounts or special offers which will enhance the visitor experience and help you achieve your spend goals whilst ensuring that the guest has a positive perception of the Value For Money of the visit.
- Plenty of physical collateral – maps and vouchers, which the guests can read at their leisure and give them all the information so they can read at their leisure. This physical collateral can be made available from places where there is guest:team interactions, and the team members very clear about how they explain what happens and are insightful in understanding the customer needs.
- The technological solution – detailed below.
Tools to ensure your team are focused on your targets:
- Reward/recognition tie ins – e.g. with TRIP ADVISOR comments which mention them by name
- Incentives to reach Targets, Goals – daily/weekly/monthly etc.
- Constant communication and follow up to reinforce good practice, best practice and achievements.
- Empowering your staff and supporting them to make decisions on their own which are aligned with the business goals - e.g. Safety First, Friendliness, ‘the WOW factor’,
- Ensure your team are aligned to your Business strategy and your MISSION, and VISION of your attraction:
- Together Everyone Achieves More
After the Visit
It is important to monitor guest engagement and obtain feedback after a visit, as well as prompting repeat visits or membership/loyalty programmes dependent on the type of Attraction or Experience. This can be done through focus groups, targeted emails, and through social media to closed user groups also whilst promoting another offer or repeat visit deal which you are promoting.
Guest feedback and asking questions of your visitors will also give you invaluable data which you can use to promote repeat visits, and to change your operation in line with the customer feedback and experience on the spending habits of your customers whilst in your attraction.
An Example:
You discover that after leaving your Attraction, your family guests tend to go to a fast food outlet to feed the family prior to reaching home. You can use this information then to target families with a discount voucher or code for use in your own food retail outlet before they leave, thus increasing your F&B retail spend in the afternoon just prior to closing.
Your Product, Your Operation, and your People:
Most Visitor interactions will be with your team in your business, and therefore all decisions and output will be enacted by them. It is important that whilst you want to maximise the efficiencies of staffing, and maximising the productivity from your team, that you use your team effectively but they are trained to fulfil the needs of the visitor Engagement and the Visitor experience issues detailed above.
That means:
- Ensuring they have a detailed and clear job description and objectives
- Ensuring they are trained to do the job and receive ongoing training and support
- Ensuring they have the required tools to do the job
- Ensuring that they have the time and opportunity to interact with visitors in the way that maximises the visitor satisfaction
- Ensure that they have good communication practices so that your team are encouraged to spot opportunities for improving visitor satisfaction and visitor engagement.
- Good communication where the guest experience and the visitor metrics and feedback are discussed with the team. i.e. what we did well yesterday, what didn’t go as well – keeping it front of mind.
Maximising the opportunity through Product Pricing/Yield Management
As mentioned above, it is important to ensure that after reopening post lockdown, that your product is now fit for purpose in the new trading environment.
The same can be said for the pricing of the product and the combination of the type of product you are now offering – i.e.:
- The Right Product Does anything need to change? Guest feedback data.
- The Right Price Guest feedback and VALUE for money information
- The Right Time Using dynamic pricing/ varied pricing dependent on demand
- The Right Experience Guest feedback – how engaged are your customers?
- The Right Value for Money Guest feedback – what is their perception of VFM
Anticipating the needs of all the party
In order to maximise spend, or even ensure that the party actually make the decision to come to you, it is important to appeal to the decision maker.
- Who is the decision maker in the party pre-visit?
- Who is the decision maker for the Food & Bev/Retail spends in your attraction?
Pizza Hut UK had research to suggest that a main driver of the decision to go to a restaurant as a family was taken by Mum, and especially in the summer months, pizza was thought to be an unhealthy option. In reference to this thinking, Pizza Hut implemented a ‘healthy options’ part of the menu and targeted families through its marketing campaign.
Capturing spend opportunities around your Attraction/Experience
Once again, this is all about Engagement and how comfortable and happy your visitor groups are, and on experience they are having.
- How do they feel?
- Are they feeling that they are having value for money? This will no doubt impact on their spending habits.
After lockdown, has your visitor flow changed to allow for one-way traffic only? This clearly will impact on your usual visitor flow into your retail outlets, and so care must be taken to decide what the opportunity is for changing further flows to maximise the spend, whilst maintaining visitor distance and social distancing according to the guidelines. There is of course nothing more important than the safety of your visitors and your employees.
