Podcasts about chessington world

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 1, 2023 29:58

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is Kelly Molson, Founder of Rubber Cheese.Download the Rubber Cheese 2023 Visitor Attraction Website Report - the annual benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. Show references: https://carbonsix.digital/https://www.linkedin.com/in/pmarden/Paul Marden is the Founder and Managing Director of Carbon Six Digital and the CEO of Rubber Cheese. He is an Umbraco Certified Master who likes to think outside the box, often coming up with creative technical solutions that clients didn't know were possible. Paul oversees business development and technical delivery, specialising in Microsoft technologies including Umbraco CMS, ASP.NET, C#, WebApi, and SQL Server. He's worked in the industry since 1999 and has vast experience of managing and delivering the technical architecture for both agencies and client side projects of all shapes and sizes. Paul is an advocate for solid project delivery and has a BCS Foundation Certificate in Agile. https://www.rubbercheese.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellymolson/Kelly Molson is the Founder of Rubber Cheese, a user focused web design and development agency for the attraction sector. Digital partners to Eureka! The National Children's Museum, Pensthorpe, National Parks UK, Holkham, Visit Cambridge and The National Marine Aquarium.Kelly regularly delivers workshops and presentations on sector focused topics at national conferences and attraction sector organisations including ASVA, ALVA, The Ticketing Professionals Conference and the Museum + Heritage Show.As host of the popular Skip the Queue Podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions, she speaks with inspiring industry experts who share their knowledge of what really makes an attraction successful.Recent trustee of The Museum of the Broads. Transcription: Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Kelly Molson. In this new monthly slot, Rubber Cheese CEO Paul Marden joins me to discuss different digital related topics. In this episode, we're talking about mobile optimisation, why it's important and what you can do to improve it. If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue. Kelly Molson: Hello, we're back. Everyone will be sick of us by this episode. Paul Marden: I give it a couple more. We've got some interesting stuff to talk about hopefully, hopefully.Kelly Molson: We have. Okay, so let's start as we usually do then, with what attraction have you visited most recently and what did you love about it? Paul Marden: Well, there's one that you and I both visited recently, and there was something I really didn't love about it. We went on what was it called? Was it Mandrake Mayhem? It's the new Jumanji ride. Chessington World of Adventures. Kelly Molson: Mandrill. Paul Marden: There we go. If you are a roller coaster nut, would be amazing. But yeah, within 2 seconds of the ride starting, I realised it was not the ride for me. Kelly Molson: I like roller coasters. Yeah. So we sponsored one of the awards at the UK Theme Park Awards. And it was brilliant. It's fantastic. Paul Marden: It was such a great event. Kelly Molson: Really good event, brilliantly organised. It was absolutely brilliant to see so many attraction friends there. And it was at Chessington World of Adventures, which was super cool. I also want to talk about Chessington because I had forgotten how good it is. So I haven't been to Chessington since I was really small, and I think I'm pretty sure I only visited once or twice because we actually lived closer to Thorpe Park and were like in the Thorpe Park Rangers camp. But what I'd forgotten about Chessington was the animals. Yeah, I was really lucky. I drove down the night before of the awards and got to stay at the hotel that night. I didn't get to stay in any of themed rooms because budget did not allow for that. Kelly Molson: However, what I'd forgotten was that when you're having breakfast, the animals are literally right outside where you're eating. And I'd forgotten about it to the extent that I went up to the buffet to go and get my lovely, delicious English breakfast, which I was really looking forward to. And I could see people looking out the window and I was like, "Oh, what are you looking at?" And they went, "Giraffes? Yeah. Wow." Actually took my breath away a little bit. It was a really great experience. It's not often that you get to eat your breakfast whilst looking at giraffes and zebras as well that were out there. So, yeah, that was really great. And I really enjoyed the roller coaster. Despite someone's screams in my ear.Paul Marden: I heard this screaming noise all the way around and about three quarters of the way around I realised it was me. Kelly Molson: There was quite a bit of a screaming, to be fair. Paul Marden: I watched it back. I found a video on YouTube to show Millie, my daughter, and I was like, "Oh, my God, it's horrific. You get to the end and you're just dangling on the side for about a minute and then it changes direction.” And we watched it on YouTube, it barely stops at the top of the ride. It gets up to the top, gets to a hole and then drops back down again. Now, to me, in my memory, that was a solid minute. We were hanging over the side of the hole.Kelly Molson: It was just a minute. Paul Marden: Anyway, I did enjoy it. Kelly Molson: Yeah, big thumbs up to Chessington. It was a really great experience. So, thank you. A big thumbs up to the UK Theme Park Awards organisers as well. It was a great event. We'll be back next year.Paul Marden: For sure. Kelly Molson: Right, we're going to talk about mobile optimisation in this episode. We're going to talk about why it's important and what you can do to improve it. And we've got some really interesting stats to share from the Visitor Attraction Website Report about this. But did you know optimisation is no longer a nice to have? It's a necessity, because Statista forecasts that retail sales from mobile commerce are expected to surpass that 100 billion mark by 2000 and 2400. Paul Marden: Crazy, isn't that? Kelly Molson: I started my career in digital, in ecommerce as well, which is crazy. So it just feels really I know, back in the day, so I always say it was my last proper job before I founded Rubber Cheese, which then has been like, what, nearly 21 years. So it was the last proper job that I had before I set that up was for a really early startup, almost like Shopify, but back then. So this is like 23 years ago. Paul Marden: We've got employees younger than that.Kelly Molson: Let's look at it. But it enabled sellers to go and build their own shop. It was called iShop. It was an absolutely incredible platform of its time. And back then, I just about had an email address, let alone did everything, could pretty much run my entire organisation on my mobile phone now. It just blows my mind how much things have moved on. Paul Marden: It's crazy, isn't it?Kelly Molson: Anyway, I digress. So our Visitor Attraction Website Report shows that attractions understand the importance of mobile optimisation for their websites, but there's really huge areas that could be improved. This, for me is the most shocking stat from the entire report. It's blown my mind slightly. 96% of the respondents stated that they had never conducted any user testing for their mobile sites. So that's nearly all of the 188 attractions that took part said that they've never done any user testing on their mobile, which I just don't understand. I've been banging on about testing on your mobile, testing your mobile site for every talk that I've given for the past two years. Paul Marden: Well, that's having a big effect, isn't it, mate? Kelly Molson: Isn't it? Maybe I should talk louder. Yeah, I'm really gobsmacked at it. What was really interesting, though, about it, I mean, it's a shocking stat in itself, but what we did this year with the report is that we asked attractions to kind of self-score their website. So we asked them what they felt their design scored in terms of design, so they could give it a one to ten score. So we asked them to do the same about different areas of their site, and one was mobile optimisation. So 31% gave their site a score of nine out of ten for it, and 24% gave their site an eight out of ten. Paul Marden: They think it's pretty good. Kelly Molson: Yes, and this is the problem. So they think it's good. That indicates that those scores are based on internal assumptions, not potentially not tangible user centred data, because they haven't asked the people to test that their mobile sites are a nine out of ten or an eight out of ten. So I just thought that was really interesting, that a lot of your judgement can be based on your assumptions rather than actually asking the people that are using it. So yeah, I think that's really important that people do that. Paul Marden: I was looking at some stuff that was related to this, but not the same area of the stats that you were looking at there. So I looked at how many of the group actually did any user testing on their site. Okay. And obviously that's a really in comparison to other stats where there's a big wide disparity between different sorts of people. The vast bulk of people reported that they weren't doing any user testing, but the ones that did, all sat in the top range of conversion rate. I'm not saying that one causes the other, but there is a strong relationship between the group of people that are user testing their sites. And all of that group of people also had a conversion rate right in the top of our data set, and that ranged in size as well. Paul Marden: So we're not just talking about the big brands that are doing this. And when you looked at that set of data, there was a big brand in there. Everybody would know it. There was quite a few big brands that weren't in there. So for me, they were conspicuous by their absence because I'd seen them elsewhere in the data set that had been reported. But there was a small brand in there as well, a small organisation. I'd not heard of them before. They had between 5 to 10,000 transactions a year, which in comparison to the people at the top end of the scale, that's at least an order of magnitude smaller organisation. But they were reporting that they were doing user testing and they had a conversion rate right up there in the top end of our data set. Paul Marden: Even more surprisingly, of those that have done user testing specifically on mobile was a very small percent. And this bit you will be pleased about because some people are listening to you, that consisted of a very high proportion of Rubber Cheese clients were in that set of people who were doing user testing specifically on their mobile experience.Kelly Molson: Yay. Yay, Rubber Cheese clients!Paul Marden: Somebody is listening to you. Kelly Molson: High five to all of you lovely people. Yes. So it's interesting, isn't it? Because user testing for me, so we talk a lot about marginal gains at Rubber Cheese, about trying to make something that 1% better, 1% better, 1% better. And the only way you can actually do that is by doing user testing because you just don't know what to make better. You don't know where people are finding those barriers, you don't know where people are maybe confused about something or being blocked by something as well. For me, it's the number one thing to do if you want to start making those tiny adjustments that will start to then have those incremental and larger effects later on down the line. Paul Marden: I think it's so difficult to put yourself into the head of that person that knows nothing. We all come to the party if we run the testing, whether it's us at the attraction or us as the agency. We come to the party with lots and lots of knowledge that the average person that comes to the site and just doesn't have. And it's really hard to put yourself into that position and the solution to that is getting them to do the testing for you. Kelly Molson: Yeah. And when it comes to testing, I think I kind of split it into two. Because for mean I've said this before, but most of my browsing or purchasing is done in a very short window of time in front of the telly when I'm supposed to be watching something that Lee and I have decided that is the one thing that we can watch with the hour of telly time that we get together each day. But actually I'll be trying to watch that whilst also doing ten other things on my phone and I'll split it into browsing and purchasing and most of that happens between about 9:00 and 10:00 for me at night and it will always be on my phone. Do not make me go, I'm not going to go back into my office and crack open my laptop at that time. Kelly Molson: So everything has to be on my phone. I'm really time poor, clearly. So page load speed for me is really important. If I'm trying to find something, I need to find it quickly. I want to read something that's engaging, but not at the expense of not being able to load that page that I want to read. So things like compressing your images is really important. This is a difficult one when it comes to video is that I love video. I think there is nothing more engaging than video on your website, especially if you're a visit attraction to sell that experience. But lose the video on mobile or reduce it, reduce it, reduce it down because that's going to wipe out a load of bandwidth speed and it's going to make your page loads really small. Paul Marden: I've got beef about it in terms of it's autoplay video. It's not an environmentally sustainable thing to do. We don't often think about the environmental impact of websites but it's right up there in terms of industry generating CO2 emissions and it's not the main cause of it, but it's one area where this is prevalent is in the use of autoplay video on homepage. The website. People go to the site, the video plays whether they want to watch the video or not and that is just burning through bandwidth which is ultimately generating CO2. So I'm not anti video. I think video is an amazing thing and as you say, it can really engage you. I sat this morning talking about engaging video to try and get people to want to love the attraction to a client. So I'm totally for it. Paul Marden: But it should be something that user opt into, not something that autoplays for them. Kelly Molson: Yeah, I agree. And content as well. So we know that people read content online differently than they do in a book or a magazine or a newspaper for example, but actually they read it differently than they do on desktop to mobile too. So you actually need to think about if a certain article you have or a blog or event or whatever it may be, is going to sit in the demographic of people like me who is a 45 year old woman with toddler has 1 hour in front of the telly a day to do all of her purchashing and scrolling and anything else she needs to do on her phone. Paul Marden: Superheroes you make. Kelly Molson: Where is my cape? That content really needs to appeal to them and it needs to be in the shortest form possible because I don't have the time to read all of the engaging content. I just don't. So you need to kind of think about, is your content formatted differently when it's from desktop to mobile as well? And then when it comes to purchasing this one's, a little bit trickier for attractions, I think, and there's lots of different reasons for it. We're probably going to talk a little bit longer about this one, but the number one thing that we're always asked to review on attraction websites is that booking journey. And the thing is, we can only do the review of it if that booking journey is owned by the attraction. Kelly Molson: What I mean is if it's been designed and you are integrating with your booking system via API, so your agency or your internal team have designed that journey up to the point of you know, the tickets in the basket and gone. If you're using a third party system, an off the shelf ticketing platform that isn't integrated via API, there's not a lot that we can do about of once a guest is into the purchasing journey, they're with that system. The things that you can think about if you are going to go down the design and at your own route, you need to think about big buttons, you need to think about less clutter. I want arrows, don't make me type stuff into small form, free form boxes on mobile. You just need to be able to select things really quickly and clearly. Kelly Molson: So you want to kind of just strip out all of the noise and just get people to focus on the one thing that you want them to do, which is go through that journey and buy that ticket. What was interesting in the stats that came out of the report is that 75% of the respondents to it still expect customers to complete more than five steps to purchase, which hasn't changed from last year, that's similar to last year. And again, the reasons you might not be able to control that, you might be unable to control that because of the system that you use. So this is a really challenging one, but if you can reduce it, you can actually make some quite significant financial gains. So you looked at the impact of bookings on conversion rate, which is quite significant. Paul Marden: I got really excited working this number out. I reckon these numbers are conservative as well because these are on the basis of ticket prices and lost ticket sales. For me, I think this number could be higher for most attractions because the value of somebody coming to an attraction is bigger than just their ticket price. We talked about this the other day when were chatting. When you go there's, the meal that you eat, there's the gifts that you buy when you leave. So the total cost of somebody arriving at the attraction is probably higher than I'm estimating here. But using some stats on what the fall off rate is in ecommerce transactions, we've worked out that each step that you add to your checkout flow, it costs. Paul Marden: For our average attraction in our data set that we reckon it costs about 8000 pounds a year in lost sales. And for our top performing attractions it could be worth in the range of a quarter of a million pound a year in lost sales for each step that is included in their checkout flow. You think if you're in one of those top performing attractions with five steps, a quarter of a million pound in lost sales just in year one, that's a lot of developer time that you could buy to simplify your checkout workflow, isn't it? The return on investment for that, for a big organisation of simplifying your checkout workflow I think could be huge. Kelly Molson: Yeah, it could. There's so many other factors to think about. We have clients that have API integrations, we have clients that use off the shelf booking systems. In one way, I've always been really in the corner of designing and owning your own booking journey, but you have to be realistic about what that puts on the organisation as well, and what size your organisation is, whether you have the internal team to be able to manage that, the infrastructure to be able to manage that as well. Paul Marden: There's a total cost of ownership issue, isn't there, that is beyond just the buying price of the website in the first place. You've got to be able to maintain the thing going forward, haven't you, and that's pricy. Kelly Molson: Yeah, absolutely. But I think if you are thinking about your booking systems at the moment, then having the conversations with the providers about what their mobile journeys look like, ask to get them to demo it on mobile so you can see it for yourself. And ask them what the roadmap is in terms of mobile optimisation for the booking journeys as well. So just go into these conversations with those thoughts in mind so that you can get an understanding of what that looks like. And if their purchasing journey is six steps at the minute, ask them what are your plans to reduce that to five steps and how could we work with you to make that happen? That could start to take those conversations in some really positive ways. Paul Marden: Honestly, this stat, I'm going to sound like such a nerd, but this stat has stuck in my head ever since we worked this one out. And I can't get out of my head what the impact is of the lost opportunity, the lost sales that are happening because of these steps. And I've been thinking, what is the absolute barest minimum? Because lots of attractions, when they're going through their buying journey, I'm thinking, what on earth do you need to ask me? This is a rhetorical question, by the way. I know the complexity that is going into a lot of these things, I do understand it, but why is it that you actually need to ask me to take these five steps to get through, to get me to actually part with my money? Paul Marden: And I've been thinking about, for me, what is the absolute barest minimum you could get away with asking? Well, there's no way that you can affect a payment card transaction without knowing the card details. So you've got to ask the card number, the postcode, the CDC number and the surname of the person holding the card. So you have to have those. And if we can't give the ticket to somebody, we've got to have a mechanism getting the ticket to them, so we need their email address. Those five things are the absolute barest things I could get away with. But of course, that would only sell you, could only sell an undated, untimed ticket with that. Paul Marden: And I've been thinking about this back in COVID, so COVID and lockdown, and then the gradual release of lockdown was what introduced for many attractions, timed and dated tickets, wasn't it? And that was a complete transformation because we had limited capacity, we needed to make sure that we didn't oversell that capacity and create a problem at the gate. But is it necessary now? I completely understand that there's lots of benefit to the attraction, to guest services and people like that, of knowing exactly how many people are coming into the attraction and being able to metre that. But I wonder what impact having timed tickets and dated tickets is having on the number of people that give up buying because there's just too many steps in the process. "I can't be bothered with this. I'm going to not do it."Kelly Molson: This is quite controversial.Paul Marden: Isn't it? Completely. And I'm thinking back to that podcast episode that you did with Roman Baths where you were talking about variable pricing and dynamic pricing and of course you can only do those things if you have dated and timed tickets. So if nothing else, there is a creative tension there, isn't there, between if I ask the absolute barest minimum, I will sell more tickets, versus if I date and time my tickets and I could be really flexible about my pricing. Everybody wants lots and lots of information because who wouldn't want all the information you could possibly get about your customers versus the more I ask, the less people will buy. Harsh, isn't it? Kelly Molson: Yeah. I'm in the camp of pre booking as well, so this is uncomfortable for me. I'm in the camp of pre booking and I don't mind time ticketing either. I think there is absolutely a place for it and I think for organisations, for attractions, it just makes their life so much simpler. Paul Marden: Completely agreed with you. But I guess there's this at one end of the scale, you've got the absolute barest minimum that you could ask that will get more people, take their money, take money off of people and get them through the checkout flow as fast as you possibly can. Versus if there's two ends to this spectrum and both make us both feel uncomfortable, Where's the middle ground? Do you need to know where my address is? You don't need my address to be able to sell me a ticket. You need to know my postcode so you can do the credit card transaction, but you don't need my whole address to do that. So maybe that's where the compromise sits. That doesn't make either of us feel uncomfortable. Kelly Molson: Maybe. I always think there's a way to get more data out of people at a later stage as well, if you really want it. And maybe that's something that we need to look at in a different episode, is that you don't have to ask for all of these things at the point of purchase, but you can ask for more stuff afterwards as well if you're really engaging with that audience. Paul Marden: There's also one more thing just on that point, there were tools that could simplify this as well. Because if you have a clever use of Apple Pay or Google Pay, both of those checkout flows, people have all of their personal information plugged into Apple Pay, so you don't need to ask me anything about me. If you have a clever checkout flow with Apple Pay, then you could take my money and then get my personal information from Apple rather than make me having to type it all in. How much easier does that make the process?Kelly Molson: When I posted about this on LinkedIn, it must have been a couple of months ago now, and I asked people what their biggest frustrations was with booking journeys. They said lack of Apple Pay. They said it's a necessity for people. They don't want to think about their details. They don't know their card details. They haven't gotten again, they're sitting on the sofa like I am, their cards are upstairs. They're not going to get off their bums and go and get their cards. That was the number one thing that kept coming up over and over again. And then the second one was around clear and consistent pricing so that they don't feel like they're being ripped off as the deeper they get into that journey. So that's two really interesting things to think about there. Kelly Molson: On these episodes, we often highlight people that are doing it. Well, we've decided not to do it in this episode. And there's a couple of reasons for that, is that it's really hard to compare between people that have an API integrated designed booking journey and people that are using off the shelf systems. And there will be very specific reasons for why they have chosen to go down either of those routes. And you can't compare them because the reasons are uncomparable, I feel. So we've decided just to take that step out for today, but we are going to talk about what next steps that you can take. So I think the first one is going back to what you've just referenced is thinking about what information you actually really need from the customer. Paul Marden: Yeah, if you ask less, you'll need less steps. The less steps, the more people will make it through the checkout site. Kelly Molson: So what can you remove and maybe what could you add in later in addition to that. Paul Marden: Completely. Kelly Molson: And then test on mobile. Test again. Didn't I end last episode with saying just test, test on mobile regularly, but go through the entire process from start to finish.Paul Marden: And then the fix the stuff that doesn't work. So I had an interesting conversation when were at Theme Park Awards with another podcast alumni. We were chatting about prepping for the report and where were going and what were doing and all that kind of thing. And he told me a story about a site, fairly large attraction, where when you try and check out the only way if you're doing it on mobile, you can't select the number of tickets when you hold your mobile up. Now, the attraction has tested, they know it because they've written a message at the top of the page and it says to be able to book your tickets, rotate your phone to the side and then you get the ability to be able to choose your numbers. Paul Marden: So great, they're doing some testing, but how many people don't bother reading that message, how many people are stymied by the idea that, "Oh, well, I can't choose the number of tickets?" Not only have you got to test it, you got to fix the stuff that doesn't work as well. Kelly Molson: Yeah, gosh, how frustrating is that? And is that the system that they're using? So they've got no control over it. And if that is the system that they're using, then they didn't get them to demo it on mobile, did they, when they purchased it? Paul Marden: I think it's a combination of the two. I think there was something very special about the ticket descriptions of that attraction. That meant that they wrote quite a lot in the descriptions and when you wrote quite a lot in the ticket description, it just overflows off the side of your mobile, unless you've got a massive tablet. Or you rotate it on the side. Kelly Molson: Yeah, it's not great. Asking them to do something that they're not expecting to have to do is challenging, isn't it, asking all your users to think, well, they don't want to think either. They don't want to think at that point. They just want to do the doing. Okay, what kind of budget are we looking at for some of these things? It's really difficult to say.Paul Marden: Yeah, as you've just said, or to remove steps out of the checkout flow. It could be impossible for many people, because if they have an off the shelf ticketing system that they call out to that they don't have control over, then they might not be able to do anything about that. I mean, don't get me wrong, there's lots of things with those off the shelf ticketing solutions. Many of them are very flexible about the steps that you take through the checkout flow. So it can be very highly configurable and it could be in their control to just take it out without any need for developers doing things. It could just be a case of how do they use their third party ticketing system and changing that slightly. Paul Marden: So it could be possible, or it could be something very practical that they could do themselves. Kelly Molson: It's worth saying that we as an organisation have lots of conversations with lots of the ticketing providers and they are very aware of improvements that can be made or would like to be made to this. Kelly Molson: So I think that there's definitely a movement in the ticketing world of acknowledging that this is challenge and knowing that they can do something about it. And I know that there are a few that have got kind of plans to make change in this area as well. So that's great to see.Paul Marden: It's a really competitive space, isn't it? So it's interesting to see how that's going to play out. Kelly Molson: Yeah, very much so. Okay, well, look, listeners, this is us for another month. What we'd really like, though, is to understand what you'd like to hear from us. So we've got loads more topics that we can talk about from the report. We have got loads of things that come up on day to day basis, things that we work on that we can talk about. But if there's anything that you would like us to discuss, any questions that you'd like to ask us, we can happily make those into a podcast episode. So send me an email. It's kelly@rubbercheese.com. Just let me know what you're having challenges with. Yeah, any questions that you just would like us to cover as a topic and we can make that happen. Paul Marden: Awesome. I'd love to. I'm enjoying it. Kelly Molson: Me too. It's lovely to have a fellow guest. Fellow host.Paul Marden: I just got downgraded then. Kelly Molson: Who's the real host? Me, of course. It's lovely to be joined by a second host. Thank you, Paul. See you next month. Paul Marden: Bye. Bye. Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip The Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip the queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast.

