If you want go from gut feel to insight inspired, this is the Data Diaries with your hosts from Dexibit, Pierre Perez and Angie Judge. The best podcast for visitor attraction leaders passionate about data and AI. This episode is brought to you by Dexibit. We provide data analytics and AI software specifically for visitor attractions so you can reduce total time to insight and total cost of ownership while democratizing data and improving your team’s agility. Here comes the show!

Angie: Hey, Pierre How’s it going?

Pierre: We are good. How are you?

Angie: Good, good. Talking all about new build visitor attractions today. We had to hit the record button on this podcast in a hurry because we were so excited talking about this topic. We got half underway before we even started.

Pierre: I love that. It is a topic that we really like here at the Dexibit and. And we see more and more new venues popping up, right? And, and joining us, which is really exciting, and they all have a different story. So we, maybe we can talk a little bit about all the different stories that we’ve seen so far, the ups and downs, the challenges, the big wins, et cetera, et.

Angie: I mean, there’s some huge projects happening around the world and visitor attractions at the moment. The V&A in London, of course, opening the East Storehouse and the whole Maritime City project over there as well. Wales have got a new national museum on the way. In New York, there’s been like the Frick with their reopening new museum, doing a double of their gallery space and Studio Museum in Harlem.

And then around the US and the world, lots of new attractions opening up from nail Shima and Japan through to the Museum of Migration in the Netherlands. I mean, it is just we’re spoiled for choice at the moment with new openings.

Pierre: We are spoilt for choice. And I think that’s one of the first things that we’ll talk about, right, is how competitive a landscape can be. Who should you consider your competitors? What are. They doing, how much they’re charging, et cetera. So you can understand a little bit more about, you know, the landscape that you will evolve on once your attraction is open.

Angie: And we were, we were talking about just before we hit record about the two different types of, new visitor attraction teams as well. We tend to see two quite distinct passions is there is the new builds where they’re part of actually a larger parent organization who is, involved in a different activity.

Often they’re not in the business of running a visitor attraction. Maybe they’re a nonprofit, maybe they’re a commercial entity, and they’ve decided to get into the business of, opening a new visitor attraction. So they, they’ve got like this startup team within this really large corporate enterprise. And then there’s the other kind of pattern where you’ve got a pure, true startup where this is all and everything they do and they’re doing it for the first time and there’s no parent looking over the shoulder.

And they do truly have that, that nice startup culture amongst them. Two quite different teams.

Pierre: Yeah, absolutely. I think by nature one will be more rapid and agile than the other one. Right. But essentially very, very different way of, of treading. Also being part of a big corporation doesn’t necessarily mean a well oiled machine for a specific industry, as you mentioned. Right. If someone is not. From this industry they may have processes in place and these processes may or may not fit our specific industry. And unfortunately you have to be pragmatic and, and start to realize that. And it’s a game of how quickly you can realize what processes are fitting or not fitting that specific industry that we evolve in.

Angie: It’s almost a burden, isn’t it? If you’re part of a larger parent organization, but that parent organization doesn’t do what you do and you are trying to act like a startup and you need to act like a startup, but you are bound by. All the heavy burdens that they bring along with them. It’s a really hard space to be.

I think what we see is that typically before opening money and time, feel really abundant to those teams and, that sort of feeling and their culture starts to add in lots of layers and complexity and often slows them down and makes things more expensive for them. And then after opening their team’s ability to sort of survive the robustness of embracing failure of the series of learning opportunities towards a success that’s inevitable for any startup as it puts its offering out in the world.

It’s quite dampened in that corporate environment.

Pierre: And things take time, right? The more complex an organization is, the more layered. You’re gonna have and you’ve mentioned earlier that in some instances, these large organizations have like a specific team that will have full ownership of that project. But in some other instances, this specific team will have to report to another team that will then make decisions or go through you know, a change approval.

