It is said that amusement and theme parks are among the most complicated businesses to run because of how departmentally complex they are.  There are so many moving parts and so much that needs to go right for the park to thrive.  If you are new to the amusement business, realizing how much goes on behind the scenes that the guest never sees can be daunting.

That’s how it should be!  So much work goes into making it look like it all came together when the park opened for the day.  Fortunately, many technological solutions can take the burden of running an amusement park off of the operator.

What are venue management technological solutions?

Venue management technological solutions encompass a wide range of tools and systems designed to streamline and enhance the operations of various types of venues, such as event spaces, attractions, stadiums, theaters, and more. These solutions leverage technology to improve efficiency, customer experiences, and overall management. Some common venue management technological solutions include the following.

Ticketing

How are you selling tickets to your guests?  With an all-in-one ticketing system, you can sell tickets online, whether on mobile or desktop, as well as onsite, through traditional ticket windows or self-service kiosks.

Point of Sale

Powerful point of sale systems help speed up the flow of guests at entry points and prevent bottlenecks.

However, your online checkout must be just as good as in store. ROLLER's advanced checkout feature, Progressive Checkouts, incorporates contemporary and user-friendly elements such as live sidebar cart totals to boost engagement and deliver enjoyable user interactions.

Additionally, contextual add-ons and captivating visuals excite your guests, enticing them to increase their spending at your venue. The cumulative effect of these features ultimately results in higher conversion rates and higher per-guest spend.

Memberships

Engaging with your most loyal guests is vital to building advocacy. Managing your pass holders enables you to regularly communicate upcoming events or new attractions and keep tabs on them when it’s time to renew.  Better yet, implementing a recurring membership program removes the burden of the guest to actively renew their pass.

At ROLLER, we utilize ‘smart dunning’ which, rather than just using fixed intervals, such as three, seven, and thirty days after a failed payment, uses machine learning to attempt the collection when it's most likely to be successful. This technology significantly increases your success in recovering payments and retaining members, and reduces the instances of complete revenue loss.

"Since launching our membership program with ROLLER four months ago, we have almost 9,000 active members, generating close to $600,000 in revenue. We’re also successfully retaining members well beyond the three-month minimum term."

Austin Barnes

Director of Marketing, Elevate Trampoline Parks

Group Sales Management

In addition to annual pass holders, groups and party bookings make up a large percentage of an amusement park’s attendance and revenue.  Equipping your group sales team with the tools to track and manage clients helps to ensure a strong relationship between the group leaders and your park.

F&B and Inventory Management

Food, beverage, and retail are constantly in a revolving door in an amusement park.  To ensure you don’t run out of hot dogs or plush, use technology that helps you stay on top of your supply chain for your food & beverage and retail departments.

Additionally, using systems that streamline F&B ordering for guests and allow them to order from a QR code from their phone leads to smoother and more satisfactory staff and guest experiences, all while reducing queues at the counter.

Turnstiles / Access Control

How are your guests getting into the park?  Your ticketing system must be integrated with your access control system so that the arrival process is smooth and efficient and avoids bottlenecks at opening or other peak times for arrival.

Fortunately for ROLLER customers, our integration with Alvarado simplifies access control, enabling guests to independently scan their tickets, membership cards, or RFID wristbands at automated control gates. These features mean quicker ticket validation and automated entry, simplifying the management of large guest volumes and delivering a convenient and enjoyable experience.

You could also consider using self-serve kiosks (SSKs). They allow guests to check in themselves, purchase tickets/ products, and sign waivers before entering your venue. SSKs are also gaining much traction lately, with SSKs becoming the norm in places like supermarkets, chain retail stores, and airports, so your guests are very familiar with them.

Waiver management

What’s one thing you don’t love when you attend a leisure venue? Completing a waiver? Waivers, especially paper waivers, are not a favorite with guests, but they’re one of those things that just has to get done. Aside from integrating waivers into your self-serve kiosks, as mentioned above, a solution is to use digital waivers. Digital waivers save you and your guests time because they can complete waivers online before attending your venue so they can simply arrive and jump straight into the fun. Digital waivers also simplify waiver management for your venue as they are stored safely in the ROLLER system and are simple to manage.

HR Administration

Hiring and firing is a regular occurrence, and so is managing large teams at a time. Ensure your Human Resources department can track every employee's and former employee's status to oversee the employment journey efficiently.

Employee Scheduling

In addition to managing the employment status of your staff, it is critical that employee schedules can easily be created and adjusted as necessary and promptly communicated to the staff member.

Timeclock

Since most employees in an amusement park are paid by the hour, there must be a seamless system for staff to clock in and out for their shifts and unpaid breaks and for leaders to reconcile hours worked with hours budgeted and manage any overtime accordingly.

Event Management

If group sales are big business, group events are the holy grail.  Will you enable groups to buy out the park after hours or on non-operating days?  An event management system can help you manage the group and ensure that communication with other departments, such as catering, is handled accordingly.

Maintenance Management

Before rides and attractions can run, maintenance must perform a full inspection before turning it over to the operations team.  Instead of using paper checklists, everything should be tracked digitally so the information can be accessed easily in an emergency.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

Continue marketing to your guests after they leave.  With a CRM, you can divide your guests into various segments, allowing you to market to them effectively, further nurturing your relationship and loyalty.

Capacity Management

Understand the flow of your guests as they move throughout your park so you can effectively streamline your operations.  Capacity management software shows you, among other things, where park areas are congested, leading to guest disbursement opportunities.

Guest Satisfaction Surveys

Guests may be talking about you online, but wouldn’t it be better if they were speaking to you directly?  Implementing a guest satisfaction survey, such as the Guest Experience Score, can get the data needed to improve your operation and further build relationships with guests.

Since moving to the GX Score, some ROLLER customers have told us they reduced their number of negative reviews online by a whopping 20%. Additionally, our research found that GX Score surveys receive a 15-20% response rate, compared to the average survey tool, which only gets a 5% response rate.

Employee Satisfaction Surveys

Sure, your guests are satisfied, but how about your employees?  Get critical information from those living and breathing your brand daily by regularly implementing employee satisfaction surveys that tell you where improvements can be made in various work environments.

Reconciliation and reporting

While not a tangible aspect of venue management that guests would care much about, sound reconciliation and reporting systems will matter very much to you. Access to your guest and financial data is crucial to running your business and keeping a close eye on the current happenings and health of your business. So, ensure your venue management systems include robust reporting and reconciliation features that save you both time and stress.

Multiple venue management

If you run a business with multiple sites, management can be twice as complex. To ease the burden, you can use tools like our HQ feature, a centralized account in your existing ROLLER dashboard that allows you to maintain all your venues effortlessly from the one spot.

In HQ, you can make bulk updates to products, services, session times, inventory and stock, and more, and in just a few clicks, the changes replicate across all selected locations. When managing staff across multiple venues, HQ makes that more manageable, too. You can quickly and easily create staff accounts in the system, and from your dashboard, you can update staff permissions and control what your staff can and can’t see in the system.

In addition to assisting you in these ways, HQ helps you stay on top of brand consistency, saves you time, and eliminates the risk of manual errors in your processes.

Leverage technology to achieve more

The list may go on, but these core elements of your business will not only ensure that you survive but will help you thrive.  Implement these management solutions into your park so you can return to doing what you set out to do: create lifelong memories for your guests.

Reach out to us here for any venue management solutions that we can help you with.