ScareTrack- Chessington Howl'O'ween / On-location Review Episode 2023

ScareTrack

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 28, 2023 16:03

ScareTrack- Chessington Howl'O'ween / On-location Review Episode 2023 We spend the day at Chessington World of adventures to experience their Halloween offering. Follow Chessington Instagram: @chessingtonworldofadventures X(Twitter): @CWOA Facebook: /Chessington World of Adventures ...................................................................................................................... BOOK YOUR TICKETS HERE: https://www.chessington.com/explore/events/halloween/ ...................................................................................................................... Visit our website here: https://www.scaretrack.co.uk/ Watch our latest ScareCam vlogs: https://www.youtube.com/@ScareTrack ScareTrack merchandise can be found here: https://fleshnmetal.com/scaretrack?limit=25 Social Media Facebook.com/ScareTrack Instagram- @scaretrack Twitter- @scaretrack Snapchat- scaretrack Check out the Haunted Attraction Network here: https://hauntedattractionnetwork.com/ *Logo/Photo property of CHESSINGTON WORLD OF ADVENTURES

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Content, design and navigation, with Kelly and Paul from Rubber Cheese

Do You Wear That In The Shower?

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 4, 2023 44:34

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is Kelly Molson, Founder of Rubber Cheese.Download the Rubber Cheese 2022 Visitor Attraction Website Report - the first digital benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. Show references: https://carbonsix.digital/https://www.linkedin.com/in/pmarden/Paul Marden is the Founder and Managing Director of Carbon Six Digital and the CEO of Rubber Cheese. He is an Umbraco Certified Master who likes to think outside the box, often coming up with creative technical solutions that clients didn't know were possible. Paul oversees business development and technical delivery, specialising in Microsoft technologies including Umbraco CMS, ASP.NET, C#, WebApi, and SQL Server. He's worked in the industry since 1999 and has vast experience of managing and delivering the technical architecture for both agencies and client side projects of all shapes and sizes. Paul is an advocate for solid project delivery and has a BCS Foundation Certificate in Agile. https://www.rubbercheese.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellymolson/Kelly Molson is the Founder of Rubber Cheese, a user focused web design and development agency for the attraction sector. Digital partners to Eureka! The National Children's Museum, Pensthorpe, National Parks UK, Holkham, Visit Cambridge and The National Marine Aquarium.Kelly regularly delivers workshops and presentations on sector focused topics at national conferences and attraction sector organisations including ASVA, ALVA, The Ticketing Professionals Conference and the Museum + Heritage Show.As host of the popular Skip the Queue Podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions, she speaks with inspiring industry experts who share their knowledge of what really makes an attraction successful.Recent trustee of The Museum of the Broads. Transcription: Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip The Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Kelly Molson.In this new monthly slot, Rubber Cheese CEO Paul Marden joins me to discuss different digital related topics.In this episode, we're talking about the impact of design, navigation and content on selling tickets and how to go about testing if your design is working or not.If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on all the usual channels by searching Skip The Queue.Kelly Molson: We're doing something a little bit different on the podcast this season. So alongside the usual guest interviews, which we'll have each month, me and the Rubber Cheese CEO, Paul Marden are also going to be recording an episode on a different digital related topic. So we're going to do this once a month. Kelly Molson: Each of the episodes, we're going to share insight around design, user experience, content, accessibility, SEO and loads, loads more. We're going to talk a little bit about what's possible, give you some ideas about how easy or how hard that topic is to implement.Kelly Molson: Maybe what kind of budget that you might need to look at and what some of the next steps are to take if you want to implement some of these things. We're even going to call out some of the best in breed websites, people that are doing things really well within the sector.Kelly Molson: So I've been hosting the Skip the Queue podcast since July 2019. Goodness, that's been a long time. Five seasons in now. This is season five. You all know me already. So I am the founder of Rubber Cheese and my background is in design. Kelly Molson: I co founded Rubber Cheese back in 2003 after learning about ecommerce when I worked at a very early kind of Shopify type startup agency. The person that you don't know quite as well as me is my fellow host on this podcast. That's funny to say, that my fellow host is Paul Marden. So. Paul. Hello. Welcome. Paul Marden: Hello. Kelly Molson: This is strange. I'm going to have to share the spotlight for a while, that's very uncomfortable for me. No, it will be fine."It will be fine", she says. Paul, I would love it if you could give us a little intro to yourself. Kelly Molson: I know your background and I know you very well. We've known each other for about, I think it's about 14 years now. It's been a long time, hasn't it?Paul Marden: Yeah. Not long after I started doing this as a proper job. Kelly Molson: Well, there you go. Tell us about what your proper job is. Paul Marden: Yeah, so I'm the CEO of Rubber Cheese now, alongside another agency that I run called Carbon Six, which we merged Carbon Six and Rubber Cheese just over a year ago. My background is as a geek. I'm a developer by training. I started out ten years at British Airways, all over the airline, doing all different sorts of IT related jobs. So I saw lots of operational side of things, commercial sides of the airline, say, selling tickets, that kind of thing. I don't know if I've told you, but my first visitor attraction job was a long time ago, because when I was at Uni, I did a placement at the National Botanic Garden of Wales when it first opened. So I was there when it was a hole in the ground and I helped them write their IT strategy. Paul Marden: So my visitor attraction experience predates my involvement in Rubber Cheese. Kelly Molson: I did not know that. So you've done geek stuff for attractions. Paul Marden: For a long time. Yeah, it was amazing. I can still remember I was in an office in a farmhouse as they were building the giant glass house. It was just the most amazing place and I've not been back for a long time. It would be amazing to go and see the place, how it's transformed in the, what is it, 24 years since I was there? God, I really sound old now, don't I? Kelly Molson: You do sound old. I'm just wondering if they still use the IT plan that you put in place for them. Paul Marden: Probably not. I was only a student at the time. It can't have been amazing. Kelly Molson: So what we normally do on the podcast, listeners, as you well know, is I ask my guests a series of uncomfortable questions, icebreaker questions, which they very graciously answer beautifully for me. We're not going to do that on this episode. Ha. So we thought, yeah, Paul has wiped his brow in a state of relief there. But what we thought we would do is Paul and I both visit a lot of visitor attractions, both professionally and in our personal life as well. We've both got daughters at very different ages, so Millie is coming up for I think, 9.Paul Marden: 10 in two weeks' time. Kelly Molson: Okay. And my little one is 2. So we're going to very different visitor attractions right now. But we thought we would talk about the attraction that we visited most recently and what we loved about it, and we thought we'd ask each other that question. So I am going to ask you that question first, Paul. What attraction have you visited most recently and what did you love about it? Paul Marden: So we just finished the summer holidays, so went away for just over a week to the Netherlands. We did visit a few different attractions whilst were there, but went to an amazing place. We went back to it, actually, it was one that we've been to before called Burger's Zoo. So I loved the whole experience of going there the first time around and we wanted to go back there. It's an amazing place. But the reason why I was going to call it out today was a conversation that we've been having and something that we've done with Kitten Museums in terms of the food offering. Because when you go to Burger's Zoo, the restaurant is amazing. We've talked recently about the sorts of food that you get at visitor attractions and your frustration around this. Lots of fried food. Paul Marden: There's never any healthy food. So went to Burger Zoo, we had lunch and of course, there'd be obligatory portion of chips there if you want to have it. Lots of kids food there, but I was able to have a massive great salad. It was in enormous and it was lovely and healthy and really enjoyable and it didn't cost the earth when you were there. And it's so unusual to talk about going to an attraction and getting that kind of quality of food without spending the earth in doing it. So, yeah, that was pretty cool. Kelly Molson: That is cool. This is probably a whole another podcast episode to talk about that. I think actually, in your intro, you forgot to mention that you are a Trustee for the Kids in Museums, which is quite a new role for you, isn't it? But it's one that kind of immersed you into the world of attraction. I think that's been a good one for you. They have set up a brilliant scheme, which is kind of an accreditation scheme for attractions to go through, just to check into how healthy and how great their food offering actually is, which I think is brilliant. It's really weird. Kelly Molson: The day that they launched it, I was having a like, literally the day before, I was having a conversation on LinkedIn about how atrocious the food offering had been at an attraction that I went to, which is one of the top ten most visited attractions in the UK. It's a great place. It really is a brilliant place, especially if you've got toddler. However, the food was pretty horrendous and I've got an unusual toddler in that. Well, she will eat chips now, she will eat chippies, but she won't eat fried stuff or battered things or anything like that. She's just not interested.Paul Marden: Nothing beige.Kelly Molson: Not really, even pasta has to be, she should have been an Italian, she should have seen the amount of pasta that she wolf down when were over there. But it's got to be good. Kelly Molson: It's got to be good. Yeah, she is particularly fussy toddler. But just for myself, I mean, just the range of food that was available that day was just dreadful. I mean, the healthiest thing that was on the menu that Lee and I both had was jacket potatoes and I think I took a picture of it somewhere and it was too awful to put on social media. So, yes, that is well needed and I'm glad that attraction stood out on the food front for you. Paul Marden: What about you? Where have you been recently? Kelly Molson: I've been to lots of different places recently, but this one I can't stop thinking about and so I want to talk about it today and it's not one that I visited with Edie. It's one that I visited with a fellow attractions professional a little while ago, but it's the Beamish Living Museum. I honestly can't stop thinking about it. It's the first living museum that I've been to, so it's the first experience of that for me. And I had such an emotional reaction to it. I'm a bit embarrassed, actually. So I went to meet a couple of people. I met one person that I'd met briefly at a conference before, and then I met one of their colleagues who I'd never met before in my life. And I actually had a bit of a cry to this colleague because it was so emotive. Kelly Molson: If anyone who hasn't been to Beamish Living Museum, there's lots of different areas that you can visit, and one of them is a 1950s area and they essentially recreate what it was like in the 1950s, where the museum is located. And it brought back so many memories of my grandparents, both sets of grandparents, for different reasons. The house was very similar to my grandparents on my father's side and just down to some of the things that they had in that space. And I just got overwhelmed by it. It was so wonderful to go back and see that. And in my head all the time I was thinking, well, both my sets of grandparents are no longer with us. They passed away when I was in my early twenties. And so Edie will never get to meet her great grandparents on that side. And I thought, God, how amazing would it be for me to bring here and say, show her some of the things that great granny used to have in her house and yeah, just lost it. Paul Marden: It's interesting, isn't it, that you can become so immersed that even now the emotional attachment that you've built when you were there takes you straight back there. Because there's a risk, isn't there, with those sorts of places of it feeling a little bit plastic and fake, isn't it? But this clearly had an emotional impact on you. Kelly Molson: Yeah, I think for me, I was worried that it would be people in costumes. It would feel like that. And it did not feel like that at all. It just felt so authentic. Anyway, you've got to go. I don't want to cry for the rest of this podcast, but yeah, it's definitely a must visit for me, it was something really special. Paul Marden: Excellent. Kelly Molson: Should we move on to what we're going to talk about? And I'll compose myself, shall we?Paul Marden: Okay, moving swiftly on.Kelly Molson: Let's. So in this episode, we're going to talk about the impact of design, navigation and content on selling tickets and how we go about testing if it's working or not. So this episode actually launches on the 4th of October, which is one day after we release the 2023 Visitor Attraction website report. There's data that has come out of this year's report that is so insightful and I cannot wait for everybody to get this year's report. It dives deeper into a lot of the topics that we talked about in the first report last year, but there's just so much more to it and I'm very excited about it.Kelly Molson: Anyway, looking at the data from the report, a 100% of the attractions that took part think that having consistent design and clear navigation is important, which is brilliant. Big tick there. However, many of them don't think that their site meets the need and some of them think it does, but they don't test that it does. There's some really interesting stats about testing that we're going to talk about in a minute that have actually blew my mind a little bit. But one good stat around the design is that 76% of respondents believe that their websites were consistently designed despite using multiple platforms in their customer journey. Kelly Molson: And this is something that we talked about quite frequently in that sometimes there's a big disconnect if you are using if you've got your website that's built and designed in WordPress for example, and then you've got your ticketing platform and the two don't look like each other, they're not consistent, they're incongruent. That can be a bit of a challenge for people in terms of trust and how they feel about your brand. Paul Marden: It can be a jarring experience, can't it? Kelly Molson: Yeah, absolutely. Responses this year once again saw that websites that look good and are easy to use are doing far better than those that don't prioritise consistency. So I'm just going to read out this snippet from the report. We saw that websites that were high scoring for their design and navigation made more sales over the past twelve months. So those successful websites had around 200,000 to 500,000 completed transactions. Whereas on the other hand, websites with lower design and navigation scores didn't do as well, stating that they had below 50,000 completed transactions in the last month. That's quite fascinating, isn't it? Paul Marden: It is. This is not just a handful of people that are answering, is it? Because there's a large number of people that are answering that this is important to them and that they think they're doing quite well. And then you see how their perception of doing well correlates really strongly with the actual outcomes of the site itself. Kelly Molson: Yeah, I think that the way that we asked the questions this year is interesting as well. So when I talked then about we said that websites that were high scoring for design and navigation, we gave respondents the options to score their website. So we gave them how well designed do you think your site is? Between 1 and 10, 10 being the highest. So we allowed them to kind of self score. But it's interesting because some of those self scores don't correlate to the data that we then took. So those scores, they're based mostly on assumption, which is always a difficult, challenging place to be. But I think, Paul, you had some insight here around the conversion rate and design and how they tally up. Paul Marden: So the stats you just talked about were about the volume of transactions. You could say that having good design leads you to have more transactions flowing through your website, but you could also say that the organisations that have more transactions flowing through their website can afford to spend more money on design. But what I found interesting was that when you ignore the absolute number of sales that they make on the website, if you actually look at what their conversion rate is on the website, the attractions who think they have good design tend to have a higher conversion rate by about 1% or 2%. Now, that could be on a low base. Paul Marden: There could be a fairly small attraction that has fewer people coming to it, but they still perform relatively better than those attractions that didn't think they had good design but could be massive organisations with large numbers of transactions flowing through. And what I found interesting is we started to work out what is the value of 1 or 2% extra conversion rate, because it doesn't sound like much. Really. There's somebody in the business that doesn't necessarily understand the technology side of it that doesn't sound like a lot. So we started playing with converting that into money. What could that actually be worth? So we played around with we tried to model what is our average attraction and what is the absolute top performing attraction. Paul Marden: And even for our average, an increase of 1% in conversion rate could mean tens of thousands of pounds of extra sales that they make. But for the top performing attraction, it could make the difference of hundreds of thousands of pounds of extra sales just by squeezing 1 or 2% of extra conversion rate out. I think that's absolute gold dust in terms of insight that we've drawn out of this data. The organisations that think they have good design tend to have a conversion rate of 1 or 2% more, which could equate to tens of hundreds of thousands of pounds of extra sales that they make. It makes you begin to think that investment in the design of the site could actually be really worthwhile. Kelly Molson: Absolutely. And information like that helps the marketing managers build the case for good design and investing in good design. Paul Marden: Yeah. And before you say, "Oh, the large organisations with the big budgets, they can afford to do this, what about the small ones?" The smaller organisations with small budgets who had good navigation tended to be the ones that would have the better conversion rate amongst their peers. So you don't need to be a nationally recognised attraction brand to be able to invest an appropriate amount of money in design and get a return on that investment that you make. Kelly Molson: I always think that the best use of budget is on the pre planning side, which is unusual coming from a designer, I think. Yeah. But Paul, you're really data driven, aren't you? You're super data driven. Paul Marden: Such a geek. Kelly Molson: Yeah, you are a massive geek. Massive nerd. We're very complimentary, but I never used to be very data driven. I was always far more visual driven. But actually well, I'm not going to share it on this podcast, actually, because I'm going to share it at a talk that I'm given. But I've got a really good story around why user testing is very important. We'll come a bit more onto that later. And why you should be driven by the data and the stats and not just by what something looks like. Okay, let's talk about navigation quickly as part of this design section. So it's really interesting. So we've actually got some findings from the Journal of Market Research. Kelly Molson: So they state that, when websites are easy to understand and navigate, individuals have a lower cognitive load, so fewer things to work out, and therefore are more likely to have a positive experience to go on to purchase. So having a consistent and well designed website can really help people make complete purchases with your visitor attraction. What I've always said, it's about trying to stop making people think, give them something that is really easy. So I think when we worked with Eureka!, and this is back in 2016, when we first worked with them, we did some research around what people wanted to find out about attractions, what were the first things they needed to know about. And it was literally, when you open, how much do you cost? How can I get there? Kelly Molson: So, if they're the three things that people desperately need to know, they're the three things that really need to be highlighted front and centre when you arrive at the site, wherever you arrive at it, whether that's the homepage or what. And it's the same with navigation. People need to understand where they're being taken and why they're being taken to certain places. So we're working with an attraction at the moment, we've just about to start work with them. They have got some really key, really strong elements to their Nav, but then they've got an area that says more, and there's a load of stuff that's been added onto the more section, and things like this happen over time. Kelly Molson: When you've got a website, people will say, “I need this to be featured on the site, I need this page to put up there”, and it gets added to, and ultimately you end up with all these things that haven't been thought about from the start, about where they're supposed to go. So they get kind of bundled somewhere, and a more section kind of feels an obvious place to put them. But what is it? Users don't understand what's in there. And they're not going to go searching for hours to find something that they want. They need to find it quickly. And so that for me, is a huge no about bundling stuff into these kind of sections. That just so ambiguous, you don't know what they are. Paul Marden: I think that figuring out what people are trying to do, what are they trying to get out of the website? I think that bundling exercise, putting lots of things onto the site that happened over time or putting it in a bucket of more is often there's so many people in an organisation that want their content heard and seen, don't they? Everybody wants their content on the site. It all goes on there. And sometimes you have to step back and think, what's the point? Who is it that's coming to the site and what are we trying to get them to do? We want the customer at the end of it to think, now that you've read this, what are you going to do next? But we don't always think about that journey. Paul Marden: We think about the snippets of information that we put onto the site, but we don't think about what the journey is they're going through. Attractions are really lucky. I think a lot of the people that go to their sites are really motivated to buy, a lot more motivated to buy than the average ecommerce site. So how do you get out of the way of those people so they can just buy stuff? And then for the people that are less motivated, they don't necessarily want to know how, when and how much they still want to be sold on the idea of going to the attraction, then maybe you need to give them more information. Paul Marden: But identifying who those people are and giving them a journey to go through and coming up with a navigation that makes it really easy for those people to navigate along that journey, there's a lot of psychology that's hard. That's your prep work, isn't it, before you do the design? Kelly Molson: Yeah, and it's the hardest part of it. And I think that's where the most amount of time needs to be spent there