The Future of Escape Rooms - Roundtable Discussion // Takeaways
On the 30th January about 30 of us escape room owners came together in an online roundtable discussion to talk about what the future holds for our industry.
In the discussion we had people from all parts of the US, Canada, the UK and more. From the introductions it became evident that we all have our own unique perspective of the discussed topics [Marketing, Staffing and The Future of Escape Games] as we all come from differently sized markets. Participating owners had experience from operating a single venue to overseeing escape room companies with several venues.
Here are the key takeaways of the one and a half hour discussion.
Part I: The Future of Our Games
As a conversation starter I have brought up Mixed Reality (Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3) and how that will effect games of the future.
The group seemed to unanimously agree that this is something that will influence future games but we are still a few years away from seeing them properly implemented in games. There are a few however who are already experimenting with making something like this part of their game.
It seemed to be mutually agreed by all that a solid gameflow takes priorty over Hollywood level set designs. You still should invest in making your games immersive as much as your budget allows. You should also have a content schedule which is greatly dictated by the size of your market as shown on the chart below.
Another important takeaway was that you should be very much aware of your customer base. One owner for example mentioned that they have an ageing population so they make sure that their games are always accessible for an older crowd.
All in all the participants agreed that you don’t necessarily need flashy tech or groundbreaking set designs but you should be very much upfront about what they’ll find in the rooms. Someone even openly advertises a padlock heavy room and have seen great success from it. Read my blog here about why you need photos of your rooms.
Part II: Marketing
For the second section of the roundtable discussion I’ve kicked off the topic with some thoughts about how we will need to become more and more sophisticated with our marketing. The escape room market is stagnant at the moment, both the UK and the US market slowed down in terms of new venues opening, in fact there has been a slow decline in recent years.
Source: Escape the Review
I’ve also raised another “issue” that 90% of escape rooms are scoring over 4.5 stars on all major review sites. Most of them usually average around 4.7-4.9 stars. This is great for the customers and a testament to our dedication to the escape room industry but the problem we will be facing due to this is that customers will have a hard time telling venues apart. [I’ll be doing a talk at TransWorld in March about branding and how to stand out from the crowd.]
The group discussed different approaches to boost sales with marketing:
Rebooking discounts work well for many and they are especially useful if they are offered to people who are out of town only visiting for a short period of time.
Setting up pop up events in places that already have a footfall - for example a murder mystery in a hotel - can draw in a brand new crowd.
Donating to charities who then in exchange advertise us works well too for additional exposure. It also solidifies our position in the community.
Help schools with fundraisers. You teach a class of students on creating an escape room which then they can use for raising funds. Instead of asking for money in return you can ask for promotion during the event drawing in more families.
One particularly interesting approach to this was teaming up with a charity and doing a revenue share with them to raise money. The way it works:
You pick a day that usually has low occupancy rate.
The charity get to sell tickets for you and get a 50-60% revenue share
You get “free” promotion, new customers and your costs are cowered.
Lastly I have also polled the participants about the best renturn on investment on ad spend (ROAS) and the top channel was Google Ads, some people also marking influencers as a great option.
Part III: Staffing
In the third and final section of the roundtable I shared a research I’ve done recently in one the escape room groups about how many different jobs owners do in their escape rooms. (see below) The result was staggering as on average escape room owners take on 8 different roles in their businesses. These are roles that a lot of the time would require a full time employee.
The issue it seemed to be that most companies simply can’t afford to have full time employees and the owners are left with taking on all these roles themselves.
I’ve run a poll in the meeting about what percentage of your staff would consider their job as a career choice and most people responded with less than 10%. As the industry has been around for over a decade now and it seems it’s not going anywhere anytime soon we need to figure out ways to bring this number up.
One third of the attendees said that they have detailed documentation for their staff although this is crucial for the overall health of the business. A key advice here was that you should have at least your own job description, it will help you to delegate more.
There was a general consensus that the most important is attitude when it comes to hiring staff. Also hiring out of school gives you affordable labour and they have the potential to grow with the company.
Summary
In summary we can say that we have entered the mature stage of our market, thus we will need to treat our escape rooms more and more as a career choice and a business that needs to provide for the long term. Our games will have to keep evolving however a strong gameflow still compensates for the lack of Hollywood level set design. We will have to become more sophisticated in our marketing and start delegating within the business to secure our future growth.
It is quite clear at this point that the escape room market isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Now it’s down to us to make it work in the long run.
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