In a visitor attraction, revenue can leak any many different ways. Catching those holes to be plugged is a great job for data analytics, with a clear return on investment too. It’s called revenue assurance: monitoring various areas of the visitor attraction to ensure revenue is being accurately recorded and collected. 

As part of your data practice, revenue assurance should be a responsibility of the finance team with periodic checks. Here’s some common examples of where to look for leaks:

1.  Visitors entering without a ticket (including general admission and activities such as events or experiences), either unintentionally or by sneaking in for attractions with open entry ways. This can be monitored by comparing footfall to ticket across entry thresholds, looking for anomalies. 
2. Failure to scan tickets, where group or channel partners are invoiced based on the redeemed rather than scheduled ticket volume (or where funding is received based on this method) or alternatively, an over scan of tickets, where content partners invoice based off redemptions and may be overpaid. 
3. Legacy discounts still active in ticketing or ecommerce sites, including the potential for old discount codes to be inappropriately circulating online.
4. Staff discounts being overused for box office, onsite retail or food and beverage, especially if there are particular patterns evident. 
5. Members or season pass holders lending their passes to friend or family, or booking online tickets for others using their membership (sometimes hard to spot in data, but can be checked on procedures to make sure members are identity checked on entry).

A good data habit and a beady eye on the numbers will make sure your visitor attraction doesn’t miss out on its well earned revenue.