And that takes time. And you and I know that. In this industry you need to react very quickly on specific matters for you to be able to repair any mistakes or anything that is not performing as it should be to be able to um, you know, to make that right very quickly. And it’s, it’s really important, right, when you’re facing the public to make sure that you are fixing the small mistakes very quickly.

Angie: Yeah. Thank you. Like that, that point about agility. It’s so important for any attraction. To be able to respond to what they’re saying and take action fast. But for that new build, especially in those first few days and weeks, they need full autonomy if they don’t already have it.

Pierre: Absolutely. And, you know, it can be very simple very simple tasks such as are our opening hours, right. Are we maximizing our opening time based on visitor behaviors and, and what people are doing around the city, for example. And you know, you may find when we talk about large organizations, so we spoke about larger organizations that. Where visitor attraction is not the core business, but you may have a case or a few cases where elicit core business and they’re, you know, branching out to a new city, to a new country. You also need to understand the behaviors of people in that specific country, right. For things such as your opening time, right?

We know that we are very, very different. There are very different behaviors across the world when people are visiting at peak times. You know, when when people are coming and what days of the week they’re coming, et cetera, et cetera. So it’s, it’s really important to have that agility on that path, right?

You, you want to, you want to tailor that very quickly.

Angie: Yeah, you can. I think you can get sort of fooled into the trap of thinking that. A new build is the journey to opening and really the opening is the the start line, and it’s at that point you run your series of experiments to see whether your ideas and assumptions hold true and how the market responds and learn as you go.

And you’ve gotta be able to test out everything and then decide to pivot or persevere at that point and keep that agility. Come from a place where you assume that most of your ideas probably won’t work. And and start from there, whether that’s those ticket prices or those opening times or whatever the case might be, conversion rates and so forth.

And I think a lot of a lot of new build teams sort of assume that they’re leading up to a point of, of doneness and completeness and maybe it’ll be more a period of refinement rather than anticipating that it’ll be quite, quite some wholesale change in those early weeks and months.

Pierre: Yeah, 100%. And I, I think you’re right in term of. You know, assumption, right? That you, you do market research, right? You do your target demographic, visitor demon, you do your competitor analysis, et cetera, et cetera. You’re benchmarking whatever it is that you need to do. Obviously you’re gonna do a lot of homework, but you are still making a few assumptions, right? And, and before we start, I think uh, you know, I was mentioning something to you like as a person by default, I do like simple things, right? But I think in this case it’s also true is that it’s, it’s always easier to start simple and hit the, you know, hit the basics right and build up on these basics based on trends and insights that you see.

Once the attraction is open, then. Really doing a lot of you know, customization and offering different packages and different experience and, you know, different memberships from the get go. And then potentially hit the mark. And the reason why I’m saying that is it’s always gonna be quicker. To build the reputation up than to actually salvage a reputation that you may damage from the get go.

The world spreads quickly, right? If it’s good enough, people are gonna talk about it. If they did not have a good experience, they’re also gonna talk about it, and they are likely to be more vocal about that. And then again, it’s a matter of reacting to that, but it’s a lot harder to react to you know, either a neutral or negative first experience.

Anige: Yeah, that’s so true and, and we have this idea in startup land of the minimum viable product or the MVP, and I think that this kind of tracks into your idea of keeping things simple from the get go and then like developing what’s great. And this is this, this idea that when you’re testing something out in the market and it, it is hard to sort of brand a new builds attraction as a test because there’s so much investment going into it.

You want it to be right, but it is essentially that it’s something completely unproven full of assumptions known and unknown. But this MVP idea is that you sort of put across the, the smallest version, you know, the skateboard rather than the Maserati of your solution to what people want or your, your product of what people want.

And then you iterate on that to build on it. And I think like you say, whether it’s like the ticketing structure or the value proposition to the visitor, or even like the. The retail strategy, merchandising strategy, like just keep that super, super simple to get across the line and then add in the complexity and the layers and everything else later on once you can start to see what works and what doesn’t, because reducing that time until open day, reducing the cost investment until that point.