and the wireframes really, the design. If you've got good brand guidelines in place, the design ultimately becomes a simplified process at that point. But the pre design work is really where the time and effort needs to be spent. And I think it is a challenge for attractions. So there are attractions that are, if you compare a Chessington World of Adventures, for example, a theme park orientated to a historic museum that you're coming to visit, that not only is an attraction, but obviously has a lot of historical information to share and learning and education plays a big part in them as well. You have different audiences for those. Kelly Molson: So I think one part of that process is you need to think about all the different audiences you have and what are their motivations for visiting the site and what do you want them to do, what actions do you want them to take? But I think when you are working, this has gone off a bit of a tangent, but when you're working with an agency, I think what's really core for the attraction is to make sure that you've got key stakeholders from each of those areas of your attraction that play a part in those early conversations. So you don't want the site redesign to be driven solely by the marketing team for the attraction side. You need someone from the education side to be part of those conversations as well. Kelly Molson: You need visitor experience to be part of those conversations because if you're planning content, each of those individuals will have a different need for what content they need to showcase on the site. So they all need to be talking to each other about how that's going to look. I'm talking from experience because this has not happened in the past. Paul's nodding his head at me because he knows that we've had this challenge previously.Paul Marden: Yeah. Kelly Molson: So yeah, and I think that kind of leads us nicely onto content, really, and about the need to frequently update your site and keep it refreshed. So once you've done all of that hard work of working out what content is going to be on it doesn't stay static. So in the report we have a stat that says 31% of respondents said that they updated their online content multiple times a week. That's good. Another 31% said that they did so at least once a month. Good. However, 22% of respondents said they had infrequent content updates or didn't update their content at all. Not updating your content at all. Paul Marden: That surprised me, that one. Yeah, I was surprised that there were 31% of respondents updated it multiple times a week. I was really impressed by that. Yeah. That takes some work, doesn't it? To be able to produce that level of content change, but to do it infrequently or not at all, that surprised me. Kelly Molson: I guess it depends on the attraction and what their offering is as well. Thinking about one of our clients, Holkham actually, so we know that Holkham update their website frequently. They have a lot of different events, they write a lot of really incredible content about what happens across Holkham Estate. So they're engaging with the audience from the perspective of someone coming to visit and what they can do on the day and what they can come and see. But they're also talking about their wider sustainability efforts across the state and what they do and how they focus on that, which again, might be for that same audience. Might be for a slightly different audience as well. Kelly Molson: So the volume of content that they produce is a lot higher than potentially Thorpe Park as a visitor, they will talk about what's on that day and maybe an events that they're running, but they might not talk about the same things that are going on across the Estate that Holkham would, for example. So I think, yeah, it's what your attraction offers. Paul Marden: Holkham's a really good example because they can take inspiration from the place. They're very diverse, they've got lots of different things that they do at that location. It's quite a large location, but there's lots of different things going on and those things are inside and outside. They can take inspiration from the season. So there's a lot of inspiration that you can take there and produce. Just off the top of my head, I could think of lots of different stories that you could tell and changes to the site that can be inspired by the season. But then I think about a theme park where there's lots that goes on. I think I've done lots of trips to Legoland. There's Legoland at Halloween. There's Legoland in Spring time. It changes through the seasons and there's a lot of story around that. Paul Marden: I wonder if you're an indoor attraction, if you're Heritage Museum based, there's going to be lots of stories that you can tell about the items that you've got in your collection. But it might be harder to tell those stories influenced by the seasons, which can be a real driver for telling varying stories throughout a year, can't they? Yeah, but I don't write a lot of stories for those sorts of organisations, so maybe I don't have the right view of the world, but I would imagine it would be a lot harder to write lots of content varying through the year for that sort of organisation. Kelly Molson: Yes, probably so I'm just thinking about it would just be a change in topic, wouldn't it? So I know Blackpool Pleasure Beach, who Andy Hygate, the Operations Director, came on the podcast a couple of seasons ago, actually, and he talked about the experiences they've developed around walking up the big one and the rise that they have there. And actually, I think for people that are interested in theme parks, there's probably a lot of content around how things are built and how they're developed and that kind of side of stuff that people would be really interested in. So it's not talking about seasonal stuff, it's about the things and how they're constructed and how they're designed and kind of stuff like that. Kelly Molson: So, yeah, again, it comes back to just knowing your audience and what are they interested in and how you can engage them and what are your potential new audiences as well, and how can you develop content that attracts them. There is a correlation between content and purchases, though, which is quite interesting. So our report shows that those who were deliberate in ensuring their content was kept fresh and engaging saw an average of 25 to 50,000 completed website purchases a year, whereas those who didn't, on average, had around 10,000 completed purchases. In the same time frame. That's interesting. In addition, of the respondents who recognised the need for regular content updates but weren't action in them, 23% stated that their average sales conversion rate sat between one and 4%, which is below the benchmark for the sector. Kelly Molson: So the sector benchmark is 5% now, so that 1% is significantly low. Paul Marden: Absolutely. Shall we move on and talk about some testing? Because I know you think this one really is. Kelly Molson: Oh, yeah, I really do. So there is a statistic in the report that I had to reread a few times, actually, to believe. So last year's survey and report, we had about 70 attractions take part. This year has been significantly more than that. We got 188 attractions from up and down the UK and Europe take part, which was incredible.Paul Marden: And one in North America as well. I was really excited when I saw that one. Kelly Molson: Yes, we went international. That was exciting. Okay, so think about this: 188 attractions took part in this. 70% of the respondents have never conducted user testing of any kind on their website. 70%! That's actually not the worst stat though. I'm going to save the worst stat for another episode, but that's not the one that shocked me the most. But this one is really surprising. We've talked a bit about making assumptions about how well your website is perceived by people.Kelly Molson: Hard data from actual users is the key to designing a website that has an improved user experience because it can clarify problem areas and identify where most effort is needed to create a really great online experience. So if you're not asking your users how they're interacting with the site and do they like it? Can they buy things well? Can they find what they want? How do you know if it's good or not? It's blown my mind. Paul Marden: It's really hard, isn't it? Really hard. Kelly Molson: And I think it's really you wrote this down, actually. It's really important to be aware of a familiarity bias. So just because you think your website is easy to navigate doesn't mean other people think is it's because you're familiar with it so you understand where things are. Which is really interesting. Actually, I've just been reminded of a conversation that I had with somebody when I was at an attraction. Now I can't name this attraction, we're working with them and we're under NDA, but they asked me about a website that we'd redesigned. They said, "Oh, you did this website, didn't you?" I said, "Yes", "I can't find this thing anymore that I couldn't find. It took me ages to find it before" and I was like, "All right, what is the thing?" And he talked about what it was. Kelly Molson: I said, "Oh, well, it would be in this area". And he said, "Yeah, which makes sense. But before it was over here and I knew where it was and it just feels a bit weird now." I said, "Do you think it was in the right place before?". "Oh, no, shouldn't have been." Okay. So it's just because you know where it is doesn't mean it's actually in the right place. It's just what you get used to over the years. Paul Marden: It is incredibly hard to put yourself into the position of the person that knows nothing about your organisation. Trying to imagine what the customer is going through takes a lot of effort and I think that you can get data to be able to do that. But a lot of there's kind of levels of kind of understanding of that, putting yourself into that customer's position, the empathy that is required. Lots of people that we meet and work with will talk about how they want their site to be structured and what makes sense to them. Some people then will go the next stage and think about what they think their customer wants. And then there's a stage beyond that which is not even trying to put themselves into the customer position, but actually test what the customer thinks. Paul Marden: It's really hard to have the empathy to understand. If you know nothing, what would you do? And there's loads of stuff that you can do. I'm sure we'll come on to that later on to try to understand and test. But just sitting somebody down and watching them go from zero to hero and buying your tickets is a valuable thing that you could do, couldn't it? Kelly Molson: Yeah, absolutely. Now the report on the survey is anonymous. All the data that we get from it, we don't talk about the people that have submitted it and we don't talk about them. There was a number of websites within the data set that were doing really well in terms of both design and navigation and the impact that they were having on their conversion rate. So we reached out to these organisations to ask if we could talk about them today. And all of them were very happy for us to talk about it. So we have had their permission. I think I'll hand over to you, Paul, because you've been doing the analysis over on these sites. It's really lovely to see that Roman Baths are on this list.Paul Marden: They're on the list.Kelly Molson: Because they have been on the podcast and they're our podcast alumni. So that was good.Paul Marden: Yeah, more than once, I think, as well. Kelly Molson: Yes, they have been. Paul Marden: What I went looking for were who were the organisations that thought that they had good design and navigation in their site? But I didn't think that was really enough because of course you could think that it was good and it isn't very good. So what could I dig into the data to try to pull apart the people that thought they had good design and following through from that good design actually had good outcomes. And Roman Baths was up there in that top set of organisations that had they thought they had a good, consistent high quality design, but they also had a conversion rate up there in the top ratings that we had inside the data set. Obviously, Roman Baths really well known organisation, lots of international visitors will be going there. Paul Marden: There was another that I pulled out in the data set, which was also a really high profile brand. London Zoo came out in that top set. Kelly Molson: Also past podcast guests. Thank you. Yes, lovely people. Paul Marden: So they also thought they had good, consistent design, but coincidentally also had good quality conversion rates up there in the top performance in the data set. But to avoid you saying to me, "Oh, but all these are all big, internationally recognised brands. What's design got to do with it?" Up there we've got Roman Baths, London Zoo. Big, well known brands. But there's also some organisations that I wasn't familiar with in that data set. So there were organisations that are probably more regional, less internationally well recognised brands. And one of those that considered that they had good quality design and they also had high levels of conversion rates. Alongside that were Smithwick's experience in Kilkenny in Ireland. It's an attraction that is a brewery tour. I thought that one was really interesting when I went and looked at it. Paul Marden: It was really easy to navigate around the site, ridiculously easy to go and buy tickets. You go onto the site, it's right there to be able to buy those tickets, to go to that experience. So I think that told me that you didn't need to be a big, well recognised brand to be able to devote the time and attention and budget that's needed to get a good design, which then has the impact on your conversion rates. Yeah, this is not just for the big brands. This is also for other brands, smaller, regional brands that can maybe not devote the same levels of investment to it that a large organisation can, but they can still have good outcomes and good design. Kelly Molson: Yeah. And I think it's fair to say we do ask questions in the report about budget, but we don't ask them specifically. So we haven't asked. We don't, for example, know the investment that Roman Barths, London Zoo or Smithwicks have made in their website to get it to where it is now. We literally have no idea. So their budgets could be phenomenally big, they could be phenomenally small. We have no idea whatsoever. But we know that they have invested in good design and they've done it to a really great standard, which means it's easy for people to make purchases. Therefore their sales are sitting at a really great level. Kelly Molson: The Roman Baths I just a little shout out to Simon Addison, actually, because Simon did come on to the podcast a couple of times now, and actually he came onto a recent episode where we talked about the value of this report and the survey that we carry out. And this is its second year now and we can see the value in terms of the data that we've been able to glean from it is so much more insightful this year. The key insights themselves are much more in depth than they were last year. But one thing that Simon mentioned is that we don't work with Roman Baths. I've made that clear on the last podcast. We didn't design their website. We've not worked with them. Kelly Molson: They did use the report to inform some of the decisions that they made about designing their website and making changes to it, which I think is so great. Right. The report is actually actively doing what we set out for it to do. Regardless of whether anyone comes to work with us or not. Someone can take this report and use the insights from it to inform their current agency to make changes to their site that are going to make a significant difference to their bottom line. Well done, us. Paul Marden: Well done, us. But well done, everyone that's responded as well. Kelly Molson: Whatever. Well done, us. Well done, everyone. Thank you. Paul Marden: So I just think it's really impressive, isn't it, that we've got what was it you said? 180 something respondents from across the sector.Kelly Molson: 188.Paul Marden: It's so hard in a tough industry. There's lots of industries where people would not work together. And this is a collaborative exercise in sharing your data that takes a certain confidence within the sector to be able to be willing to share that information so that then somebody like us can then do the graph that aggregating that and seeing the interesting stories that people can then use to make things better. There's so many places where you would not see that happen.Kelly Molson: It's a wonderful part of the sector, that collaboration and that willingness to share and be open about things. Right, let's talk about next steps then, because we've talked about some of the items within design, navigation, testing. We've talked about who's doing it well. Let's wrap this up with next steps that you can take. Kelly Molson: If you think some of these things are relevant to you and you want to do something about them. Do some testing. Do some testing and you can do that in a variety of ways. Paul Marden: Do you want me to test some stuff? Kelly Molson: Let's do some testing. Let's test. Look, there's loads of ways that you can do user testing if you're going through the process of a redesign at the moment. Go back to your wireframes, make them interactive. Do some internal testing, do some external testing. You can do this in multiple ways so you can do focus groups, get bums on seats in front of computers and give them some things that you want them to do on your site. Don't tell them how to do it, but just give them some things that you want them to achieve. I want you to buy a ticket. I want you to tell me how easy it is to go and find the interactive map. I want you to find a blog post and can you get from the blog post to buying a ticket, some of those things. Kelly Molson: This doesn't need to cost you a huge amount of money, right? You all have an asset in that. "Hey, would you like a free ticket to our venue if you come and do some testing for us?" Put on a little bit of lunch, put on people are really happy to help and give you feedback in that way. So that doesn't need to be a huge cost at all. You can use online tools, so we use tools like UserTesting.com. You can select a certain demographic that you want to test out and you upload what you want them to test. And then they go off and they do it, and they record videos, and you can see how they interact and they talk through what they're doing and how easy it was for them to do those things as well. Kelly Molson: They are not a huge, costly I actually don't know off the top of my head. There will be a fee to use the system, which will be a monthly fee and then there'll be a fee probably for that will cover X amount of tests within that monthly fee. So it will probably be from what, 150, maybe a month, something like that, maybe a bit more. Paul Marden: The cost depends as well on factors, how many factors you place on the do you only want people to do user testing that are of a particular demographic and age? If your attraction has mainly parents with young kids coming, do you want your user testing to be done only by parents with young kids? When you add more constraints to it, the cost of doing it becomes higher. But arguably the quality of the data that you get back from the testing is more relevant to you. Kelly Molson: You can do this with I've talked about going back to the wireframe stage. You can do this at any point. So great, do a load of testing before you go ahead and release something to the world. But if you've got something that's up and running now, do some testing. So you can do user testing on what you already have. You can do exit surveys so you can ask people once they've bought a ticket, you can ask them how easy that was. What did you find difficult? What were your challenges at the end of your purchasing journey? So there's small little things you can do there. Paul Marden: The world has changed a lot, hasn't it? In the last few years we've moved to almost exclusively online sales beforehand. So we've got this massive pool of data, of contact information of the people that have bought your tickets. That's such a great resource that you could use, which in previous years pre pandemic it would have been a struggle because a large chunk of your people would have been walk ins who you didn't necessarily it wasn't easy to capture those sorts of contact details and follow up with them. Kelly Molson: Yeah, exactly. And then I think there are things that you can do in terms of looking at your user experience and the design side of things. We do things like UX reviews for people. We actually offered one as a prize for all of the people that entered the survey this year and the lovely people at Cheddar Gorge won that. We're going to be looking at that in a couple of months for them. Paul Marden: Back near my home proper, that's Cheddar Gorge is where I went as a kid, like, so that's exciting to be. Kelly Molson: In that we'll be carrying that out later on in the year for them. So, yeah, there's things that you can do in terms of working with an agency to look at what your user journeys look like. Are they correct for the audience that you have? Does your design flow? Where are the barriers that you're seeing? And again, if you're looking at some of the data of where you're seeing people drop off, is that a design issue, is that a function issue? How do we work those things out? Paul Marden: There's loads of tools, isn't there, as well, like Hotjar that you can stick on, which doesn't cost a lot of money. And it's not just Hotjar, there are lots of other tools just like it which would give you insight into the behaviour of the users on the site. It's just a snapshot that you get for free, but that snapshot could really help inform decision making about maybe I need to make it easier for them to find the button because they're finding it hard to book tickets or whatever. Kelly Molson: Because they can't see where they need to book their tickets. Paul Marden: Yeah. Kelly Molson: So, yeah, I think in summary, do some testing is what I'm going to end this podcast episode with. Do some testing, come back and tell us what you find.Paul Marden: Exciting. I'd love to have those conversations. Kelly Molson: As ever, if you want to get in touch with either of us, all of our contact details are in the Show Notes. If anything has sparked your interest that we've talked about today, we're really happy to answer any questions and things like that. So if you do want to ask any questions about any of the kind of stats that we've talked about, again, just our email addresses will be in the Show Notes. And also, if you haven't downloaded the report yet, why not? Because it's out. It launched yesterday. We did a webinar. Did you come to it? Why not? If not, but if you do want to go and download the report, we'll put the link to that in the Show Notes as well. But just head over to the rubbercheese.com website and you'll be able to find it. We'll see you next time. Paul Marden: Awesome. Thank you. Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast.

god ceo spotify founders halloween europe kids uk design digital thinking spring microsoft ireland italian north america adventures journal massive managing directors museum netherlands seo cheese wales burgers goodness skip survey estate customer service tourism wordpress trustees shopify users ux responses agile zoo museums navigation eureka user experience rubber nda nav queue attractions market research british airways operations director legoland website design asp alva conversion rate kilkenny conversion rates broads sql server hotjar experience economy usertesting national children website content london zoo tourist attractions smithwick content design heritage museum thorpe park user journey tourism marketing roman baths blackpool pleasure beach chessington world cheddar gorge smithwicks kelly molson

Ep 94: Pia Fay Waller, Head of wardrobe

In the 'House Seats'

Play Episode Play 30 sec Highlight Listen Later Aug 20, 2023 34:22

Pia studied costume design at the Wimbledon College of Art and Design, which is part of the University of the Arts London, where she learnt a wide variety of skills including millinery, wiggery, pattern cutting and much more. She also gained a range of technical skills in machine sewing.Since graduating she has worked her way up from a costumer at Chessington World of Adventures to working as assistant wardrobe mistress on a wide variety of productions as Othello, Much Ado About Nothing, Feydra, Small Island and Ocean at the End of the Lane at theatres including The National and the Duke of York theatre.Pia is currently Wardrobe Mistress on the production of The Third Man at the Menier Chocolate Factory.

