Our TicketSignup team returned this week from an annual trip to the Halloween & Attractions Show in St. Louis, MO. This year, our booth was situated at the intersection of Halloween vendors, Christmas vendors, and Escape Room vendors. This gave us an opportunity to talk to a wide range of events and attractions. As always, the expo floor was full of gory costumes, cheery Christmas lights, and even dinosaurs!
Introducing MTE
This year, we were excited to be able to demo the beta release of our new patent-pending multi-day timed entry ticketing solution and discuss how it can make bookings easier for escape rooms, tours, and other business ventures that need long-term or perpetual ticketing. You can see our basic escape room demo below to see how seamless and intuitive the process is for booking a room and adding upsell items. Of course, specific customers will have different configurations for reserving rooms, adding attendees, and selling additional merchandise and experiences. This demo simply demonstrates the ease of the purchase flow.
Presenting Strategies for Marketing and Pricing Haunts
On Friday, Byan led a free seminar on strategic marketing and pricing for haunts that sparked some interesting ideas and conversation within the room. For this seminar, we took some of our data from the 2023 Haunt Season to better understand haunt traffic and standard pricing. Topics covered included:
- Ways to encourage earlier pricing to lock in attendees and increase their likelihood of bringing friends.
- Increasing per-ticket revenue with merchandise, side attractions, and ticket bundles.
- Incentivizing previous attendees to return the following year
- Remarketing to people who have shown an interest in your haunt.
Key Topics of Conversation
One of our favorite things about attending trade shows is the opportunity to talk to customers and other event organizations. We always walk away with new understandings of the challenges that events are focused on, and new ideas of how technology can provide solutions. A few takeaways from this year’s conversations:
- Increase the percentage of ticket sales that are online. Virtually everyone agreed that increasing the percentage of ticket sales that take place online is a priority. More advance knowledge of ticket sales helps with staffing decisions and prevents last minute “oops let’s go to a movie instead” decisions. Price breaks for advance sales, special promotional nights, and easy ticket management can help drive more sales online.
- Reduce (or eliminate) on-site credit card sales. Cash is king for on-site ticket sales. Increasingly, we heard events (and escape rooms) express a desire to reduce the number of on-site credit card sales. Our advice? Use QR code signage to encourage (or require) on-site purchasers to buy on their phones. This pushes credit card fees back to you attendees, and saves you money. You can see below how much paying credit card fees can cost your haunt (based on standard Square Pricing; 3 tickets per transaction).
- Automating sales tax saves headaches. Most haunts have to deal with sales tax, and with complicated rules around taxation, it can be stressful to calculate sales tax. Beyond that, many of them don’t know how to accurately charge their visitors for sales tax, so it ends up being another cost coming out of their limited event budget. TicketSignup automates sales tax collection and remittance for marketplace states to ensure it’s paid by your visitors, as intended.
- Easy on-site waivers are important. For many haunts, escape rooms, and other attractions, making sure every visitor (not just the ticket purchaser) signs a waiver is crucial. Paper forms can be a hassle to store (and find when needed) and lead to issues around legibility. We recommend waiver kiosk on-site to ensure you’ve captured a signature from every guest. Bonus: digital waivers can also help you build your email list.
See you next year (or sooner)?
We’re already looking ahead to next year’s Halloween and Attractions Show! However, if you’re looking for another opportunity to attend a haunt show in person this year, we also have two upcoming trade shows in August: Fear Expo LIVE (April 12-14) and East Coast Haunters (April 25-28). Email johanna@ticketsignup.io if you’re planning to attend either and want to stop by for a demo or conversation!