Means that you don’t get on the other side of that and go, oh, this doesn’t work. And then you’ve sort of sunk all of that time and and investment and, and complexity and, and building things that people don’t want.

Pierre: Yeah, it’s, it’s so true. I think pricing will play a big part of that, right? Like pricing it correctly from the get go. And this is where like, I mean, personally here, my take will be that. You will never upset someone if you price slightly lower than anything else in the market because what are you trained to do right now when you open is likely grabbing market share from someone else. And if you want to grab market share from someone else, yeah, you’re on the new kid on the block, it’s great. You are a new experience. But also if it’s priced attractively, you’re gonna attract people. The early people that are gonna come you know, come to your attraction, they’re likely gonna. they’re likely gonna rave about you, et cetera.

But if you price it attractively, you’re increasing that behavior, increasing that excitement or be like, whoa, it’s new attraction. It’s. Either a little bit cheaper than everything that’s around, or the same price, but I feel like sometimes people try to be a little bit too, how would we call it? Too hungry in term of the pricing and the pricing you know, fairly on the, on the high side because there’s a new attraction and it’s always easier to increase your price later on. And to actually advertise that your price have changed because your thought was, you know, because you bring your price down ’cause it was too expensive at the start. So my take will be that, right? You’re trying to grab market share and be competitive from the get go and then you can adjust instead of trying to go best case scenario into want to make X amount of money from the start. That would be my take on that.

Angie: Yeah, I have mixed feelings about pricing and pricing strategy. I think most visitor attractions. Under price themselves and they’ve got a bit more flexibility and elasticity in their price than they anticipate. And I do think without getting into the realm where you come in so hot and you’re pricing that you develop this perception in the market that you are expensive in that lives with you forever in a day is your reputation.

If you can be on the higher side. Relative to your competitors, but not out of the water. I don’t think that that would be a, a bad thing. I wouldn’t necessarily, if it were me fully undercut everyone as a entry point. And there’s kind of two ways to play that around opening. I think there’s sort of the price it and then discount it to say it’s like opening special.

Or make use of the sort of novelty and demand and limited capacity of opening to have that opening price and then maybe discount it later on as you, as you need to. But yeah, it’s such a tricky one and so market specific as well. On what, yeah, what the price points of your competitors are and how competitive that market is, and whether you are unique, whether you are novel, whether you are high value or not.

But yeah, definitely seen a couple of options where, new builds weren’t clear about the fact that they were gonna price and the public’s perception in their city thought that they were gonna be free and got hit with that PR message really late in the piece, that it was gonna be a paid experience.

And the other sort of mistake that I’ve seen is. Just like absurd pricing expectations that are just far, you know, double what’s on the market for what they are. And I think you gotta sort of translate that into some industry norms like. Cost per minute of visit and compare that to your attraction.

Particularly if you aren’t going to be somewhere that people are spending a long period of time, like, don’t then price yourself similar to experiences where they spend double the the time that they’re going to spend with you. There’s sort of a general tolerance of what people will, will pay per minute for something that might take them an hour to go through or something.

And and then also sort of thinking about that relative to the audience. Like is it child centric or adult centric, and how are you pricing? Who the experience is valuable for you know, if you are a child targeted experience and the adult ticket price is really expensive and that can then, hit hard as well.

Pierre: What, what’s your thought on, you know, when we talk pricing and, and ticket, what’s your what’s your thinking around, you know, partnering with. Like third party agents to, to sell tickets on your behalf or to offer tickets on, on your behalf from the get go, what do you think? I haven’t made up my mind on that yet for new attraction, but I’m keen to hear your thoughts.

Angie: Yeah, I think, I mean in terms of outsourcing overall. I’m a huge fan of doing it, especially for things like food and beverage because like opening an attraction is hard enough. Opening an attraction and a shop in a cafe, in a parking lot and everything else is like opening four or five businesses at once.