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The One About Thrill Seeking

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 16, 2023 30:31

In this episode, Rav and Simon talk about thrill seeking, being adventurous, UK Black Pride 2023, Chessington World of Adventures, and much more. WARNING - This episode contains strong language Submit your questions to DoYouShower@gmail.com #ShowerPod Follow us: www.instagram.com/ShowerPod Music by Skilsel from Pixabay Produced by Bee & Ant Productions

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First Drop 5: A Season of Screams – Summer Coaster Adventures in the U.S. and Europe

ACE - Ride With Us

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 4, 2023 69:48

It's been a real zinger of a summer when it comes to theme parks, travel and enjoying new coasters around the world! We head into fall with a roundup of the summer's newest attractions and great discussions with ACE members from around the world. Co-host John Davidson chats with Paul Drabek, ACE Regional Rep for the ACE Heart of America Region. He shares his experience riding the all-new GCI wooden coaster, Zambezi Zinger, at Worlds of Fun. In our next segment, Bryant Yeager interviews Chris Kearsing director of Operations for Adventureland Park about their new Zamperla attractions, Flying Viking and Draken Falls. For the final interview, co-host Jessica Gardner is joined by ACE Europe Assistant Regional Rep Hjälmar Sinke to discuss Mandrill Mayhem, the newest B&M wing coaster at Chessington World of Adventures. In this episode: Meet Paul Drabek – coaster enthusiast since the Usenet days Zambezi Zinger media day – he took an epic road trip that included Waffle House to get there! Next, Bryant chats with Chris Kearsing about Adventureland Park and their new Zamperla rides: Flying Viking and Draken Falls, plus more upcoming changes to the park. Adventureland can be a part of some great Iowa road trips (also visit Arnold's Park, Worlds of Fun, Lost Island, Valleyfair and others while you're in the neighborhood!). Our last interview goes to Europe, Jessica talks with Hjälmar Sinke about Mandrill Mayhem and some enchanting European parks. Learn about the Merlin park Chessington World of Adventures, plus the new coaster! Share your ideas and thoughts about this podcast via email: podcast@aceonline.org. Visit ridewithace.com to learn more about the non-profit organization American Coaster Enthusiasts. Join the team of ACE volunteers. Volunteering offers different ways to share your talents by: Having an impact on the future of ACE Providing opportunities for rewarding experiences Developing friendships in a small group Learning new skills or sharing your talents with ACE Podcast Volunteer Team Hosts: Jessica Gardner and John Davidson Producer: Derek Perry Editors: Bob Randolph and Alex Monastersky Show Notes: Liz Tan Project Manager: Corey Wooten Correspondent: Bryant Yeager

#81 - Is it a cred though?

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 6, 2023 115:33

This week we're going to be talking/arguing about what defines a Roller Coaster cred?! This could all end in tears. We also catch up on all the latest news including Fury 325 crack, Kingda Ka reopening, Chessington World of Adventures waterpark, Fear at Avon Valley and much more!

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Why taking part in the 2023 Visitor Attraction Website Survey is so important, from The Mary Rose Museum and Roman Baths

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 5, 2023 36:43

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is Kelly Molson, Founder of Rubber Cheese.Download the Rubber Cheese 2022 Visitor Attraction Website Report - the first digital benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcastCompetition ends July 31st 2023. The winner will be contacted via Twitter. Show references: 2023 Visitor Attraction Website Report Survey - https://www.rubbercheese.com/visitor-attraction-website-report-2023 Andy Povey, Managing Director UK & Ireland for ConviousSkip the Queue episode: https://www.skipthequeue.fm/episodes/andy-poveyConvious: https://www.convious.com/Andy Povey Twitter: https://twitter.com/MrTicketeerAndy Povey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andypovey/Andy Povey joined Convious in November 2021 as managing director for UK and Ireland. Andy has worked in the attractions industry since the early nineties when he began as a ride operator at Chessington World of Adventures. He stayed with the Tussaud's company and later Merlin Entertainments for another 18 years, working in a variety of operational jobs at Rock Circus, Madame Tussauds, and central support, where he was responsible for the group's ticketing systems. After Merlin, he worked for Gateway Ticketing Systems for ten years, opening and then overseeing their UK operation, before transferring his experience to the Convious team. Outside work, Andy enjoys visiting attractions of all shapes and sizes with his family. Simon Addison, Heritage Business Manager at the Roman BathsSkip the Queue episode: https://www.skipthequeue.fm/episodes/simon-addisonRoman Baths: https://www.romanbaths.co.uk/Simon Addison Twitter: https://twitter.com/addisonsimonSimon Addison LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonaddison/Simon Addison is the Business Manager, Roman Baths and Pump Room, Bath, and heads the finance and business planning functions at the Roman Baths. He is responsible for business analysis, pricing strategy and leads the benchmarking work.Simon started his career in the financial services industry, where he qualified as a chartered management accountant with the Bank of New York. He moved to the National Trust in 2012, where he held roles in the finance team. Latterly he was responsible for the Trust's finances in Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire. Simon joined the senior leadership team at the Roman Baths in 2017.Simon joined the Board of the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions in May 2022. Dominic Jones, CEO of The Mary Rose Museum, and Director of Portsmouth Historic DockyardSkip the Queue episode: https://www.skipthequeue.fm/episodes/dominic-jonesThe Mary Rose: https://maryrose.org/Portsmouth Historic Dockyard: https://www.historicdockyard.co.uk/Dominic Jones Twitter: https://twitter.com/DominicJonesUKDominic Jones LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominicejones/Dominic Jones was recruited to the Mary Rose in 2019 ago as Chief Operating Officer, and became CEO in 2021. He brings an excellent background in commercial visitor attractions (Disney, Merlin) and creative visitor experience development.During his time at the Mary Rose, he has already driven an excellent commercial and operational performance and worked closely with previous Chief Executive to create the new Portsmouth Historic Dockyard joint venture with the National Museum of the Royal Navy, which launched successfully in August 2020. Transcriptions: Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip The Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Kelly Molson. Today's episode is a little bit different. I speak to Dominic Jones, CEO of the Mary Rose Museum and Director of Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. Simon Addison, Heritage Business Manager at the Roman Baths and Andy Povey, Managing Director, UK and Ireland of Convious. Dom, Simon and Andy share with you the merits of taking part in the 2023 Visitor Attraction Website Survey. We talk about how the report has shaped their digital strategies and what that's delivered to their attractions in terms of increased revenue and improved customer experience. If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on all the usual channels by searching Skip The Queue. Kelly Molson: So I've got Dominic Jones, Simon Addison and Andy Povey here. All past guests, all good friends. We don't need to do icebreakers here because we all know each other pretty well now. But we are going to do a little mini round of unpopular opinions again, because, let's face it, that's why people listen to this podcast. Dominic, I'm going to start with you. Dominic Jones: Why would you start with me? That's so unfair. It's obvious that Simon is your favourite. We can know this is how it works with Bath. He gets all of the good stuff and you come to Dominic first. I used my best unpopular opinion last time when I talked about not mentioning the weather. And I always think my unpopular opinion should be work related. So this one is an interesting one and I wonder whether you will disagree with me, let alone Simon and Andy. But I think when doing discounting, online or in person in our industry. You shouldn't use percentages, and you should use physical pounds, because I think people who use percentages can really confuse people. And also, I just think it's bad form. Kelly Molson: I should throw this one over to Andy, really, because he's pricing expert man, isn't he?Andy Povey: I go that far, Kelly. I actually agree with Dominic, but from a geeky technical perspective.Dominic Jones: Love Andy, always loved Andy. You know what, he's one of those guests that you just love. Simon Addison: Dom, is this just an unpopular opinion because you just can't do percentages, you just want to know how many pounds to take off. Is that what it is? Kelly Molson: Percentages are hard. We're not all like numbers people like you, Simon. Dominic Jones: We're not all born with a calculator. The other thing is that actually, the great British public, our international public, they don't want to be working out. They want to enjoy the day outside. They want to enjoy the Roman Baths, they don't want to be sitting there working out, “What these percentages off mean?”Simon Addison: Dom, you not listen to my podcast on pricing strategy. We don't discount. Andy Povey: But that was going to be my point. Simon Addison: Yeah, we should be confident enough to the quality of our own products, Dom. That will be my unpopular opinion. We shouldn't discount as an industry, but that's not what I've prepared. Andy Povey: Discounting just seems like a really easy, quick thing for marketeer to do when they're desperate. And I think we should be a little bit more confident about what we're doing and actually use better tools and better ways of communicating the value of what it is that the attraction is doing. So slightly more unpopular, I suppose, Dom, would be let's not do discounts at all. Doesn't matter weather it's 4 pounds or percentages or whatever, then just don't do it.Kelly Molson: So, I'm just gonna come at this from a car boot perspective, which I have to skip randomly. But I love a little bargain. I went to a car boot sale. I'm renovating a cottage in North Norfolk at the moment and I'm trying to furnish it with as much second hand things as possible. So car boot sales are my friend right now, and if I had gone up to the stall and been like, "What's your best price on this?". And they said, "You can have 10% off", I'd have been like, "But what does that mean? It's 05:00 in the morning and my brain can't work this out". But two pounds is yes. Dominic Jones: And it works. And also, there's an element of, you do need to put discounting in, because you've got to look at reaching different audiences. You've got people like Kelly who want to bargain. So you need to put out a decoy pricing in. So they think, "Oh, I'm not paying that for tickets, but I got 2 pounds off, aren't I lucky? I like that.” The problem with percentages is it's people trying to be too clever and it's marketeers trying to be a little bit too clever. And I've never liked it. It's not as bad as the weather. I hate the weather being used as an excuse, but my second one is using percentages in discounting.Kelly Molson: Okay. I'm glad that you changed that quickly to discounting and not marketing because there's a lot of percentages in my report, which we'll discuss later. Right, Simon, moving on to you. Simon Addison: Yeah, okay. It's nothing to do with work. Camping is not a holiday. There's no way that camping is a holiday. But I love the outdoors. We're going on holiday to Pembrokeshire in a couple of months, we'll be outside most of every day. We will walk in the cross paths in whatever the weather. But at the end of the day, we got a little cottage that we are renting to come back to for a shower that haven't got to queue for. We're not sharing a toilet block like camping, washing up, cooking, they're disproportionately hard work, and that's assuming it's sunny. If it rains, it's just miserable. Simon Addison: We can go out and get wet and we don't have to worry about whether we're ever going to get dry for the rest of the week in a tent. The kids will wake up. I haven't finished yet. Kelly. In a tent, they'll wake up at five in the morning when it gets light, and that means just the suffering of the holidays extended over an even longer day. And worst of all, the red wine is too cold and the white wine is too warm. Just miserable. Dominic Jones: Do you not have a fridge when you do camping? Simon Addison: Dom, I don't camp. You might have got that from there. Dominic Jones: I go camping. I have a fridge. I have a blow up tent. I have all the cons. Kelly Molson: Do you take your bed like the glastonbury dude? Dominic Jones: Well, I try and turn up late to someone else that can turn it all up, but it's very nice. Kelly Molson: Simon, I'm with you on this. I love the outdoors. I'm a big nature girl, but camping is a no no for me. It is miserable. Even glamping. I went glamping on a friend's hen doo once and even that was just a step too far for me. Everything was grubby. It rained, everything was then damp. Everything was damp. Like, everything was damp. It was horrible. Cottage all the way. Hello. I've got one in North Norfolk coming up, available for rent in September. If you're interested in a holiday in beautiful North Norfolk.Dominic Jones: You should go to car boot sales. I believe they've got some great deals at the moment. Kelly Molson: Yeah. They do have some great bargains, Dominic.Simon Addison: Will you offer me a percentage discount on your cottage in North Norfolk? Kelly Molson: Right, I like that one. I don't think that's going to be that unpopular, if I'm honest. Andy, over to you, final one. Andy Povey: When you first broached the idea of coming back to the podcast, I was really excited and the fact that I was going to join probably my two favourite podcast guests was really exciting. So my unpopular opinion is hopefully it's going to be borne out or proven by this episode of Skip The Queue, in that Dominic Jones isn't going to be number one on the Skip the Queue chart by the end of next week. Dominic Jones: That's so harsh. Now, what have I ever done to hurt you, Andy? Andy Povey: You've not hurt me, Dom, you're not. It's just a little friendly competition. Simon Addison: Is Dom number one? He's never mentioned it. I've literally never heard him talk about. Andy Povey: I don't know where you'd get that from. Dominic Jones: I'm a very shy guy. Am I number one? You're joking me. Really? Kelly Molson: Yes, you do not know?Dominic Jones: We should tell people about this. This needs to get out there before it changes. Kelly Molson: So I said, if Dominic is still number one at Christmas, I'm going to send him a gift. I'm going to send him something commemorative for this at Christmas. So he was number one last Christmas. You were the official Skip the Queue Christmas number one. Dominic Jones: Amazing, I did not know that. Wow.Kelly Molson: Yeah, I know. It is amazing. I'm sure you've not mentioned that before. Andy Povey: You never talked about it. Kelly Molson: We're just at the end of June where we're recording this, so there's still a fair few months to go. We do have our summer break coming up, the season five will start in September. So we've got from September to December for someone to topple you off that number one slot. Dominic Jones: I'm happy to be toppled. And joking aside, both Andy and Simon's podcast were amazing and I love both of them. And actually all of your guests are really I do really love Skip the Queue. It's one of those treats you get to looking to the new Skip the Queue podcast. So if I get toppled from number one, life is okay. Kelly Molson: You are very kind. Right. Thank you for sharing those unpopular opinions. What would be lovely listeners if you follow us over on Twitter, you can just search for Skip the Queue. I'd like to know who's unpopular opinion you preferred the most out of those three, please. Maybe I'll do a little poll on Twitter next week when this podcast episode launches. Right. This is completely unscripted and this is really last minute for the guests and so I'm super grateful that you could come and join me today. Now, it is a bit of an unusual episode for me because I actually don't tend to talk about the stuff that I do or Rubber Cheese does on this podcast. Maybe tiny little snippets of it here and there, but we never kind of dedicate an episode to the things that we do. Kelly Molson: We had a free slot and I thought, I wanted to come on and talk about the initiative that we started last year that is now running in its second year. So bear with me while I explain a little bit of a background about it. So back in May 2022, Rubber Cheese, my agency, launched the first national survey of visitor attraction websites. So I've been asked to speak on a webinar by the lovely team at Kallaway PR, who have also Will Kallaway has been a guest on the podcast. They asked me to come on and talk about cart abandonment and ways that kind of design and UX can help prevent it. So I went away, put my slides together, tried to search for some data that would back up a few theories that I had. Kelly Molson: And that was when I kind of hit a bit of a brick wall. Yeah, brick wall, that's what I'm trying to say. Couldn't find any specific data for the sector. I could find data about cart abandonment rates for all kinds of ecommerce sites, all kinds of pharmaceutical companies. Anything and everything that you could think of was out there except visitor attractions. And I realised that I think the data gets a bit skewed for them because they were kind of getting put into hospitality or tourism in general, or hotels sometimes, I think outdoor and sports. So I wasn't kind of able to back up theories that I had with the data. So that led us to setting up the survey. Kelly Molson: And were really, really lucky to have some amazing bunch of people like the teams at ALVA and ASVA who totally supported the initiative and shared it with their members. Last year, we had a brilliant response. We had 70 leading attractions from up and down the UK take part. And in November last year, were able to launch the very first Visitor Attraction Website Report, which saw us set the first digital benchmarks for the sector. So the sector now has benchmarks for add to basket rate, basket abandonment rate, bounce rate, conversion rate, load times and then the report, because of the kind of questions that we asked, we got loads of key insight into user experience, booking journeys, mobile experience and loads, loads more. Kelly Molson: But more importantly, that report, since its launch, has enabled attractions to make improvements to their websites, which makes their service better for their clients and makes their digital presence better. So it's been such an exciting thing to be involved in and it is a real passion project for me. I've loved every minute of setting it up. This year, we are now in our second year of running it and we've got a brilliant partner in Andy and the team at Convious, which I'm thrilled about. Say thank you. So I've asked you all to come on today to talk a little bit about the survey and the report and what it has enabled you to do. I want to start a little bit with Dominic and Simon, really, and ask them the questions, because they are in the position of being senior leaders in a visitor attraction. Kelly Molson: They've both publicly spoken to me and said that the report has enabled them to do some really exciting things. And I think it's probably important for me to state that you're not our clients, like Rubber Cheese is not. We don't work with either of you from a client perspective. I'd definitely count you as friends and obviously Skip the Queue podcast alumni now as well. So, Simon, let me come to you first. What has the report enabled you to do at Roman Baths and why has it been important for you to kind of take part? What's it delivered for you? Simon Addison: Sure, I think the report came out at a really important time for us because were already in the midst of a website redesign project. So what the report enabled us to do was to look at the findings in the report, the stats in the report, and ensure that were building our new website in a way that optimised that sort of user experience and customer journey. But I think also in visitor attractions, our websites are often trying to do two quite different things. So, on the one hand, it's sort of the gateway to a visit. It's the first place that people go when they're planning their visit and they want to maybe buy a ticket and come to Bath. Simon Addison: At the same time, it's also telling sort of our more engaged audience, information about the collection and information about the history of the site or research that we're undertaking. And we want to be able to really quickly segregate those two audiences, because one audience we want to keep there for as long as possible to delve into the stories that we want to tell them and to really sort of effectively convert them from a very transactional relationship, which is buying a ticket to one of more of a supporter where they might donate in future. They'll become engaged in our program. And so designing a website that on the first page helps to divert visitors from that sort of more engaged, we're here to learn from, “We want to buy a ticket for Saturday”, and sort of get them on their journey quickly, efficiently and as few clicks as possible. Simon Addison: So I think having that endorsement of the importance of the user, the journey, how many clicks is optimal before people start abandoning and giving up, that was so helpful in the way that were designing the website. Kelly Molson: Amazing. That is such a good testimony for what we've done. And obviously we can't do any of that unless people take part in the survey and submit their data. And so we can understand and learn how websites are performing in the first place. But for me, it's really exciting to hear that because I guess having those kind of baseline benchmarks is a starting point for the industry. And that's, for me, what was missing completely in that we can talk about how we want them to improve and how we want the sector to move on. And I think, Andy, we've had a conversation before where we kind of feel like the sector is a little bit behind, where other industries are probably about four or five years, potentially behind in some areas. Andy Povey: I'd go even further than that, Kelly.Kelly Molson: Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. Andy Povey: Generally people don't pick up the phone to me and ask me to come and talk about