18 months+ of COVID-19 have changed the way guests view their experience. Meanwhile, 2021 may have benefitted from a year’s worth of pent-up demand, 2022 and beyond may find guests yawning at a venue’s efforts that used to work in the past. Developing and maintaining a creative, innovative, thoughtful, consistent, etc.. experience will be essential to Acquisition and Retention of the Guests of years’ past.
There is no shortage of written articles offering opinion, my hope is that peers will read this and take note of an objective observation of what I witness when visiting parks as I have in my past 40+ years of life, how it has been affected since April 2020, and what I see going to the future. From where I sit, a positive Guest Experience rests on our ability, as an industry, to objectively grade efforts in these disciplines:
- Overall Attention to detail [all touchpoints]
- Complete Team Alignment
- Do you know your Guest? Do you know who you are?
- Are the Experiences you have Memorable?
- Is your Experience holistic with an Eye to the future?
- Don’t discount the “undercard”
- Capture Guest Feedback in Real Time
- Stay in Character
- Efficiency is key
- Over and above…
There’s probably 100 others- but these are mine. Over the next few days I’ll take a brief dive into one or two each day.
Let me set up my scenario: a mild-mannered husband and father of two is loading up the family to embark on a trip to a park- can be any park. The following article series will detail points of detail a guest may experience and note while there. I will do my best to only focus on those things that are within reasonable ability of a park to change: road construction and delays affect the overall experience but aren’t necessarily within a park’s ability to manage. Usually.