They’ve all got their own sort of rhythms and procedures and processes and staffing requirements, and it’s, it’s all complexity. So I think for the, to the degree that you can outsource some of that. And have some strict terms in your contract that you can review that at the end of year one or year two.

When you’re then ready to take on that complexity, it helps you reduce your sort of ready requirements and you can learn and lean on that operator and then sort of be informed by how they work rather than having to reinvent the wheel on some of those auxiliary lines. In terms of ticketing, I think that that sometimes is like dependent on what the visitors buying mechanisms are in the experience that you are, you are doing.

So for example, if I was opening a new tower top like viewing platform, a lot of those are quite highly sold by. You know, ticket resellers and, you know, the city passes and these sorts of things. So I would sort of sign up to that. A disclaimer on that being, of course you lose a little bit of commission and price point on the ticket, but of course, open up to a new market, which is really great to build in some of these layers.

It’s probably a helpful experiment to run anyhow, to see if it works for you or not, and just keep things um, again, agile around that assumption. But also like right now, I think this is gonna be a real moving area of the industry. With chat, GBT and the likes of generative ai. Maybe one day, one day soon.

That won’t be something that visitors do and they’re instead purchasing through that channel. So maybe especially make sure that you model out what that looks like for you if you lose some of your, you know, if you don’t plan on using like an OTA and then you end up selling tickets through chat GPT in six months time and and having to give them commission ’cause they’ve now got a monopoly on that visitor relationship. I think there’s quite a, a high risk for the industry overall, but especially for new builds.

Pierre: I mean, I’m with you on, you know, you made a couple of points here, but I’m, I’m 100% with you on. If there is something that you can outsource to make your life easier, do it like retail, F&B. If you find folks that it is their core business, right? You’re gonna have fine folks that are running cafes for digital attraction, and they only do that. And you’re gonna have folks that run retail and they only do that. You’re right. Get these folks in, learn from them, and then you can decide whether or not you wanna do it yourself and, and show that there is no strings attached. And then the second point is that.

It will be, I will have the same approach, sorry for any systems that are put in place. You know, in my new venue, my ticketing, my retail system, whatever I have, I’ll make sure that you know, I’m, I’m flexible on contract terms. I can get data in and out at will because if I want to change to a different system, I want to get my historical data out to either migrate or, you know. Keep that to a new system.

Angie: Amen. How many, how many attractions have we seen that have churned through their uh, source systems on point of sale in the first year? Sometimes more than once.

Pierre: exactly. And, and, and it does happen. So to be prepared for that. But what, and again, it comes back to that point. Do you know that MVP do the basics, right? You will make changes along the line. You need to be agile enough to make these changes along the line. But you need to be prepared. For these changes. And by doing all these sticks here, be like, okay, my, you know, my ticketing system, yeah, great. I can you know, have an open contract or I can change that after X and I can extract my data and this is how I’m gonna do it and my retail software, I can have an open contract and I can extract my data, et cetera, et cetera. So make sure . The systems that you put in place are flexible and agile, not just yourself. And then the you know, third point that you made around you know, third party partners about the competitiveness of, you know, the industry and how chat GPT will come into the mix. I’m thinking. From the get go. I think for me, I will go all the channel that I possibly can to create awareness at least. And then again, you can almost, you can refine that, right? So you can say, well, these guys are charging us too much commission. We’re gonna stop with these guys, but we’re gonna keep going with this box. And et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, you can make these changes, but create awareness first. It doesn’t really matter how much commission you’re paying at first, you can always review that. You can renegotiate, you can stop your contract and join someone else,

Angie: Yeah, that’s, I mean, you said channels are layers and, and nothing’s hosted to the truth there. That, you know, sort of building up, whether it’s the things that you start with or the things that you end up with. You essentially like layer channel upon channel upon channel.