their ecommerce platforms if they're perfectly happy with what they're doing. So maybe I'm seeing a different side of the market. But it astounds me how many attractions there are that aren't able to monitor their performance, to look at their conversion rates, to look at their basket abandonment rates, all that kind of stuff. It's astounding, which is why I'm really happy to be working with you on the survey this year. Kelly Molson: Okay, well, let me go to Andy now. So, Andy, introduce yourself for your role at Convious.Andy Povey: So I'm responsible for everything we do with Convious in the UK and Ireland. So job title is MD, UK and Ireland. Kelly Molson: So Andy and I got introduced quite a while ago, actually, now. I feel like it was a Ticketing Professionals Conference. Was it there? Andy Povey: I think it was Dominic Jones that introduced us at the Museums and Heritage. Kelly Molson: Yes, it was Museums and Heritage. It was.Andy Povey: And it did indeed. Dominic Jones: I can't believe you forgot that. Kelly Molson: Yes, it was with the Sarcophagus.Dominic Jones: I brought two great people together. I mean, I feel like I don't get the credit for this introduction. Thank you. Kelly Molson: I'm sorry. Dominic Jones: You do? Kelly Molson: Yeah, it was you. You're actually really good at introducing people.Dominic Jones: Talented people. Talented people to each other. Kelly Molson: Yeah. You grabbed me at this year's Eminet show and introduced me to multiple people, actually. It was very kind of you. What a kind man you are. Dominic Jones: It's a pleasure. Andy Povey: Isn't he? Kelly Molson: So this year, well, I mean, I guess this is thanks to you, Dominic. So Dominic introduced Andy and I.Dominic Jones: You are welcome, by the way. Welcome. Kelly Molson: Why is it important for Convious to be part of what we're doing this year with the report?Andy Povey: Well, it's actually more important to me on a personal level, I think, Kelly. I'm a massive fan of attractions have been for my whole working life, which is there have been quite a lot of years in that so far, and I just want to see attractions doing better than they do at the moment. We've shared lots of conversations about really awful booking experiences, not just for attractions. Booking tickets to my kids, after school clubs. Personal bear of mine is dreadful. Don't ever do it if you don't have to. Andy Povey: So I find that really frustrating. It upsets me to see attractions getting it wrong and some get it really wrong. So having some benchmarks, having some industry standards where people can go, actually, we're not doing what we should be doing. And why aren't we able to measure that? And what does it mean to our business by not measuring that? It's really important. Kelly Molson: It is really important. It's been phenomenal to have the support of Convious and specifically Andy and Mirabelle, who I've worked very closely with over the past few months on this project. What it's also allowing us to do, and hopefully this will grow year on year, is that it's opening up to a European audience as well. So, Andy, Convious is a Dutch company originally. Andy Povey: Yes. So we're headquartered in Amsterdam. Germany is actually our largest market in terms of volume of customers, but we also have significant presence in France and Belgium, Netherlands and Bedelux area. Kelly Molson: So we have had a number of submissions this year from European countries. And that's all down to Convious. Andy Povey: Thank you. Kelly Molson: We would hope over the next few years that this can start to grow and grow and become something that isn't solely focused on the UK market, which would be really exciting. We did actually have a Canadian zoo take part yesterday, which was quite exciting. So the message is slowly starting to spread out worldwide as well. An international survey. That's exciting, isn't it? Andy Povey: Absolutely, yeah. Dominic Jones: It was a game changer. That's what you've done. You've created something that is a true game changer. I remember getting very excited about the results and sitting at the back of the London Transport Theatre or wherever you launched them, and then just getting depressed every single slide. I was like, “Oh, no, we don't do that, or, we don't do that well, or, that's not great”. But it was fantastic because actually, for the first time ever, were able to compare ourselves and think, “Right, so if this is the industry standard, how can we make that better? How can we adapt that at the Mary Rose in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard?” and things like the five steps to make a booking and all this other sort of stuff that you were putting out. And I remember writing my book and thinking, “This is awful. This is absolutely awfu”l because we are performing way worse than that. We're still not fixed it.Dominic Jones: We've got some money to look at websites and we put some new websites in and we're still developing it. But even little things like we changed and had a microsite last summer, we had one of our best summers ever, but we did that because of your data. We were looking and thinking, “We've got too many steps to making a booking or It takes too long to load this page, or actually we need to.” So I think you've really been a massive game changer, and if now you're getting the Canadians involved, I mean, it's going to be fantastic. I can't wait to see what they've got to say. Dominic Jones: So I do genuinely think you've made a big difference and I can't wait to see this year's results and next year's results. And I hope this is something you keep doing forever because you've made a real difference. You really have. Kelly Molson: Dominic, you're so kind. That's really kind. Thank you. That's amazing feedback. What I love about what you said is that you've actively been able to take the data that people have supplied and go, “We are here. We're not performing to that point yet. But if we make these changes, we can get to that point.” And that's what I love. This is what this is all about. It's about marginal gains. It's about making those tiny little 1% improvements every day and getting better and better. We couldn't ask for more. That's what we hoped. Dominic Jones: And before I get kicked and hit by all my colleagues, there were lots of things that were doing great as well. But actually, you don't talk about them, do you? Don't say, “Oh, well, we're doing okay because we're very British, we only really talk about the things that we want to improve or we're not doing right.” But I do think it's a phenomenal game changer and it's the sort of report that you can use as a toolkit to really sort of check where you are and where you want to be. And I genuinely can't wait for the next one. I hope we get a preview for doing this podcast. Did we get an early release? Is that part of the deal? Simon, did you sign something like that? Simon Addison: Yeah, signed it all. Dom, did you not get the paperwork? Dominic Jones: Of course you did. He's got people. Kelly Molson: If you've taken part in the survey, you will get it exclusively before it is released to the general public. So, I mean, I can confirm that you both have, which is a relief. Dominic Jones: Of course we have. We're early adopters, we love it. Simon Addison: I did check before we came on this afternoon that we completed it because I thought that would be really awkward. Dominic Jones: You probably won the Convious prize, right, for being one of the people that completed it all. The 100th person to complete. I saw all that online, honestly.Andy Povey: I think everyone got one by you, Dom. I don't know what it was you've done to upset Mirabelle in our marketing team. Dominic Jones: I think you're taking this podcast thing a little bit too seriously. Simon Addison: Just to go back to what you were saying, Kelly, about marginal gains, I think that is where the value of this is, because most of us have got websites that are capable of selling a ticket. But when you operate a visitor attraction as successful as Dom's, or you get hundreds of thousands of people going to your website or to your attraction each year, millions of people to the website. Simon Addison: And if you can achieve a 1% shift in a customer behaviour, the returns on that are really significant. So you don't have to suddenly come up with a revolutionary new website. You have to focus on what are the things that are just holding you back a little bit, removing those pain points from the customer journey. The uplift is so significant of just achieving a small percentage change. I know Dom doesn't like percentages, but that is what we're talking about here. Dominic Jones: No, with that terms, I do, absolutely. And you're absolutely right. And even little things like how it looks on a mobile as opposed to looking on a desktop.Simon Addison: Exactly.Dominic Jones: Change our way of thinking. And you've got to keep doing it because that's what's going to make this industry and where we all work and the amazing places that we work in even better. It's brilliant. Kelly Molson: Well, we absolutely will continue to do it. So this is the second year that we're running it and we have no intention of stopping. Just going back to what you said, Simon. I think what you said about making what you already have better in terms of your website, I think that's a really important point to push is that it has been a really weird few years. And this year I think all of us were kind of hoping this would be a year of normality. And let's face it really hasn't, has it? It's been another odd one. Kelly Molson: So we've started off the year, there's an awful war happening, there's a terrible cost of living crisis, there's all kinds of stuff happening that is affecting attractions. Yet again, affecting all of us, really, but affecting attractions in terms of whether people are going to come, how much they're going to spend, what they're going to do. We know that marketing budgets were going to be probably drastically cut this year by at least 15, 20%. That was the message that was being given when I attended the ALVA Heads of Marketing meeting before Christmas. So I think that being able to look at the report and use it to implement changes to what you already have is really important. You may not have the budget to go out and start again. Kelly Molson: You don't necessarily need to, but if there's improvements that you can be made to your site in terms of the performance or the speed, all of those things are going to help. They're all things that will add up over time and ultimately make the performance of it better and make the customer experience better. So think that's quite an important message to talk about. Another thing to add is that this year we're doing it again. We're asking the same questions that we did last year because obviously we need the same data set, but it's more so it's bigger and better. We'll get feedback on whether that's too much for people, but we're asking questions around Usability, whether you're collecting feedback. We're asking questions around kind of promotions and discounts and how people are measuring their traffic sources and whether they're doing user tests. Kelly Molson: So there's so much more that's going to be in it from this year. And one really exciting thing which you touched on, Dominic, is that everybody that takes part in the survey will get exclusive access to the report before it's made public. But actually, as soon as you've filled in the survey this year, you get a little mini report. And what it does is benchmark you where you are now against the benchmarks from last year. So it will give you a little report to identify how your website is performing based on last year's benchmarks that we identified. Now that's really important. So you could be underperforming, you might be performing too, you might be overperforming, you might be doing better than those benchmarks from last year, and those benchmarks may change dramatically from last year to this year, we don't know yet. Kelly Molson: So that's like a little added bonus. If you're on the fence about taking part, you will get something that's actionable as soon as you've taken part in the survey this year. This year the report will launch towards the end of September. We will release dates and be a bit more specific once we've closed the survey. But this episode is going to launch on the 5th July. That means that you've just got one week left to take part. So one week left before the survey closes on the 12th of July. So if you are thinking about it, stop thinking about it. Go and do it. It will literally take 20 minutes. You're going to need your Google Analytics open or other analytics tool that you use. You can find the link to the survey in our show notes of this show. Kelly Molson: You can head over to Rubbercheese.com and you will find the link to it on the home page. Or you can search for the 2023 Visitor Attraction Website Report and you will find it. You can head over to Convious and you will find it on Convious website. It's everywhere. Go find it. Do it. Take part. These guys did it. Made a big difference. Dominic Jones: Best 20 minutes of your life. Just do it. Just do it. Honestly, what else can you do? So much value in 20 minutes. There's not much else you can do.Kelly Molson: I worry about how you spend your time. If that's the best 20 minutes of real life. Dominic, that's a concern, but, I mean, he's not wrong. Dominic Jones: I mean at work, not like in real life. I do amazing things in my normal life. Kelly Molson: If you could talk to all of the visitor attractions that are listening now, what would you say to them to encourage them to go and take part? Simon Addison: I would say that if you're not already looking at the things you need to fill in, then you should be looking at them anyway. So you say it takes 20 minutes, Kelly, to fill them in? I'll be honest. I didn't fill them in for the Roman Baths, our Digital Marketing officer did. And I think Dom's blank face when you're talking about the mini report also tells me that he didn't fill it in for Mary Rose either. But it's 20 minutes. But it's all data that you should be looking at. And if you're not looking at it's probably a prompt that you or your teams need to be looking at it anyway. Simon Addison: And getting that report allows you to either make the case with your trustees or your board to invest if you need investment, or it provides an endorsement of the quality of the website and the offer that you've got. Either one of those things is really useful and we know how hard it is to get investment. Kelly, you talked about marketing budgets at the moment. If you want to get money to invest in your website, having this evidence will help convince your CEO or your Trustees that's the right thing for you to do. And equally, if you don't need to, then this is confirmation of that. So that's what I'd say. Kelly Molson: Thank you. That is brilliant. How about you, Dom? Dominic Jones: I'd agree and I'll come clean. I didn't fill it in either, but someone did do it. But it's not the filling in, it's the reading it and using it that counts. Right? That's what matters. It's about receiving it and doing something with it. I actually think it's really useful to get as much benchmark data as possible in this industry. And actually what you do is you give us this for websites, you give it for ecommerce and it's fantastic. I wish there were more people doing it in all the areas of our industry because actually this visitor attraction to get benchmarks is quite rare. So it's fantastic to get that. So I really appreciate that. And I would say if you're listening and you work in a visitor attraction, why wouldn't you do this? Dominic Jones: Because like Simon says, you can understand where you are. You can use it for funding, you can use it towards getting revenue, you can use it towards recruiting some extra people in your team. You can use it to how you performance manage your team. You can use it for so many things. It's such a good document. I can't stress enough, I might not have filled out the form, but I definitely read it and I definitely used it and I do definitely love it.Kelly Molson: Wow. So appreciative of your fabulous comments. Thank you both. Andy, what would you add to that? Andy Povey: Well, I don't know that I can, but really it shouldn't really take you that long to complete this because you should be all over this kind of data anyway. If you're a digital offer in any business and if you're not looking at this kind of stuff, then it's probably time to really start managing your business in a much better way. And really, just to reiterate the point, that an incremental improvement, just a 0.5% improvement in the results in this kind of area can deliver you hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pounds extra additional revenue over a twelve month period. So what else is that you could do in your business in 20 minutes that's going to potentially deliver that kind of result? Kelly Molson: Wow. There you go. I think you've said it all. Well done. Thank you. I really appreciate this. I threw this at you literally a few days ago to come on and they've had no time to prepare whatsoever. So I'm super grateful that you've given up a little bit of time for me to talk about it today. This is something that I'm so passionate about. I bloody love this podcast. I'm so lucky that I get to talk to such lovely people. And I think, like you've all said, just like, I mean, like echoing what Andy said, being able to make this industry better is something that is literally like at the core of me right now. I just want to see good people doing really good things and having really good results. Kelly Molson: So if everyone could please just go out and fill the Blooming survey and I'd be really grateful. Thank you. Right, books. Have you all prepared a book today? I didn't ask you to. I've got a book, but I feel like you might have. Right, throw it out. Dominic Jones: So I've got a book called The Alignment Advantage Transform Your Strategy, Culture and Customers to Succeed. Now, I love a good strategy book, so the last time I was on the podcast I recommended Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, a great book about strategy. I did bill it as the best book on strategy. Scrap that. It's the second best book on strategy. This is now the best book on strategy because it talks about how you have to align your culture and as a strategic enabler, your strategy and your experience. And for people who listen to Skip the Queue or fill out the Rubber Cheese Website Survey or work with Convious, one of the best people to work with in the world, they will love this book. It is incredible. The only book to read on Strategy by Richard Nugent, The Alignment Advantage. Fantastic. Dominic Jones: There is also an interview with a great guy from the Mary Rose in chapter two, I can't remember his name. I think it rhymes with Dominic Jones. I can't remember it fully, but it's very good to read.Kelly Molson: I knew that there was something like that coming. I knew, Dominic. Amazing. Thank you for another number one strategy book. Simon, what would your book be and have you featured in it? Simon Addison: I can say I have not featured in this book. Unlike Dom, I don't read a lot of business and leadership books. I tend to read for escapism and relaxation. But I have picked a workbook and it's probably the only workbook I've gone back to and reread portions of. And it's called Leadership: Plain and Simple by Steve Radcliffe. The book was a foundation of a leadership course that I did when I was at the National Trust, which was called Future Engage, Deliver. And it was centered on the idea that in order to be an effective leader, you need to have clarity of your vision for the future. You need to engage your colleagues and your teams in that future and then collectively, you need to work together to deliver it. And it sort of broke that strategy and leadership piece into those three distinct portions. Simon Addison: And it had some really helpful models in there for self reflection, for getting meaningful feedback from teams and developing techniques to engage stakeholders in the delivery of your vision. I would recommend that obviously it's not the first or the second best book on leadership, but maybe it's the third. Who knows?Kelly Molson: Love that. What's really interesting is these books. Both neither of those books have been recommended on the podcast before, so I always like it when a new ones come up because I add it onto my little wish list on Amazon. Dominic Jones: I'm going to read that book. I've not heard of that one, Simon, but that sounds amazing. I do love the book recommendations. I do the same. I go buy them. Except for the Harry Potter one.Kelly Molson: I already had and you knocked Geoff off as well, didn't you? Dominic Jones: Did I knock Geoff off? Kelly Molson: Yeah. Geoff was number one for quite a while. Dominic Jones: Is he no longer number one? Skip the Queue. Kelly Molson: No, did I not tell you that you are number one?Simon Addison: Once you edit this out, kelly, this is going to be a really short podcast episode. Kelly Molson: I'm leaving all of this in. Andy, what about you? Have you got a book that you'd like to share? Andy Povey: A book I'll keep going back to is The Experience Economy by Joe Pine. And I don't know whether someone else has recommended this in the past, but for me, that whole life chain value thing, the graph where you talk about a thing becoming a commodity and everything moving into the sort of experience space, really fits with what we're doing in our industry. It really fits with what we do at Convious. The reason I enjoy what we do. Kelly Molson: It's a good book. I'm going to ask Joe if he'll come on the podcast. Andy Povey: So I saw him talking at the Blooloop conference a few years ago. Absolutely compelling. Dominic Jones: Could he maybe talk at the January? Why don't we get him on 2025 podcast? Let's do that, right? Kelly Molson: Yeah, let's discuss it off the pod. Yeah, we'll discuss that later. Thank you all. I'm so grateful. Oh, as ever. Sorry, listeners. If you want to win a copy of those books, head over to our Twitter feed. You know what to do. Retweet this podcast announcement. But more importantly, go and fill in the survey. Be so grateful. Andy Povey: Fill in the survey. Kelly Molson: Fill in the survey. We have got, actually a podcast exclusive. Let me tell you how many attractions have taken part so far. Last year, 2022, 70 attractions from up and down the country took part. This year with a week well, actually, it's two weeks today, but a week to go. When this podcast launches, 129 attractions have taken part. So we've nearly doubled on last year. I'm so thrilled. But, yeah, if we could get that to 140, that would be amazing. Imagine 140 attractions being able to improve their websites this year, being able to improve their customer service, being able to improve their bottom line. That's what it's all about. Thanks, guys. You've been amazing. Simon Addison: Thanks, Kelly. Dominic Jones: Incredible.Andy Povey: Thank you, Kelly. Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast.

