Oakvale Wildlife Park is a family-owned and operated animal park in Salt Ash, New South Wales, Australia. Founded in 1979, Oakvale has grown rapidly in terms of attendance and the size of the team but still keeps a small-family culture. Today, guests visiting Oakvale can enjoy seeing and learning about a wide variety of animals, splashing in the water park on a hot day, and taking in one of several shows and keeper talks so that they walk away educated and inspired.
When guests purchase tickets, they can select from a few different options, including single-day admission that is valid for one guest and an entire family. Memberships are also available, as are add-ons that can enhance the guest experience through intimate interactions with various animals, which also increase revenue. Guests can also purchase gift cards, book events, or redeem vouchers that guests purchase through Discover NSW.
Time savings
As Oakvale Wildlife Park has grown over the years, so have their needs from their point of sale partner. They quickly realized that with the growth of their business came new limitations in their previous point of sale provider, such as the ease of selling tickets online or changing the date of a booking once a guest made a purchase. They were prohibited from certain functions, but the service and support also made these issues even more challenging to manage.
“When someone has to change the date of their booking in ROLLER, we’ll all go, ‘Oh, that was so easy!’ I’m not slow on the computer, but that would honestly have taken me 15 minutes to change a date before.” Leanne Sansom, one of the owners of Oakvale Wildlife Park, shares a distinct comparison in the day-to-day functionality of ROLLER compared to systems used in the past.
All-in-one platform
Regarding the most impactful changes that ROLLER's wildlife park software has made to the business, Leanne stresses the importance of managing every business unit in one place without having to toggle back and forth between systems. Oakvale Wildlife Park sells tickets, memberships, food and beverage, souvenirs, and hosts events. It can be a sizeable administrative challenge to reconcile them all together when they aren’t all under the same roof. “If you want that one-stop-shop where all your reporting comes to one system, I would highly recommend it.”
Leanne also shares her confidence in continuing to partner with ROLLER as Oakvale continues to grow even further beyond where they are at today. “We’re not a small business anymore. We’re not a big enterprise, but we want to be prepared for that transition. We want a system that can be where we want to grow to, but also be simple enough for where we’re at now.”