Market upon market upon market. And that’s how you end up with your, your growth position is, is all of those things. There’s no real sort of silver bullets out there that are going to bring in. Everything from this one place. It’s about working out in your marketing strategy, how you can layer on education, relationships, and group tours and tourism and cruise ships, and all of these sorts of things to build up that, that demand while keeping yourself excellent at those basics, like offering a great visitor experience.

Offering superb visitor services, which is where I wouldn’t go ever go as far as outsourcing the actual ticketing operation at its core, like as some crowds do. And there’s some food and beverage and retail operating companies who go after that sort of business process. Outsource of trying to get hold of that admission as well.

And I think like that for me is a real core. You know, core capability that, that needs to be in-house for an attraction. And then of course, that relationship with the visitor to the extent that you can have one before, during, and after their visit. For them as a, as a customer or a guest or however you consider them.

That’s like your core value as a, as an organization as part of that. And again, you know, try not to give that away where you, where you can hang onto it. And that’s, that’s sort of the threat of gen ai right? Of. Essentially they’re taking over that relationship. Some of these sort of city portals are, are doing the same.

And you lose some of your, your value and your growth opportunity when you don’t have that direct. So to the extent that you can hang on to those things, I would. Speaking of visitors, Pierre, I think one of the big questions that comes up in the planning process is trying to work out how many visitors to expect.

This is a very controversial topic because what typically happens from what we’ve seen is however many years out from the bill that the fundraise happens, whether that’s private capital or banking friends, family and fools as they call it, or fundraise. Corporate investments. However that happens.

There is this study done at some point that, and that number is then used for that fundraise. So typically they’ll get in like some consultants to do this. I always think of real estate agents who specialize in attraction real estate are the best at this because for the most part, the location you choose.

State, city specifics in terms of within the neighborhood and street and the footfall of the, the area this is really hugely going to govern your visitation performance. So I always think that there are good opinion to, to refer to, but early on, often before that real estate is even chosen.

Despite the fact that it’s a, a necessity to know what that number is, this big number is chosen and it’s held up through the fundraising, and often the team won’t come back and revisit it if at all until quite close to the day. And as we’ve seen from some of the new builds that have opened over the last 10 years, that number is usually drastically wrong.

And it’s usually drastically overstated. So sort of working out how many visitors to expect is a, a really big thing of of that. It’s easier if you are in an organization where you’ve got other venues elsewhere, where you can sort of look at what’s typical for one of your locations, how your new location compares on some of that metadata.

Sort of look at your. Visitor origin market and sort of work out what your catchment is and how that compares to population and tourism numbers. But this is, this is a hard guess to, to take and it is a guess until we open and find out what that number is.

Pierre: Yeah, 100%. I mean, I’m with you on, you know, the real estate piece and, and you know, the folks that are close to to the real estate will know a little bit more on the expectations, but. But it is a massive guess. And, and you have to take so many variables in, in consideration. And also, right, we, we spoke about different attractions that may be around you you know, what numbers are they pulling, et cetera.

But you may have, you may be somewhere that nothing is comparable to yourself. Right? And, and the only other attractions are such that you can compare yourself to is anything that’s related to entertainment, right? Such as like cinemas. Malls you know, restaurants, et cetera, So it’s, it’s a very, very tough one to find out.

But, but my take is that right, is that when you open a new venue, when you are busy to attraction we are in the entertainment industry or maybe the cultural entertainment industry for you know, some specific places. But this is what you are you know. If we grossly put it competing against you, competing against any form of entertainment, any form of what we call in fresh passed on.

Right. Which is like how you spend your time, essentially during the time business. So how people are gonna spend their time. You’re competing against these other folks,

Angie: We need this word in English. What was it?

Pierre: which is, I, I don’t even, it is applicable here. You know, it’s. Passed on. Yeah. It’s, it’s how you, how do you spend your time, right? So how do you spend your free time, essentially? And there’s many, many, many ways you can spend free time. You could be staying at home watching Netflix, or you could be going to a museum. You know, it’s, there’s, there’s a few a few hundreds way to spend your free time.