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#66 - Our Top 10 Roller Coasters

guide adventures acast sven rambles al nassr journeymen football ramble chessington world

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 2, 2023 158:05

In this week's episode, we discuss all of our top 10 coasters! We also go through the latest news from the Theme Park industry around the world including World of Jumanji at Chessington World of Adventures, Luna at Liseberg, ImaScore news and the Vekoma coming to Hassoland in Poland.

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The Football Ramble's Guide To… Journeymen

The Football Ramble

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 11, 2023 40:14

With Cristiano Ronaldo's move to Al Nassr, he's now played for five different clubs in five different countries. So he has officially joined that revered, mocked and suspicious legion: the journeymen! But, what are they? What makes them tick? And why can some players – and clubs – just never settle?Today, we take a deep dive into the players and managers who simply cannot stop moving: including the goalkeeper who has played on every continent, the striker who was caught with cocaine at Chessington World of Adventures, and Sven – obviously.Tweet us @FootballRamble and email us here: show@footballramble.com.Sign up for our Patreon for exclusive live events, ad-free Rambles, full video episodes and loads more: patreon.com/footballramble.***Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks!*** Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

#57 - Phantasialand - A Wintertraum Special

adventures epic universe phantasialand chessington world

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 15, 2022 141:56

In this week's podcast, we talk all things Phantasialand! We also catch up on the latest news including Mission Ferrari, Jumanji Coaster at Chessington World of Adventures, Epic Universe's Mack Dueling coaster construction and much much more!

Looking forward to 2023: Key digital trends attractions shouldn't miss out on.