The guest journey around your site still needs to flow with safety and then the visitor experience in mind, but also maximise the spending opportunities at the times which are the most sited to the visitor experience on the day. For example, if the experience has a one-way flow, and lunch times/evening meal times coincide with bottlenecks in the attraction flow, this will impact the spend per head and average transaction value at the peak times, stifling profitability. Careful planning and positioning of retail outlets, and other retail opportunities after changes in your Standard Operating Procedures needs to be considered, so to maximise the opportunity for visitor spend.
Try it out
Change layouts and visitor flows and monitor the result over a day, a week, a month. Collect the data and learn from it. You will learn and improve your operating procedures, as well as setting your business on an improved footing, with higher spends and increased guest satisfaction.
The Use of Technology:
Visitor engagement is key to guest and visitor perception and their ultimate experience in your attraction or experience.
With the acceleration of the digital opportunity within the leisure and attractions sphere, and the more ‘digi-savvy’ population, and digital now being used by wider demographics. It is important to capture the opportunity and leverage this to increase engagement and so deliver increased spend and improved Value for Money perceptions.
What technology do you use in your attraction? Apps? Bookings? Responsive websites?
The advocation of apps and contactless technology is an opportunity which may be harnessed to promote spending. Even if you do not have an app now in your attraction or experience, it is worth considering how you can use the fact that the majority of your guests will now be holding their own smartphone in their hand as they experience your attraction.
Nowadays, as people are so much more confident using a mobile app to purchase. It is worth noting that research (by io.com) shows that guests do spend up to 42% more using a mobile application than in person ordering. That would make a significant impact on your profitability, and daily purchases in your attraction.
Interactive solutions using personalised push notifications are also available to enhance what you are doing already to improve the Guest/Visitor experience.
An example would be in a theme park where the family would usually eat at peak time, experience large queues for food, and end up purchasing the cheapest, easiest menu option as they are stressed and in a hurry. They also find that they miss the next ride time due to the queuing in the restaurant and the time it takes to eat the meal.
This impacts their enjoyment of the experience on the day, potentially reduces their engagement in and loyalty to the brand and also and reduces their spend. They may not purchase more food on the day for this reason.
Mobile technology and harnessing the opportunity with apps technology could be the solution. Anticipating this issue, the technology can be set up to send the family push notifications to order food in advance, plus a link with personalised offers, so it is waiting for them in time for their next ride, plus even guide them quickly through the theme park to do so using the interactive map, pointing out other additional added value items which will smooth and enhance their experience on the day.
Some questions to consider:
- How can I use tech to improve the experience for my visitors from before they enter my attraction?
- What are the barriers to spend in retail? In F&B? in other opportunities e.g. photography?
- How can I leverage smartphones and promote spend in my attraction through social media/apps?
- How can I use tech to improve the experience for my visitors during their visit?
- How can I use tech to improve the experience for my visitors after their visit and make them want to return and recommend me to others?
Using Data to inform your thinking
Technology can give us much data to make the decisions to inform your thinking and make enhancements to maximise your spend.
Such data can be:
- Find out your most popular places in your site
- Know your peak times in all areas/outlets
- Monitor spend and find out the most common purchase times/purchases
- Monitor your queueing times
- Look at visitor flow – who/where/what and why
- Collated Feedback from the customers about their behaviours – WHY?
This rich combination of data gives you the ability to influence guests just like the e-commerce guests. Knowing your business and your consumer behaviour, peaks and troughs and phasing of business through each day, week, month and year, will give you insights to improve your business.
An example:
KidZania Dubai changed its opening hours to reduce costs and have a more efficient use of staff throughout the operating times. The impact on the opening hours was to change the ‘session times’ from a full day’s opening (10am to 8pm) to two sessions, split with an hour break in the afternoon. The business revenues steeply declined.
Upon investigation it became clear that as the day session finished at 4pm, that fewer visitors, who arrived at the Mall after 12 noon were purchasing in the day time as it was not perceived value for money. The opportunity for a sale was lost as the family would find an alternative activity in the Mall. On discovering this error, the site then re-arranged the staffing to reduce the opening times at the beginning and the end of the day and have one complete open session, rather than two, and the business recovered.