Pierre: Yeah, I think one of the things I like to encourage new builds to do is to revisit that number at least once a year. You would be, I know that sounds ridiculous, but like there are some attractions out there that take five, 10 years to come to fruition. And they don’t revisit that visitation expectation figure until, you know, they reopen.

And it’s 10 years old and maybe the pandemic’s happened in the meanwhile and the market’s shifted quite significantly. So, I would suggest at least revisit it once a year during your lead up to opening, ideally more than that. Because you start to, you start to learn things as you go.

Maybe like you mentioned, a new movie theater is opened. Maybe the neighborhood is gentrified. Maybe the population’s grown, maybe the tourism market’s shrunk. Maybe you’re now in recession times where you weren’t before you were in an economic boom time. Maybe you’ve now got your. Building plans, and you can start to think about your square foot capacity and what that means for either fire safety or visitor happiness.

Maybe you’ve got your sort of, time ticket and receipt of visitor processes thought out, and you can start to think about what your numbers mean in terms of actual throughput. Of how are you gonna manage that capacity? Maybe you’ve got your designs for your experience and you can think about pinch points, like have you got an escalator or an elevator or something like that that’s going to, to hold up your capacity somewhere in your experience and become a real disruptor, which we’ve definitely seen a few times.

So keep revisiting that number all the time until the point where. We’re sort of in that last year towards reopening, particularly the last six months. And at that point we’ll take that number and start to compare it to. Neighbors, peers similar like venues and, and that’s where Dexabit can come in with our unified forecasting model and data from sector to start to provide you with some preliminary forecasts for opening using ai.

Where we can predict that visitation down to the day. And at that point we can start to use that for more granular financial planning and also all your operational planning and eventually scheduling to work out how many staff do we need at what time of year and what does that look like for our workforce on the front line and how does that translate into all of these assumptions that are going into our business model as well. So that’s something that we can do at that stage, but in the, in the lead up to that, definitely keep revisiting that all the time.

Angie: And we really open about that number, right? We, we need X amount of people. Yes. And, , how long do we give ourself until we reach that goal as well, right? Like, we want a million visitors. Yes. What in the first year? Or do we want a million visitor per year in the third year or in the fourth year? Like, let you know, be realistic and, give yourself enough time to reach. Target. Right. Otherwise it may feel a little bit depressing to, to have these high expectations from the get go. And we, we can’t really see Angie, but she’s smiling right now which she fully understand what I’m saying.

But, you know, as a as a side note you know, my, one of my mom’s friend went to the doctor, slightly overweight, and the doctor told her, you need to lose 10 kilos. She was depressed, and when she told me that, I was like, man, that doctor needs to get another job. Because he fully did not commit to a specific timeframe for her, right?

He did not come up with a plan. He just gave her a number and he gave her no context. Instead be like, well, if you can lose one in the first two weeks, that’s great. And then one in the third week that’s even better. And then you’re on track and, and you can lose your 10 kilos over six months. Right? But coming up with a number and no timeframe. Can be either a really big shock for a lot of people, but it can also also feel a little bit depressing for either folks in the frontline or folks tracking this number on, you know, daily, weekly, monthly basis and, and see that number getting further and further and further away from when they need to be throughout the year.

Pierre: Yeah. And speaking of of throughout the year I think as well making sure, not only are you simulating what those scenarios look like for good. Great and oh dear, in terms of the first year of opening, but also thinking about what do they look like across year two and year three? Because typically what happens is you have a huge amount of hype around your opening.

You’ve seen this before, right? Pierre Lake and numbers are great. They start to wane. You get this big boost when you come into Year Two’s anniversary. If you play your cards right, that starts to wane. And by year three you get a big drop off. And what’s happened at that point is that everybody who lives locally has visited once if they were going to, and at that point you’re shifting to a different pattern where you are looking for net new visitors, like people who have just had kids or something that have now in your target market and your tourism market, if you’ve got some catchment from that, and people who are now.