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 14, 2022 38:20

EPISODE NOTESSkip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is Kelly Molson, Founder of Rubber Cheese. Download the Rubber Cheese 2022 Visitor Attraction Website Report - the first digital benchmark statistics for the attractions sector. If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast Competition ends January 31st 2023. The winner will be contacted via Twitter. Show references: https://www.convious.com/https://twitter.com/MrTicketeerhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/andypovey/ https://blooloop.com/technology/news/convious-consumer-pricinghttps://blooloop.com/technology/news/convious-digital-trends-webinar/ Andy Povey joined Convious in November 2021 as managing director for UK and Ireland. Andy has worked in the attractions industry since the early nineties when he began as a ride operator at Chessington World of Adventures. He stayed with the Tussaud's company and later Merlin Entertainments for another 18 years, working in a variety of operational jobs at Rock Circus, Madame Tussauds, and central support, where he was responsible for the group's ticketing systems. After Merlin, he worked for Gateway Ticketing Systems for ten years, opening and then overseeing their UK operation, before transferring his experience to the Convious team. Outside work, Andy enjoys visiting attractions of all shapes and sizes with his family. Transcriptions: Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in, or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Kelly Molson. Each episode, I speak with industry experts from the attractions world. In today's episode, I speak with Andy Povey, Managing Director, UK and Ireland for Convious. Andy shares with us the five key digital trends attractions shouldn't miss out on and research into dynamic pricing for theme parks and tourist attractions. If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue.Kelly Molson: Andy Povey, it's so lovely to have you on Skip The Queue podcast today. Thanks for coming on.Andy Povey: Thank you. It's my absolute pleasure.Kelly Molson: And I know you've been a bit poorly. So let's just state now, poor old Andy has had COVID, and he's got a little bit of a cold today. So be kind to him.Andy Povey: It's man flu.Kelly Molson: It's always man flu, Andy. Right. As ever, we're going to start with icebreakers and I've got a really good one for you. So how would you describe your job to a three year old?Andy Povey: Oh, to a three year old? Well, I've got eight year old twin girls. So as far as they're concerned, daddy gets to go to zoos and theme parks without them, which is not brilliant. But no, I make computers work, I suppose.Kelly Molson: Make computers work for cool attractions like zoos and theme parks. I think that's perfect.Andy Povey: Absolutely.Kelly Molson: Good job, Andy. We'll talk more about that later. Okay. What one thing would you make a law that isn't one already?Andy Povey: That's a really difficult one.Kelly Molson: They're always difficult, Andy. It's always.Andy Povey: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're being mean to me. Yeah. Oh, I'm in our office in Amsterdam at the moment, so I'm traveling a bit. And I do have a theory that you should never, ever fly from an airport where people feel it's appropriate to turn up in flip flops.Kelly Molson: Well, even if you're traveling back from holiday and it's a bit warm.Andy Povey: So the law would be, if I'm at the airport, and I'm waiting in the back to get to Carousel, you need to get out of my way.Kelly Molson: I think that's fair. Everyone goes a bit savage at the airport. Don't you think? You know when you go into London, and there's a certain way that you act on the tubes to get to places. You've got to walk really, you've got to be very determined, haven't you?Andy Povey: Absolutely.Kelly Molson: That's how I feel when I go into London. I've got my London walk on. And I feel it's a bit like that at the airports as well. Everyone's all in it for themselves. They don't care about anyone else around them. It's all just-Andy Povey: No, no. Get out of my way.Kelly Molson: Yeah. It's a good law, Andy. Right. Everyone has to get out of Andy's way at the airport. That's the law. Nice. Okay. And this one, I've asked a few people this one. Because I really like this one. What would you buy as you exit through the gift shop?Andy Povey: I'm not really into things. I'm much more of an experience kind of person. So if there was another experience, or something to enhance the experience, then it would be something like that.Kelly Molson: Okay. Good answer.Andy Povey: Yeah, something to enhance the experience.Kelly Molson: Good answer. I like that, Andy. And we'll talk about that a little bit more later as well. What would your twin girls pick? What would be their things from the theme park?Andy Povey: Oh, cuddly toys. You must be the same. Shelves and shelves and shelves of these things in the house.Kelly Molson: My daughter is doing incredibly well from all of the visits though that I have been on recently. Yeah. Let me tell you the gift shops, I've been [inaudible 00:03:28].Andy Povey: Squish 'em alls.Kelly Molson: To the gift shops. Yeah.Andy Povey: What do they call them?Kelly Molson: Squishy animals, all sorts of stuff. She's now got from various attractions that she's never been to that I'll have to take her to, to say thank you.Andy Povey: No, when mine were the same age as your daughter, I went to Orlando a few times for IAAPA. And I would buy them Mickey Mouse and Mini Mouse cuddly toys, and bring them home. But because they'd never seen anything to do with Disney, these were just referred to as Boy Mouse and Girl Mouse.Kelly Molson: Oh, bless them.Andy Povey: They didn't know what Mickey Mouse was.Kelly Molson: Oh. And I'm sure they do very well now.Andy Povey: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.Kelly Molson: All right, Andy, what is your unpopular opinion? What have you prepared for us?Andy Povey: I actually did a poll of my colleagues in the office, because I was looking at something to do with Eurovision, and actually trying to work out whether my opinion was unpopular or not. And unfortunately it wasn't. So Eurovision massively overrated is my opinion of this.Kelly Molson: Gosh. So-Andy Povey: I knew we were going to fall out over this.Kelly Molson: Well, it's not just me. There's a lot of listeners that you are going to make very unhappy about that statement, Andy. Not to mention Rachel MacKay, who, if she hears this, I don't know how she's going to feel the next time she sees you. So that is for you to feel awkward about.Andy Povey: You asked for an unpopular opinion.Kelly Molson: Okay, let's put it out there. How does everyone feel about Eurovision? I feel like this is definitely going to be an unpopular one, Andy. Thank you. Right. Okay. Andy, so you have got over two decades in the attraction sector, self proclaimed attractions industry nerd. I think that's fair. Tell us a little bit about your background, and how you ended up working in the sector.Andy Povey: A colleague did tell me the other day that it's actually 30 years, and I was trying to hide away from this. Yes, I am old. So many, many years ago, started a temporary seasonal job at Chessington World of Adventures, having left college without a clue about what I wanted to do when I grew up. My first job was driving the train around the park at Chessington, and absolutely fell in love with the attractions industry. And then stayed with Merlin or The Tussauds Group, which then became Merlin Entertainment for about 18 years, and doing all sorts of different jobs. So that's how I fell into it. And I've never looked back.Kelly Molson: It's a really common theme actually, from guests that come on who've gone to work in a theme park or an attraction as what they probably thought would be a temp job for a while. And then absolutely loved every minute of it, and then have just risen through the ranks. Whether they've stayed in one group or they've moved around. But they've just continued to learn, and learn, and learn, and progress. And that comes across so frequently with our guests. It sucks you in.Andy Povey: It absolutely does. And it's a great industry. And I love the fact that you can build a career within our industry from starting right at the bottom, and just work your way up. I think it's a testament to the industry.Kelly Molson: What kind of roles did you work in then as you moved your way up?Andy Povey: So I did four years at Chessington as a ride operator. Then went to Rock Circus, which was a subsidiary of Madame Tussauds in the Trocadero and Piccadilly Circus in Central London. It was there for four years, and we were told that someone from head office was going to come and install the till system and tell me how to make it work. At which point I went, "Oh, maybe not." So I went and became that person.Kelly Molson: Oh, you were a tills man?Andy Povey: Yeah, I was. It was a tills man. So I started in ticketing before the internet.Kelly Molson: Yeah.Andy Povey: Before anybody really knew what the internet was, and then moved to Madame Tussauds for a short period of time, and then to what was Tussauds Group head office in Tottenham Court Road looking after all of the till systems for the organisation. And then did that for about 10 years, and then left, went and joined the supplier that we were using, Tussauds, so gateway ticketing. I was with them for 10 years. Basically convinced them to set up a UK office, and I ran the UK office for 10 years. And then after COVID, decided it was time to go and do something else. So came across Convious, the company I work for now, and whose office I'm sitting in today. And that's it, really. That's a very brief summary of Andy's career.Kelly Molson: Excellent career. I'd like to hear a little bit about Convious. So I am aware of you, and I think that most people at the moment would be aware of Convious. They're everywhere. Convious are everywhere.Andy Povey: Yeah. We're bright pink, and we shout a lot.Kelly Molson: And they're pink.Andy Povey: Don't know what they do.Kelly Molson: You have fantastic stands, events that we all attend. But I think there's something really different about Convious. Can you just tell us a little bit about it?Andy Povey: So it's not just what Convious are doing. There's something going off in the whole world of technology that the sales force are referring to as the fourth industrial revolution. And so competing with third industrial revolution from sort of 1949 to 2010, the fourth industrial revolution's all about data. And five years ago everyone was talking about big data. That was the buzzword that was everywhere. So we were just storing loads and loads of information. The fourth industrial revolution we're seeing now is actually doing things with that data. Because there's no point in just paying for a load of storage somewhere, if you're not going to do anything with it.So what we're doing at Convious with that data. It's really sitting on top of our partner's websites rather than being a page that you go off to, and gathering as much data as we possibly can. So we pull in long range weather forecasts, we're pulling in all sorts of information about how people are interacting with the website. And ultimately just using it all to drive sales and increase sales for our partners.Kelly Molson: I know that the weather thing is a really small thing of the system. It's a tiny thing, but it's the thing that sticks in my head the most. Because I just think it's blooming genius. I know. It's such a small thing, but it's such a clever thing to have.Andy Povey: It really does affect attendance at so many attractions. And I love Dom Jones when he was talking to you. I love his take on the weather, of actually, if you're going to blame the weather, you should also give the weather credit when you have a great attendance.Kelly Molson: I agree. Yeah, I love that quote from Dom. So it is really interesting in terms of what Convious do. Because I think that one of the things that attractions could be better at is using the data that they already have in more sophisticated ways. And the Convious platform allows you to do that really easily. Because let's face it, marketing teams are overstretched in attractions. And they can be quite small at times as well. We had Danielle and Ross on from Drayton Manor a few weeks ago. And the two of them pretty much head up their department. And I know they're a head of marketing as well. But that's a small team for what is a significant attraction.Andy Povey: Yes. Yeah, yeah.Kelly Molson: So anything that we can help to put in place for those teams is ultimately going to make it easier for them, and make it better. And they'll be able to understand better what their customers are actually doing.Andy Povey: And ultimately it's about making it easier for the customer. There's a whole focus on personalization at the moment, again, across the industry. So rather than it being one too many, it's one personalisation. And looking at, if we know something about the customer, so take me for example. I buy family tickets, and I love industrial heritage. So Google knows that about me, and Google will tell every website that I go to, that's who I am. So if we've got a family offering as an attraction, then let's promote the family offering. If you've got an industrial heritage offering, let's promote the industrial heritage offering to the people who've identified that they are. Ultimately it's about giving people what they want.Kelly Molson: And that's the really smart bit, isn't it? That the system can identify the person that's coming, and show them the things that are more relevant to them from that attraction. Then the standard things that they might like, they might buy. But actually this is the one that they really want, because that's connecting with them at a completely deeper level. That's some of the stuff that I want to talk about today. So one of the things that's good about Convious, and I'd like to hope that Rubber Cheese are aligned in this way as well, is that when we think about talking to attractions, we're giving them things that are useful. I think, that ultimately from any marketing perspective is how useful can you be? This content that I'm putting out, what value does it bring somebody? And how can they engage with it? And is it helpful for them?And that's what I feel Convious does really well. And I see a lot of your articles on Blooloop for example. And a month or so ago there was an article about the five key digital trends for attractions as we roll into 2023. And I think that this is a really good time to talk about these things. Because people are doing a lot of planning at this time of year. They're in Christmas, which this year feels very busy, because it's the first Christmas people can-Andy Povey: It certainly does.Kelly Molson: It's the first one though, if you think about it, that people can actually go out and feel comfortable that the things they're going to book, they can actually do. Last year we still had that Omicron. Do we do big groups? Do we just stay inside a little bit longer? But this year feels busy. And I think that attractions will get through Christmas, have a brilliant Christmas. And then January will be that time when they go "Right, what are we doing? This is what we need to focus on now." So this is very pertinent. It comes at a great time. One of the key trends that you just mentioned was personalization. So you talked about making things relevant to your audience. Really, really relevant. Are we talking about exclusive here as well? Because we talk about that quite a lot. Exclusive events and things that they can only get at certain places.Andy Povey: Yeah, I think so. And I think that's one of the things that, not just around digital, I think it's one of the things that the attractions world will do to really weather the economic storm that we're going through at the moment. Generally what we've seen over the past 12 months is that if you've got a short event, or a short-term event, it tends to sell out. So looking at what you as an attraction can do that creates that exclusive event. So if you are a park, can you get Peppa Pig on site for two or three days? Can you get Paw Patrol there for a couple of days? So giving people their incentive to come, and come again, and come again. So not just being, this is the six weeks of the summer at my theme park. This is the Peppa Pig, fortnight, although two days. And this is the Paw Patrol for two days. So improving that repeat visitation.Kelly Molson: And what you talked about data, I guess that comes back to really understanding your audience.Andy Povey: Absolutely.Kelly Molson: So you need to be collecting the data to understand what those people want in the first phase to then be able to tailor your offering to what they like.Andy Povey: 100%. 100%. There's no value in creating a Peppa Pig experience if none of your visitors have got kids. A great way to waste a load of money.Kelly Molson: I don't need to see Peppa.Andy Povey: No. No, no, no.Kelly Molson: You can keep Peppa. So you talked earlier about what you like, and that Google knows that about you. How do attractions tap into that? I guess through advertising, right?Andy Povey: Well it's not just advertising. It's actually looking at... And you did the survey a few weeks ago about the attractions, and understanding Google Analytics, that kind of stuff. It's free. You do not need to pay to get Google Analytics data. It's there for you. And there are so many venues, and so many prospective clients that I'm talking to now, that don't have access to it. It's almost criminal. There are still vendors out there that don't share this information. So I suppose to come back and answer your question is, go and look at the data that you've got. Google Analytics will give you a view of everybody that's coming to your website.Kelly Molson: Find out who they are, what they like, and then give them what they want.Andy Povey: Well, yeah. But tailor something for them. So if you've got a large foodie audience, then look at your catering.Kelly Molson: Yeah, that's really good advice.Andy Povey: Can you put on a Heston Blumenthal event, or a Jamie Oliver event?Kelly Molson: Yeah, that's really great advice actually, taking it to that deeper level. The second key digital trend was about online and offline, which we're talking a lot about online and offline as well. So this isn't just about digital, but I guess one of the things that was mentioned was about digital experiences. And I guess you can talk about that from a pre-visit perspective. How do you engage people digitally before they turn up at your event? But also, once they're at your venue too. So digital experiences that deepen or extend the experience that you were already giving them. Can you think of any really good examples of that, that we could talk about from an attractions perspective?Andy Povey: That's really difficult. The reason that we go to attractions as human beings, is because we like doing physical things. We want to be with our friends. We want to be with our family. Particularly after COVID, it's has been difficult to go and see granny, and whatever. So it's safer to go and visit a park, or to visit a garden than it is to possibly all sit around in the lounge, having a cup of tea. I can give you an unusual example, I suppose. The Forestry Commission did something a few years ago with The Gruffalo, and it's an augmented reality thing.Kelly Molson: Yes.Andy Povey: So as a parent, you could sit your child on a tree trunk and hold up your phone, and the augmented reality would superimpose an image of the Gruffalo sitting next to your child. They pulled it within six months, because the parent is having this experience of looking at their child through a phone. Whereas the child's sitting there going, "Well, mummy and daddy's just on their phone again."Kelly Molson: "Where's the Gruffalo?"Andy Povey: "Mummy and daddy's just on their phone again. What are we doing?"Kelly Molson: Yeah.Andy Povey: So in that situation it's about getting back to reality, rather than being digital. So it's a really fine line. At what point does an app, or a park map, or something like that, at what point does it enhance your visit, versus intruding on your visit?Kelly Molson: Yeah, that's a really good question. It's really funny, because when you mentioned that, I was like, that's a perfect example of this, how digital interacts with nature. But you're right, aren't you? Because the child doesn't interact with it. They just see you pointing a phone at them again, or you interacting with your phone and not with them. I hadn't considered that, and what message that actually sends out to them while they're outside in nature as well.Andy Povey: Yeah. And so I'm not a [inaudible 00:18:44] who's going, no, no, digital should be nowhere near your experience. It should be there, and it should be enhancing. But actually really understand that it is enhancing. So if you talk to the guys from BeWILDerwood, I know there was a podcast with Hannah. They delight on the fact that you can't get a mobile phone signal in Norfolk. Because you should put your phone away. You're here to have a day out with the kids.Kelly Molson: Yeah, that's a really good point. I actually quite like it when I can't get any mobile signal, because it means that I'm present.Andy Povey: Yes, absolutely.Kelly Molson: It means I'm not worrying about having to check something. I'm actually not even that concerned about, oh I needed to get this picture for the gram. I just forget about it if I've got no signal. It's just not going to happen. One thing that we do have to think about though, from an online perspective, is about bookings. So what we have seen, and again we've seen this in our attractions website survey that we've just published, is that bookings are increasing on mobile year, on year, on year, on year. So we do have to think about that pre-visit, and how easy we make it for people to book tickets. So actually, someone asked me this question on LinkedIn yesterday. What's one of my top infuriations with attractions websites?And I said for me, I'm often on my mobile phone when I'm doing things, because I'm out and about and I might be booking my tickets on a mobile phone. And I really hate when you're forced to create an account before you can actually buy anything. And I'm like, "God, I've got literally five minutes before I get off the train, and onto the tube. And I've got no signal. And I've got to get this ticket. I don't want to be creating an account right now."Andy Povey: No, no, no.Kelly Molson: Just give me the ticket. I might get an account afterwards, but just give me the ticket.Andy Povey: That was one of the things from your report, wasn't it? The account creation is a massive turnoff to conversion. And for me, I never remember any of those passwords. So every time I go back to their store, I'm having to reset my password, because it's just an absolute pain in the butt.Kelly Molson: I'm with you. So there you go.Andy Povey: Don't do it.Kelly Molson: Top tip from this podcast. Don't make people do that.Andy Povey: Yeah. Don't do accounts.Kelly Molson: Two very angry consumers here.Andy Povey: Absolutely. 100%.Kelly Molson: All right. So number three on our digital trends list is increasing loyalty. Now this is a big one, isn't it? Right? So again, it's interesting. So from a personal perspective, again, I was asked about memberships. We have a National Trust membership, it renews in January. I'll absolutely be renewing it. It's great value for money. It gives us so many places locally that we can go to. It's not a free day out, but it's a great day out, and we can take quite long.Andy Povey: It feels like it.Kelly Molson: It feels like a free day.Andy Povey: Yeah.Kelly Molson: Yeah. But do attractions need to think a bit more about that now? So should attractions be rewarding loyalty? So member perks for example? Or just small things that members get for being a member, that you couldn't get unless you were a member?Andy Povey: Absolutely. It's almost those money-can't-buy experiences. So it doesn't necessarily cost the attraction anything to do these things. And you can go have a member exclusive event to walk a coaster track, or to a behind the scenes tour of something. But yeah, all right. It might cost you a couple of hours for a member of staff to put it on. Again, as we came out of COVID, the first people that came to your rotation, were your most loyal customers. They've come to see you as the first thing they can do. So as an attraction, you have the opportunity to harness that loyalty, and turn these people into advocates. And that's going to be your best marketing resource, where they're recommending to people to come along to you. So if you can deepen that relationship by rewarding, by sharing, then absolutely you should do it.Kelly Molson: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's understanding what they want as well. So when we talk about delivering what they want, should attractions be surveying their members, and finding out what more they can give them? And again, it comes back to the data thing again, doesn't it? How well do you know your audience? From a member's perspective, are you actually giving them what they want?Andy Povey: No, absolutely. And surveying's great, but there's so many other ways you can capture information about members and what they're doing that isn't actually going and asking them a question. It was interesting when we did the dynamic pricing consumer research. The responses that you get from people when they're answering a survey aren't necessarily what they're doing in real life.Kelly Molson: Interesting. Give us an example.Andy Povey: There was, 30% of people believe the airlines aren't charging dynamic prices. And I'm looking at this going, well, this can't be right. This is obvious. But actually, if you dig into it a little bit more, and we did with the guys from Baker Richards. And it's actually, the consumer's not looking at the price changing. The consumer's interested in the price they're paying for the date and time that they want to get on the plane. It doesn't matter that the price changes. It's how much am I paying today? What's my price now? That's a very long winded way of answering your question about the value of surveys.Kelly Molson: Yeah. No, it's really important, isn't it? So how else do you get to know your members? If surveys are giving us not quite the full picture, what other ways can we find out about-Andy Povey: So if you are looking at app, then obviously you are tracking, or you have the ability to track where people are going, how they're engaging, that kind of stuff. I was at IAAPA a couple of weeks ago in Orlando. And there's guys there with a new product that's actually harvesting location data from 200 different apps, and bringing all that, and presenting it back to you. Which I'm not a hundred percent sure that it is GDPR compliant, or [inaudible 00:24:44].Kelly Molson: Is that okay though? I'm not sure about that.Andy Povey: Yeah. But there it's looking at where people are going, how long they're staying there, and that kind of stuff. So that's one example. Going back to what we do at Convious, we don't capture addresses, postal addresses. Because we're not interested in old school CRM. We're not going to produce a mailing, a physical piece of paper and post it out to somebody. So why are you asking them to fill in all those fields with their address on?Kelly Molson: That's interesting. So even from a geographic perspective, it's not always relevant to understand where your customers are traveling from.Andy Povey: You can get all of that from the IP address that they're coming from.Kelly Molson: Sure.Andy Povey: So obviously it's really important to understand whereabouts in the country, and how far away your customers are from you, and that kind of stuff. But there are other ways to gathering that information, rather than traditional filling in. Back to your comment about filling in my address on the phone. Yeah, I've got fat fingers. I'm not going to type my address in on the phone.Kelly Molson: And I'm busy.Andy Povey: Yeah, yeah.Kelly Molson: It's not going to happen.Andy Povey: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.Kelly Molson: All right. Yeah. No, I like that.Andy Povey: Make it as simple as you possibly can for people.Kelly Molson: Yeah, absolutely. And the data's already there, so just gather it from the right place without giving people something else that they need to do. Good. Okay. All right. Well, our next one is about engagement, digital engagement. So digital engagement, from a marketing perspective, I always think about user generated content at this point. Because you're asking your visitors, from an offline perspective, you're asking them to engage with something that's at your physical attraction, but then you then encouraging them to share that digitally. So you're getting that double exposure and, you're also generating content from your users, which is invaluable for your marketing team. So that's the thing that I always focus on from digital engagement. What other things can we ask attractions to focus on?Andy Povey: A story someone told me many, many years ago was that their marketing guy actually ran a training session at this attraction, I can't remember which one, for staff on how to take the best photos.Kelly Molson: Oh that's great. Yeah.Andy Povey: You see a family, and mum or dad's taking a picture of the other parent and the kids, obviously the member of staff is going to offer to take the photograph for them. That's just human nature. That's what we do. But if you've already identified the most memorable background to put these people in, then the member staff can just move them slightly. And it improves and increases the rate of those photos being uploaded and shared.Kelly Molson: That's such a small thing, isn't it?Andy Povey: Isn't it?Kelly Molson: But again, that's genius. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get a better picture for people. They're more encouraged to share it. I love it. That's so clever. I hadn't even considered that. But again, that comes back to the people. People make places.Andy Povey: Absolutely.Kelly Molson: So you empower the people to make those things happen better for those guests. I love that. Yeah, great one. Okay. And then I guess reviews is something that's really important about engagement. And how do we encourage people to leave reviews about the venues?Andy Povey: It can be as simple as your post visit survey. Standard. Everyone's doing them.Kelly Molson: Ah, are they though? Are they though?Andy Povey: Well, yeah okay. Everyone should be doing them.Kelly Molson: Okay. Should be.Andy Povey: Everyone should be doing them. And then you can have some intelligence sitting behind it, that if you get a lot of high scores, whatever, then direct the consumer over to the review site at the end of the review. If you're getting some negative scores, then direct them to your customer service team and do something about it. As human beings, we're happy to share this kind of information, as long as we're getting something back from it. It's a transactional relationship at that point. So we talk a lot about harvesting data. But morally, you can't do that if you're not giving the consumer something back, and giving them a benefit for doing it. Back to your comment about accounts. What's the point of me creating an account? What's my benefit of doing this? There isn't one. I'm just going to get annoyed about it.Kelly Molson: This is the thing, actually. So most of the time when I've had to create an account to get my ticket, there hasn't been any further interaction other than someone's whacked me on their mailing list. And I'm probably going to unsubscribe from that mailing list, because I'm annoyed that I've had to make the account in the first place. So what is that benefit? Yeah. Think about if you are going to force people to do something, at least make it worthwhile for them than a newsletter. Just sticking them on the newsletter list is not going to cut it.Andy Povey: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. And then for a long time I was on the Encore Hotels mailing list. I get an email from them a couple of times a week. And it started, Dear Povey, you-Kelly Molson: Dear Povey.Andy Povey: Dear Povey, you have got that so wrong. You cannot. Your CRM is so bad.Kelly Molson: Can I tell you though? So sometimes when I have to sign up for stuff and I have to put my company name, I get emails to Dear Rubber. That's not okay. I'm quite used to it, but it's still not okay.Andy Povey: No, no, no, no. So yeah. We're talking a lot about examples of how not to do it, than how to do it better.Kelly Molson: Well I think this is important, right?Andy Povey: It is.Kelly Molson: There may be attractions listening to this, going, "Oops, we might have done that. We might need to change that." So it's all relevant.Andy Povey: Oh no, on a positive. I got an email from Father Christmas yesterday. It's from an attraction we took the kids to last year to go and see Santa. And it's the first mail I've had from that venue since visiting, so 12 months. So I'm not getting spammed. And you see Father Christmas arrive in your inbox.Kelly Molson: Oh, that's nice, isn't it?Andy Povey: It's a very special moment. So that was very well done. Very well done.Kelly Molson: Yeah, that's really smart, isn't it? If you're just going to send one email a year, make sure it's from Santa.Andy Povey: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.Kelly Molson: Right. Let's talk about pricing, because that's our number five key digital trends for attractions. Now pricing's really interesting. We've talked quite a lot about pricing recently. So we had Dominic on from Mary Rose, talking about pricing. We also had Simon Addison from Roman Baths, talking about pricing.Andy Povey: Yes.Kelly Molson: Let's talk about dynamic pricing, because it's something that we touched on just earlier when we were talking about the airlines and the surveys. So airlines use something called real time pricing. When a plane's almost full, the airline company's going to bump their prices up. Because they know they're going to sell out, and they know that somebody really wants that ticket, because they have to get somewhere on a certain day at a certain time. So it's a bit of a no-brainer for them. Is that something that attractions should be doing?Andy Povey: I think so. And as an industry, we've talked about dynamic pricing for the past 20 years. And when I was Madame Tussaud's, we implemented what then was peak and off-peak pricing. And so we changed the price of the ticket three times during the day. And actually, because we were very explicit about what the price was, we were stuck at this 1995 price point, and had been reluctant to change for a while. We actually increased our ticket yield by about 30%, whilst also increasing our value for money score, which seemed counterintuitive. And actually what was happening there was that the consumer was choosing how much they were going to pay.So rather than being told what the price was, the consumer chooses. So naturally we are more comfortable about a situation, where we feel that we've had some choice. Dynamic pricing does that. Real time pricing, which is where we sit at Convious just makes that run much more efficiently, much more quickly. So a lot of dynamic pricing consultancies out there at the moment will talk about changing prices every day, which if you think, generally people are buying tickets to an attraction three to five days before they visit. They're only going to see three to five different price points. Whereas the way the modern world is going, or the way we are is, we're changing prices, or we can change the price as a result of every single transaction.Kelly Molson: Does that make it more difficult from an operational perspective, if you're constantly changing your prices though? Is it harder to do your forecasting, for example, if that's your price strategy?Andy Povey: If you are forecasting on individual ticket price level, yeah, absolutely. So don't do that.Kelly Molson: Good advice.Andy Povey: Yeah. So every attraction that I've ever worked in and around has a target yield, or a target ticket price to achieve. And we've been doing variable pricing through all the coupons that get put out on all the leaflet racks that you see on every motorway service station. So you can't control how many of those coupons are coming back, and how much discount you're going to get. So having much more control makes it easier for you to manage that, and get the computer to do it. Obviously if you're sitting there changing the prices all the time, then yes, it's going to be a nightmare.Kelly Molson: Nobody wants that job.Andy Povey: No. And the other thing on dynamic pricing is, we still get hooked up on the idea that dynamic means increased, and it doesn't. If you're doing it properly, then it doesn't mean the price is going up necessarily. Obviously you get a better yield. But the guys at Pleasurewood Hills down in Lowestoft, they have a very transient market. So there are loads and loads of holiday parks in their area. So Mondays and Fridays are change over days. So their total addressable market on a Monday and a Friday drops by 50%, because people are packing up and going home. So if you drop the price on a Monday and Friday, or drop the price on a Monday and Friday. Someone who may have come on Wednesday, is now going to come on Monday or Friday, have a much better experience, because venue's not full. And so it smooths their demand. So there's a lot of science behind it.Kelly Molson: Yep. And that all comes back to data, what we started talking about, right?Andy Povey: Absolutely.Kelly Molson: Knowing-Andy Povey: Yeah, yeah, yeah.Kelly Molson: Knowing where people are coming from, what they're doing, how you can change their mindset about things just from the data.Andy Povey: Yeah. And actually watching what they're doing. So we have an artificial intelligence engine that sits behind what we're doing. And it can monitor in real time what's happening about your conversion rate. So if you put the price up by a pound and then your conversion rate drops by 5%, you've probably gone up too high. So drop it down a little bit. So just manage it better, I suppose, in summary.Kelly Molson: I think that's good advice for life in general, isn't it Andy?Andy Povey: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.Kelly Molson: Just manage it better.Andy Povey: Just manage it better.Kelly Molson: This has been a great chat, Andy. Thank you. I think there's loads to take away from. So what we're going to do in the show notes. So there will be links to all the blog articles that we've mentioned today about the digital trends. And I believe there is a webinar that you ran about dynamic pricing as well. And I believe that we might have a link to that too that we could share, which would be great. But Andy, we always end our podcast by asking our guests to share a book with us, something that they love or they've really enjoyed that they think our listeners would also like.Andy Povey: So I've pondered this for a while, and I know that some of your previous people you've spoken to have got away with two.Kelly Molson: Yeah.Andy Povey: So I've got a request for two books.Kelly Molson: Oh, God. Okay.Andy Povey: One's a business book. Really simple, about a half hour read. It's called Who Moved My Cheese?Kelly Molson: Good book.Andy Povey: It's one of my favorites when I first read it 20, 25 years ago, something like that, it really gave me a different way of looking at change. So I really recommend that. And the other one is actually a book I love reading to my kids, called Oi Dog!Kelly Molson: Oi Dog! Great.Andy Povey: Oi Dog! Yeah. So there's a child in all of us. And that for me really just tickles all of my childish bones. Yeah.Kelly Molson: Oh brilliant.Andy Povey: So it works pretty well.Kelly Molson: Well, both of those books are right up my street. So Who Moved My Cheese? Unsurprisingly within a company called Rubber Cheese, you won't be surprised to know that somebody bought that for me when I set up the business. And that was nearly 20 years ago. So that was one of the first business books that I think that I ever read. And it did make a big difference about how you deal with change, and how you compartmentalise it into an easier way of dealing with. But Oi Dog! sounds right up my street. I'm going to put that on my list too? Right listeners-Andy Povey: Absolutely.Kelly Molson: So as ever, if you want to win a copy of Andy's two books, then if you go over to our Twitter account, you can just search for Skip the Queue, and you retweet this podcast announcement with the words, "I want Andy's books." Then we'll enter you into a draw to potentially win them. Andy, thank you. It's been lovely to chat today. I've really, really enjoyed it. I'm sure I will see you out in events soon. And if I don't see you-Andy Povey: Absolutely.Kelly Molson: Before, have a wonderful Christmas.Andy Povey: And to you. Thank you very much, Kelly.Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned.Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast..