Into that mode of being a repeat visitor, if they’re going to be. And so it’s quite a distinct demand pattern and often it’s. Oh dear. We have to manage this capacity issue to, oh dear, we have to manage this growth and demand issue, which is a totally different mode of thinking. And at the same time, you go through normally this big churn of your staff at about that point as well.

So you, you have to cope with like all of the disruption and knowledge loss that happens around that because these people came to build something. They’ve done that big job. They’ve had that amazing career experience, that lifetime experience, and they go on to the next thing and take that with them. And that’s just a natural part.

And it’s, you know, there’s a lot of burnout and, and everything else involved in those builder teams too. And they’re two quite different skill sets and interests in life of people who build things and people who run things. So coping with that sort of year two, year three transition is really tough.

If you haven’t. Talked about it and planned for it and assumed it was gonna happen and, and just sort of thought, oh yeah, one’s gonna be how it’s always gonna be.

Pierre: Absolutely. Building and sustaining are two different two different things. Right. And they are, they usually involve different teams, different skill sets. And you mentioned something very important here, is that how to retain that knowledge from team A. So it can be fed into Team B you know, after a year or two years, right?

Like we spoke about systems a little bit earlier in that podcast. You know, it’s, it’s important to keep that knowledge somewhere as well because as you say, people move on. You don’t want. Their knowledge or you know, their knowledge should be trapped somewhere that you can access or that knowledge go with them. So you need to have system in place to capture that knowledge, store that knowledge for the next person so they can either ramp up quicker or identify what’s not working well or what’s not being, what’s being put in place that is not working well so they can change it.

Angie: Yeah, and that can be everything from, like, for example, on the data side making sure that your recognition rules and all your reporting and things is automated, that all of that data transformation is automated. Because if you’ve got, you know, the analyst who’s producing this stuff. Either manually or through their own pipelines, and then they leave and that knowledge goes with them.

You know, they’ve just walked out the door with your core reporting. Or it could be, you know, your visitor services manager, making sure that they record. All of those experiments in the Almanac, because what happens if they go and then you can’t forecast anymore because they’re the ones who knows in their head that a rainy day does this.

Or they’re the ones that have gone through and done that experiment to say, well, what happens if we open on Saturdays at this time? Rather than that, and, you know, you hire somebody new and they’ve got a, you know. We learn that often by doing from scratch. So, being able to make sure that all of these sorts of things are captured, that they’re systematic rather than, like, knowledge held in people’s heads is super, super important for new build teams because of this churn employee churn problem, which is, is just inevitable as, as much as we would like it not to be.

Pierre: Yeah, What I wanted to also mention is, you know, we spoke about USP core offense, a unique selling proposition that, that, that your venue come with. That can also change over time, right? As you tailor your offering, as you tailor your experience, you may, you may offer something different, you may offer something new play on that card.

Right? We are we’re lucky enough right now to have access to feedback from your visitors. Right there, right now. Like you go on TikTok, you go on Facebook, you go on Google, you have access to all that feedback people give you, take that feedback, tell us us feedback based on that feedback, right? Again, that agile point, but it’s really important not to sell anything in stone.

You can have a new venue opening around the corner. You can have a change in the public transport that will affect your venue. So how are. You know, based on, on, on this information and what are you gonna do about it to, to make sure you stay relevant.

Angie: Yeah. So, thinking about that data piece um, sort of the lead up to operation, I mean, for if you’re out there and you’re building a new visit. Attraction we’d love to talk to you and you’re welcome to talk to us as soon or as late as you like. We’ve talked to teams who are building your attractions where it’s just an idea and, you know, we always love hearing about what’s coming up and although we probably won’t be a piece to play until a bit later down the pathway, once the funding’s done and the site’s chosen and the designs are drawn up you’re more than welcome to reach out to us to see how we can help between now and then.

Likewise at the other end of the scale. You know, we’ve had visitor attractions rock up and, and we’ve said, when do you open? And the answer has been an X number of days. And we’ve got there. It’s been a push, but we’ve got there. And then also of course, the ones that have actually already opened and they, and that sort of very chaotic year one and worked out that, oh dear, these this sort of way of operating isn’t gonna serve us.

And, and we can’t do this, that, and the next thing. And we’re wasting all this time doing this reporting. And the data’s not getting up fast enough to make moves. We don’t know what’s going on. We haven’t worked out where our markets are. We’ve either got a capacity issue or a demand problem. So, definitely we can respond to the urgency of that need as well.

But in an ideal world, it’s best to start talking twice, roundabout, sort of a year out from opening and try and sort of make a commitment by about nine months out from opening if you can. And that gives us a nice runway towards opening. We like to, we usually say give us 90 days to, to go through sort of onboarding motions in a new build.

It’s better to have double the time if you can, because often the questions we’re asking are not things that you can answer straight away because you’ve got to invent the wheel. So we say, how do you wanna recognize the revenue on your tickets? And that prompts a discussion with your team rather than just a quick.

Bang answer. Here we go. And also you’ve got a lot of our other stuff going on apart from data. And we ideally like to be out of there by three months in the lead up to opening because if you’re still you know, designing reports and things two weeks out from when you’re opening you know, your team will probably want to be doing some other more important things getting the actual physical space and, and the teams prepped, ready for doors open.

That would be my suggestion is sort of start thinking about that a year out. And also we can start to make some very important suggestions in terms of other systems that you’re selecting or being or implementing. Like making sure they’ve got decent APIs so you don’t end up being one of those ones that has to swap out the POS system in year one.

And then again in year two. Or making sure that you’ve got your electrical wiring in for your footfall cameras and you’ve thought about with us where those are gonna go rather than being an afterthought ’cause they’re more expensive to put in aftermarket after your build’s complete. So, all of these sorts of things we can address with the right timeframes.

Of course, we’ll, we’ll work with what we’ve got as fast or as slow as that, that might happen. But yeah, that, that would be our ideal. What have you seen sort of Pierre, as that sort of sweet spot in your timeframes?

Pierre: That’s a great question. I’m not sure. I mean, yes, it is nice to have time. It is nice to have time because with time you can then give extra recommendations, maybe point out to a specific route if you think the route that was chosen is not the right one. So I’ll say definitely in month rather than weeks and days is ideal because you have time to adjust. So that. You know, you, I think you mentioned that like 90 days that’s like sort of perfect timing, right? You can still have run a few herons, you have a little bit of time in front of you to adjust if you need to adjust, et cetera, et cetera. So I, I agree with you on that.

Angie: Have you ever seen the new build open on time?

Pierre: Have I, I don’t, I don’t know. Not that I can recall. Not that I can recall. Not the ones that I, I can recall. No, but it is part of the game. Right. And I think it’s tied to what we were saying earlier is that there’s so much that outside of your control, and it is, it is what it is.

Angie: Yeah. And probably another reason for the ‘m’ in MVP like keep things minimal and it’ll help you get to that that opening date and that opening budget easier and just to look to add those things on later if you can.

Pierre: 100%.

Angie: Well, one last note to those of you out there that are building these brand new attractions thank you. Like, I think it is just the, the coolest thing to do for the world to. Gifted a new attraction, and there’s just so much blood, sweat, and tears as that goes into these new attractions as they come to life.

I think it’s an incredibly special thing to do as a team, to be involved in, in your career. And it’s such a cool thing to think that it will be here for generations to come in the future. I just think that’s, that’s so special. So, to everyone out there who’s busy building, thank you and thanks Pierre.

Pierre: Thank you.

If your goal is to get more visitors through the door, engaging and spending more, leaving happy and loyally returning – check out Dexibit’s data analytics and AI software at dexibit.com. We work with visitor attractions, cultural and commercial, integrating with over a hundred industry source systems across visitor experience and venue operations, providing dashboards, reports, insights, forecasts, data management and a unique data concierge.

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