covid-19 christmas god spotify founders google uk disney real research ireland santa adventures competition engagement exclusive managing directors amsterdam skip ip dom pricing dynamic crm customer service tourism omicron looking forward generally eurovision gdpr mickey mouse norfolk merlin theme parks google analytics user experience carousel queue attractions shelves zoos peppa pig paw patrol father christmas jamie oliver national trust conversion rate central london peppa madame tussauds digital trends personalisation dynamic pricing experience economy mary rose who moved my cheese gruffalo heston blumenthal piccadilly circus iaapa trocadero so google tourism marketing tottenham court road forestry commission lowestoft roman baths your crm chessington world chessington merlin entertainment tussauds blooloop kelly molson

Why smell is a form of mind control, with Liam Findlay

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 2, 2022 37:20

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is Kelly Molson, MD of Rubber Cheese.Download our free ebook The Ultimate Guide to Doubling Your Visitor NumbersIf you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcastCompetition ends January 31st 2023. The winner will be contacted via Twitter. Show references: https://aromaprime.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-r-findlay/Smells for Theme Parks and Dementia Care: AromaPrime on BBC NewsKickstarter for the game where a reward is a scent collection, based on the locations in the game Smell tour of Amsterdam Liam R. Findlay is a designer of themed attractions who also works for AromaPrime, advising attractions on how to enhance their experiences using scent. AromaPrime was founded in 1973, and it creates weird and wonderful pongs for venues like Alton Towers, The British Museum and Madame Tussauds. The company's collection of over 400 concoctions ranges from Dinosaur to Dungeon, and Pirate Ship to Penguin Sick. While Liam helps clients select or develop the best smells to tell their stories, he also assists in implementing them in the most effective ways. Transcriptions: Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Kelly Molson.We're getting smelly on the podcast today as I speak with Liam Findlay, Multisensory Attraction Designer and Sensing Specialist at AromaPrime. Liam discusses the use of Aroma's storytelling and psychological influences in your attraction and why smell is a form of mind control. If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue.Kelly Molson: Liam, hello. Welcome to Skip the Queue.Liam Findlay: Hi, how are you?Kelly Molson: I'm very good. How are you is the question?Liam Findlay: I'm very good. Fatigued from lots of orders, but it's a good thing.Kelly Molson: Right, we'll talk about that in a minute because it's a very busy season for you. Our listeners will find out why soon, but first, icebreaker questions. So I'm going to start with a couple of topical ones. I want to know, what is your favourite smell and also, what is the smell that turns your stomach?Liam Findlay: My favourite smell is probably a kind of, when I was growing up there was an attraction called The Timewalk in the town I lived in, and it had a musty smell in a Black Death scene. And it was very scary and dark in there and it had that horrible smell but the attraction's been closed for over a decade now, and everyone in the town remembers it for its Black Death smell. And now I work for the company that made that smell, so I have kind of a personal connection to it.Kelly Molson: Oh, how funny. Okay, so do they have the smell in the archives? So can you go and find the smell and it takes you back to that attraction?Liam Findlay: Yeah, we're selling it now as The Timewalk smell for locals who might want to transport themselves back.Kelly Molson: This is amazing. And again, this is something that we will talk about a little bit later, the reasons why smell is so emotive for people. Okay. And what about the worst smell?Liam Findlay: I'm not sure when it comes to that because I'm so used to all sorts of horrible smells, and especially with AromaPrime, everything's artificial so I know it's just chemicals, so I don't tend to be repulsed by them. Personally, I think things that are to do with people's mouths, like food-related smells or if someone's just been eating and you can smell it.Kelly Molson: Like if someone had eaten raw onion or something like that? Yeah, okay. All right. I mean, mine's tequila but there's a whole other story around that that we'll save for another day. All right. What are you most likely to buy when you exit through the gift shop?Liam Findlay: Probably a magnet for my parents' fridge.Kelly Molson: Do they collect magnets when they go on holiday and stuff? Is it full of them?Liam Findlay: Yeah, it's kind of a mandatory thing, if someone goes on holiday they have to get a magnet for the fridge.Kelly Molson: Okay. All right, I like that. That's quite a good collection to have. Liam Findlay: Unless they sell smells, Efteling sells smells of its rides in its gift shop. So that's a must do for me.Kelly Molson: I've never heard of that before. Is that the only attraction that you know that does that?Liam Findlay: I think Europa Park might have done it, and Blackpool Pleasure Beach has candles that are inspired by the rides, but they aren't the actual smells. So yeah, I don't know why more places don't do it.Kelly Molson: Well, maybe they will after they hear this podcast, Liam, who knows? Okay. And if you could choose any attraction to create a smell for, what attraction would it be?Liam Findlay: It's hard to say because I kind of work on lots of smells for all sorts of attractions anyway. I think I always enjoy kind of time travel ones, maybe linking back to The Timewalk attraction that I grew up with, because they always have a nice variety of smells with all the different time periods you can go through.Kelly Molson: Okay, yeah, all right. So yeah, there's a little bit of variety involved in what you could create with them, so it wouldn't all be the same.Liam Findlay: Yeah.Kelly Molson: Okay, interesting. Thank you. All right, Liam, what's your unpopular opinion?Liam Findlay: I would say that bad smells are not necessarily bad in that like I was just saying they can bring back memories. We work with lots of care homes at AromaPrime, and sometimes you can have a horrible fishy smell that's used in scare mazes, but it's also used to bring back memories for people that used to be fishermen or fisherwomen. Bad smells, if you put them in different contexts, they can actually not be so bad. Sometimes you can have a kind of horrible manure smell, but if you present it as something like a lovely countryside kind of atmosphere, people can react positively to it. And actually, rhino dung, I was sniffing some rhino dung last week.Kelly Molson: As you do.Liam Findlay: At Chessington World of Adventures, and we were saying how it's just got a lovely kind of grassy smell to it because the rhinos eat grass, but then when you realise it's rhino dung, you might end up reacting to it negatively.Kelly Molson: So we need to reframe our minds around what that smell is and take away the bad connotation of it?Liam Findlay: Yeah. Bad smells are perhaps not always necessarily bad depending on how you look at them, that's my message.Kelly Molson: All right, listeners, well let us know what you think. As ever, I'm going to need to reframe tequila in my mind. Maybe, I don't know, maybe if we meet up at an event, someone can help me do that, who knows? I thought about you while I was on holiday a few weeks ago, Liam. I don't often think about many of my podcast guests when I'm on a holiday, but you definitely came to mind. It was because of some of the things that we're going to talk about today.So I took my husband and my daughter into the Museum of Torture, which was a very small museum in Tuscany, in Sienna, probably not child friendly, I'm not going to lie. I don't think my 14 month old was overly impressed. But it was very small museum, we went down into the dungeon area and it was very small and it was very dark and it smelt really musty. And it was the one part of the museum for me that really captured that sense of for like, "Oh, this is a dangerous place to be, something horrid is going to happen here." And it was because of the smell. You didn't have that in any of the other areas.And it was really fascinating, you walked around and you looked at these torture instruments and you saw how people were treated and what they did to people but that area was the one place that it really got under my skin and up my nose, but for the right reasons because of the smell. And it instantly made me think about you and what you guys do. So tell us a little bit about AromaPrime and then tell us a little bit about what your role is there.Liam Findlay: Well, AromaPrime's been around since 1973, so we're turning 50 next year and throughout that time we've been making immersive smells for visitor attractions. So it could be to kind of increase anticipation and anxiety in a rollercoaster queue with the smell of fire, for example, like at Alton Towers it's Wickerman rollercoaster. Or it could be to educate people and engage them in the past if it's a historical smell. It could be to kind of bring about certain feelings if they're walking into a hotel and you want a lovely signature scent that's going to make people relaxed, or if it's historical or a nostalgic sense that are used in care homes like I was just saying to kind of bring back fond memories. So there's kind of lots of ways you can use smells to trick the mind and change how people feel, maybe feeling anxious in the Torture Museum.And my job is to advise attractions on how to implement these smells and which smells might work best and kind of lead to the best results in their attractions. So whether they want to make people feel a certain way or if they want to tell a certain story and use smells to change how the story's being told as it developed. So it's very exciting, always lots of different projects.Kelly Molson: It is. And I'm really intrigued about how you came to be in this role. So your bio says that you advise on Aroma's storytelling influences, psychological influences and thematic influences, as well as practical ways to utilise aroma in different environments. All of this is really, really fascinating. But what did you study and how did you get to be this person that advises them on all these things?Liam Findlay: Well, I actually did an animation degree and then I worked in the animation industry for a while. And from that I kind of learned lots of design skills and storytelling skills and I ended up putting that into work at an escape room where I designed escape rooms. So there was kind of sound design and visual design and telling stories again. And then I ended up working freelance designing experiences and museum interpretation for attractions like castles and more escape rooms and a ghost train on one occasion. And through working in the attractions industry as a designer, I wondered if I could maybe contribute my kind of understanding of the processes behind attraction design and put that into smell. And I knew that AromaPrime existed and I wondered if maybe I could help them out through that. So I sent them an email and they said, "Oh, we're looking for someone like you," and they took me on and I think it was late 2018 maybe so it's been a few years now and it's been going quite well.Kelly Molson: So you've kind of honed your craft working at AromaPrime. So can you just explain a little bit about, I understand about the storytelling influences that we talked about and how smell brings back those memories and it can transport you to a different place, tell me about the psychological influences and the thematic influences. What do you mean by those? How does that work?Liam Findlay: It's a bit like what I was saying about the rollercoaster queue or in a scare maze, for example, you might use a pleasant smell that lots of people have a familiar connection with like the smell of bananas. Maybe not everyone likes bananas, maybe the smell of chocolate, to kind of lift people's spirits and give them a false sense of security so that when they suddenly turn a corner and see something horrid and it has a disgusting kind of rotten smell, you're kind of crafting the psychological journey for them. So you're bringing back these pleasant emotions and memories and then you're twisting it. And maybe that horrible smell will be the smell of vomit that most people will have really unpleasant associations with and it'll make them feel uncomfortable when suddenly a pig man jumps out with a chainsaw. So you can tie the sense into how the story develops and manipulate or influence emotions as it goes along.Kelly Molson: Yeah. And what about the thematic influences? What does that mean in terms of smell?Liam Findlay: It's probably the most basic way of looking at sense. So at fantasy experience for example, like we did a wizard mini golf attraction recently, so it's kind of binding or creating sense that apply to a theme. And sometimes that can be tricky if it's a fantasy theme, you might not really be sure what kinds of smells potions have. But with our unicorn smell, for example, we sniff some horses, as you would, and we read lots of ancient myths about unicorns and we kind of approached it like we would approach historical smells. So we want them to be backed up with stories and kind of authenticity where possible to make sure that the theme is as strong as it can be.Kelly Molson: Isn't that funny though because when you said unicorn, the image of unicorn in my head is glittery and pink because every little girls are obsessed by glittery pink unicorns. And so I was like, "Oh yeah, but for me, unicorns smell a bit sugary," a sweet sugary smell they'd smell like.Liam Findlay: Yeah, well that's what the final product is really. It's like got a little undertone of horse, but it's mostly like a birthday cake.Kelly Molson: Yes. Oh, I love that. Thank you for explaining that. That's put me right. Yeah, it's really weird how you see what something looks like and you instantly imagine what it smells like, even though I have no clue what a unicorn smells like, obviously.I guess it's the same feeling, the one that you spoke about in terms of making people feel comfortable and then shocking them is, I can remember reading something years ago about if you are selling your house, have some freshly baked bread just come out of the oven because that is a smell that everyone finds quite comforting and quite homely. And so then if you can smell that while you're in a new home, you think, "Oh yeah, I could see myself living here. This is a cozy place to be, isn't it?" So it's that kind of sense that you're trying to get build in people.Liam Findlay: Yeah, it's a big thing in retail using scents in shops. There was a study where people went into a room, I think it was full of shoes and it wasn't scented and they kind of responded to what they thought of the products, whether it was shoes or not. And then there were some other participants who went into a room that was scented and it had the same products and the people in the scented room valued the products as being more expensive, or they guessed that they would be more expensive because they saw them as a higher quality because the room was scented even though they didn't realise it was the scent that was causing that.Kelly Molson: Because they could smell the leather and the... Right, okay. Gosh, that's interesting, isn't it? How it can affect how you perceive something as well.Liam Findlay: Yeah, it can change perception. And also like you say about pleasant smells, if you smell something like bread, it makes you kind of hungry because it kind of triggers those memories of enjoying bread and therefore you'll start to kind of seek it out and you won't necessarily find bread, but you'll seek out some kind of satisfaction and that satisfaction might end up being purchasing something.Kelly Molson: A very expensive house purchase.Liam Findlay: Yeah.Kelly Molson: How do you create smells? Because I watched one of the interviews that you did, I think it's for the BBC, which I will link to in the show notes, it's really interesting. But I think one of them said that your recipes, some of them are based on 30 year old recipes, these smells. So how do you even start to create the smells?Liam Findlay: Well, yeah, well like I was saying, we are turning 50 next year, so it was actually slightly inaccurate in the BBC video is-Kelly Molson: Sorry, kids, it's wrong.Liam Findlay: Well that was my fault, I told them the wrong date. Because actually, there are not many records about the company history and I only a while ago realised or found a document that said when it was founded. So it's always been a bit of a mystery. But yeah, over that time we've accumulated over 400 aromas, so we've kind of got a big stock of anything anyone could imagine just about. And if they want something that's a bit more specific, sometimes we might combine our existing scents. So it might be a bit of grass with a bit of rotten eggs for some kind of Roald Dahl soup for example. And then if we are making something from scratch, it will be a case of finding the chemicals that kind of have certain qualities like you might have a chemical that is generally used in rose products because it has a rose smell and then you can combine it with others. And often we'll have references like maybe rhino dung, we've been sent otter poo and jaguar urine before to get that right.Kelly Molson: In the post? Go get the post today, I wonder what could be in it, that's a surprise.Liam Findlay: Yeah. So sometimes we'll be kind of mixing things and sniffing and then we'll also send lots of samples to the clients so they can say if it's accurate or not and it works that way.Kelly Molson: That's brilliant, isn't it? Funny to understand what might turn up in your letter box each day. So when you work with an attraction, Halloween is a very obvious market for you. There's lots of scare things that happening and they are very smell related. But how do you work with an attraction? What's that process of them calling you in and going, "Look, we've got this thing that we are doing, how can you work with us?" What do you do?Liam Findlay: It kind of varies on what their end goal is. Sometimes regardless of what the kind of function of the attraction is, sometimes it will just be a case of them telling us how large the space is and then we'll advise on the kind of machine that they'll need because we do machines as well and the themes as well and then we'll suggest some scents and then they put them in the machines. And it can be quite a quick process sometimes.If it's more complex, it might be like a museum that wants a historical scent and they don't want it spreading around the whole museum and stinking things out or ruining the paintings down the corridor, there can be more advice to give in that regard. So museums often it's good to use what's called dry diffusion when you have an object that's scented rather than liquid kind of going out as a mist into the air. So that object will just kind of emit a smell and you can maybe put a lid over it or have it in a container that has a puffer. So yeah, I would often ask what the end goal is and then kind of make some suggestions from there.Kelly Molson: Yeah, because I hadn't thought about if it's a museum, those artefacts and those things could be damaged by certain smells. It's also, I guess you have to be quite consultative in your approach about what you offer to them individually.Liam Findlay: Yeah, another case or another issue can be around whether people want to smell things or not. Like if they go to a scare maze, they'll probably expect to be repulsed. But if you go into a museum, I suppose it's because people aren't really used to it, they're not always prepared to sniff things. So it can be good to have flaps so people can choose whether they're going to smell things or not. Or maybe some places will put up little warnings if it's kind of a profound world war trench set that they can walk into and there's going to be horrible smell of bodies and things. Sometimes there might be a warning because it almost equates to having gory images, like in museums you'll have warnings that there'll be gory images here.Kelly Molson: Yeah, and I guess talking about what we were saying earlier about those emotive, it can take you right back to a place, I guess that could be quite frightening for some people as well if they don't want to be taken back to those places, for example.Liam Findlay: Yeah. And because smell's kind of flexible and a horrible smell relating to war could also be a horrible smell relating to some other unpleasant personal memory. So yeah, sometimes you have to think about how the smell's going to be presented in a way that's going to work for the visitors.Kelly Molson: Okay. Thorpe Park, the Dungeons and Warwick Castle all have promotional scent ranges. This is something that you helped them develop, isn't it? I think this was during the pandemic. Am I right? So can you tell us about this? How did this happen?Liam Findlay: Well, it was a tricky time because all the parks were closed so the parks were wondering what to do while they were closed. And the parks were our customers as well, so we couldn't sell to them. So everyone was kind of out of action at that point. So we were kind of thinking of ways that we could engage people in our products for the parks and for us. So I think it was Thorpe Park we approached first and we just suggested that we could kind of release some of their smells that they used in their scare mazes and eventually it was Warwick Castle and the smells they used in their Kingmaker Experience and the Dungeons and their smells to make them available, branded under the scenes that they appear in those attractions so people could buy the Blacksmith smell at the Warwick Castle Kingmaker Experience. And that was a nice way to take people back to the attractions while they weren't able to visit.And it helped AromaPrime as well because we were kind of profiting from the customers of our customers in a way that everyone was kind of happy with because it was promoting the parks and the customers were happy because they were being taken back to the parks. There was one customer who contacted me and was thanking me for the opportunity to buy the smell of the Tomb Blaster ride at Chessington World of Adventures because her sister had autism and she was really struggling with the lockdown and being able to transport herself back to the ride through the smell during lockdown kind of brought her lots of comfort. So it turned out to be a kind of lovely and beneficial project for everyone, a nice way of adapting to the scenario.Kelly Molson: That is so wonderful, isn't it? By the power of smell, being able to be in your favourite place without being able to leave your house. That's incredible, what an amazing thing to have been able to do.Liam Findlay: Yeah, and fans really enjoy it. The Wicker Man Woodsmoke smell from Alton Towers is really popular and we get people that diffuse it in their living room and make all the lights red and they play the music and send us photos.Kelly Molson: That's taking true fan to a whole nother level, isn't it? Recreating the smell of your favourite attraction in your living room, wow. Okay, that's great. But there's other ways of using smells as well, isn't it? And I think this is something that you've been talking about quite a lot on LinkedIn that I was really interested in. A smell tour of Amsterdam has been developed. And you've been part of this, haven't you? So this isn't just about attractions, this is about tourism as well. Tell us about this. I don't fully understand what it is and how you've developed it.Liam Findlay: Well, this was run by Odeuropa, who I've been collaborating with a lot. And Odeuropa is a kind of global group of academics who are working to improve the ways that senses are used to tell historical stories and how they are used their museums. And one of their projects was this smell tour of Amsterdam and this was done through a scratch and sniff card. So my job was to illustrate the card and it was a map of Amsterdam so you could kind of follow a route and go to an apothecary that had a certain ingredient to its perfume that it once used or you could go down to the canals and smell what the canals used to smell like hundreds of years ago and kind of scratch as you went around. And they developed an app as well so you could kind of track where you were going.And that was a really nice way to engage people in history and they were able to access the stories themselves. They weren't just going through a museum and reading stuff, they were properly exploring and sniffing and taking it all in. And it was a really exciting way. It was throughout the month of September and the cards were available at Amsterdam Museum and it was an exciting way to get people enjoying and almost living the past because they were going through the real places where all this stuff happened.Kelly Molson: That's such a brilliant idea. So yeah, it's completely immersive, isn't it? You are in the area, you're doing a walking tour so you can see the places that are being described to you and then you can smell what they smell like a hundred years ago.Liam Findlay: Yeah, it was cool.Kelly Molson: Wow. That is really cool.Liam Findlay: Got lots of good responses.Kelly Molson: And I guess you worked with them in the same mode that you would an attraction, it's just understanding what used to be there, finding the smells that you already have and then bringing them all together into the scratch card.Liam Findlay: Yeah. In this case, Odeuropa already had the smells because they've been working on lots of different historical smells themselves like the smell of hell, I think based on a kind of 1700s painting, maybe it was another century.Kelly Molson: And what does hell smell like? Can you describe it to us?Liam Findlay: From what I understand, it's mostly fire and bodies.Kelly Molson: Burning hot stuff? Okay.Liam Findlay: But one of the members of Odeuropa had worked on an exhibition in The Hague where people could go around a gallery and they had paintings and smell puffers like foot pumps so they could pump it and a smell would come out and that would be the smell of the painting or of something that was in the painting. And it was a nice way to kind of engage them with the contents of the painting, kind of look a bit harder and think about what's making that smile and why did it smell that way? So Odeuropa already had lots of interesting smiles that they could incorporate into this.Kelly Molson: That's brilliant. I would absolutely go on a scratch and sniff tour of anywhere.Liam Findlay: Yeah, well it's a nice model because you can kind of apply it to any city or even, I don't know, an ancient school or a hospital or all sorts of places.Kelly Molson: And if you think, I guess there's just so many advantages to it as well for people that can't see the places that they're in but can still feel that emotive connection to them by being able to smell what those places smell like.Liam Findlay: Yeah, smell is very good in terms of accessibility because even if you're on a theme park ride and you're going along in a boat and maybe there are cannons going off, if you can't see the cannons or you can't hear the cannon sound effects, if you smell it, it kind of means that you're not missing out on the story.Kelly Molson: Yeah, it's brilliant. I hope they do more of those, I'd be up for that.Liam Findlay: Yeah.Kelly Molson: There's a quote that I read from you that said, "Smell is a form of mind control." It really resonated with me, especially because of some of the things that we've been talking about. But let's go back to what you started to talk about at the beginning of our interview was about the smells for care homes because you've worked on quite a few projects for those as well. And I think obviously this is not attraction related, but I just think this is such a wonderful thing to be able to use your skillset for. Tell us a little bit about what you've done.Liam Findlay: Well, care homes was one of the company's first kind of activities I suppose back in the seventies. I mean, back then it would be the smells of the 1920s that would be made to take people back into the past. And that's something interesting as well because the kind of residents who are always getting that bit older and the smells that will be familiar to them change gradually so we have to kind of think, okay, maybe World War smells, I saw on Twitter someone was complaining that their mother was being subjected to World War II songs, even though most care home residents probably weren't around back then anymore or at least a small number.So yeah, we've been producing nostalgic smells for care homes for a long time and it can be really nice if there's like carbolic soap for example is a popular one. If there's a smell that lots of people perhaps with dementia who will have personal memories with, it's a nice way of unlocking those memories, especially you tend not to lose your smell memory. So if you smell something from the past and even if you have memory problems, smelling that can kind of unlock something from years and years ago and bring back those memories and encourage conversation with the other residents that you might live with about their memories and then they'll kind of start talking about it and sniffing and it can be a nice way to lift spirits as well as bringing back memories.Kelly Molson: Yeah, it's wonderful, isn't it? I saw the clip, and again this was in the clip that we will add into the show notes, but it was about the soap smell and the lady said, "Oh, it just makes me feel comfortable." It took her to a happier place where she just had really good memories of it and it was just such a lovely clip to see, you could almost see her face kind of light up with the smell because it took her back there instantly. It was just brilliant. And just think that's such a lovely thing to do.Liam Findlay: Yeah, there's a company called Rempods, which they make a kind of sets for all care homes like a recreated nostalgic pub from the sixties or a train carriage, that's quite a popular one. So like a wall and there's a window that's a screen and you can see the countryside going past. And we work with them quite a lot to supply smells to kind of bring that whole experience together. So that kind of ties into the theme entertainment as well.Kelly Molson: Yeah, it's like a mini attraction in a care home with sense. That's incredible. I had no idea that that was even a possibility. What a brilliant thing to be able to do for people.Liam Findlay: Yeah. It could even be as simple as a memory box that. We have a customer who makes memory boxes for care homes, which are just kind of full of props and things that the residents might be familiar with and they include the smells as well. And that same customer, she is a funeral director and we have what are called aroma cubes, which are normally used by care homes and they're just little cubes you can pick up and sniff. And there was someone who was in her chapel of rest who had died and the person who had died had worked in a bakery so this funeral director had put the smell of bread in a little aroma cube just in the same room. And when her family, the person's family visited in the chapel, they could smell this and they just found it really kind of nice and it took them back to her bakery and it wasn't kind of gimmicky, the room wasn't full of bread smells, it was just a little thing that they could use to have a nice moment with. And it worked really well.Kelly Molson: That is so lovely. I was just thinking, because I lost my granddad a really, really long time ago, I think I was like 20 when I lost him. And if I could be in a room now and his smell would be Polos, he had Polos, pockets full of Polos everywhere, even when he passed away, all of his cardigans had Polo packets in them. And that would be the smell that would bring me back to him instantly. So I can completely imagine how comforted they were by smelling that. Oh, it sounds really lovely. Liam, I know that you're super busy at the moment because we are recording this at the beginning of October and Halloween is coming and everyone goes crazy at Halloween, right? So you've been busy since probably a good few months with people ordering in their smells. What's the most popular Halloween smell on order at the moment?Liam Findlay: I'd say the familiar one is the most popular because you want smells that are going to affect the largest range of people. So it will be things like vomit and poo and rotting flesh is actually popular. And I suppose not many people would be familiar with that.Kelly Molson: It's not a statement you hear very often, "Rotting flesh is very popular." It's not popular here.Liam Findlay: We've released a new blocked urine smell as well. Because we already had a urine smell, but I wanted to try something that had more of a kick to it. So we've got kind of two urine choices this year.Kelly Molson: Wow, wow. We've taken it to a whole new level of poo and wee smells on the podcast people. Liam, thank you for joining us today. I've thoroughly enjoyed talking about this and I think it's such a fascinating subject to talk about. So thanks for sharing your insight. We always ask our guests for a book that they'd like to recommend to us, something that they love or something that's helped them in some way. What would you like to share with us today?Liam Findlay: Mine is Theme Park Design and the Art of Themed Entertainment by David Younger. And this is like, I think-Kelly Molson: It's like a Bible, Liam. It's huge.Liam Findlay: Yeah. Well I was just going to say, lots of attraction designers kind of treat this as their Bible because it's like a big encyclopedia of everything to do with theme park design. So there's a bit about smells in it, there's a bit here about costumed characters, there's stuff on cues and how different cues work. So it's like anyone wants to go into theme park design or attraction design in general, even if it's like museums, this is a great resource.And actually David Younger, the author, I've just been working with him because he's started a Kickstarter for a video game that's based on a theme park sort of. And we've put together a scent collection of the different locations in the game so as people are playing, they can sniff the smells and kind of transport themselves into the world of the game.Kelly Molson: Oh, how cool. You must send over the link to us and then we can pop that in the show notes for any of the listeners that will be interested in it.Liam Findlay: Yeah.Kelly Molson: Okay. So look, as ever, I feel like this is going to be an expensive one for my marketing budget, because that looked like a really big book, Liam. But as ever, if you'd like to win a copy of this book, then if you pop over to our Twitter account and retweet the episode announcement with the words, "I want Liam's book," then you'll be in a chance of winning it. Liam, thank you for joining us on the podcast today. Good luck with Halloween, I know it's a really crazy busy time, but thank you for coming on and sharing all of your wonderful smells with us today.Liam Findlay: That's all right. Thank you for having me. It's been fun to talk about them.Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip The Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip the queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast.

#45 - Jumanji is GO!

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Play Episode Listen Later Oct 28, 2022 115:01

This week we talk about Chessington World of Adventures' Jumanji announcement, Parc Asterix, Parque Warner Madrid's coaster update and much more! Plus, we catch up on our personal highlights from the recent TowersTimes event at Alton Towers!

204: A Parents' Guide To Chessington World Of Adventures!

Park Rush - A Theme Park Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 19, 2022 47:01

Josh and parents are back once again, this time not to talk about Florida but to discuss a theme park much closer to home. Chessington World of Adventures! Will this park be fun for all the family, or a bit of an expensive let down? FInd out by listening to the podcast! If you want to contact us about anything at all (corrections, info, sponsorship ;P) you can hit us up on: Twitter @ParkRushPodcast Instagram: @ParkRushPodcast TikTok: @ParkRushPodcast Email: Podcast@ParkRush.com YouTube --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/parkrush/message

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Disneyland Magic Key Renewals are Here, and more news! - The Attractions Podcast - Recorded 8/21/2022

The Attractions Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 22, 2022 63:30

Join hosts Seth and Carly as they bring you news and discussion about all things theme parks, as well as their thoughts on the latest movies, television, and video games on The Attractions Podcast. This week on The Attractions Podcast, Seth and Carly discuss: Disneyland Magic Key renewals are here! Universal Orlando reveals full lineup of its Halloween horrors Terror Tram features Jordan Peele crossover Knott's Scary Farm unleashes new frights Howl-O-Scream at SeaWorld Orlando reveals its full lineup of terror for 2022 Zero Latency free-roaming virtual reality is coming to Icon Park First-ever ‘Jumanji' themed land set to open at Chessington World of Adventures Ice! returns to Gaylord Palms Resort with a Dr. Seuss theme for 2022 Disney Legends for 2022 to be announced at D23 We welcome your suggestions and want you to be a part of the discussion. Please send your comments to info@attractionsmagazine.com with the subject line “The Attractions Podcast.” Statements or opinions herein are those of the hosts and advertisers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the producers, Dream Together Media LLC, or staff.

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#41 - Is Galaxy's Edge in Paris Cancelled?

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Play Episode Listen Later Jul 20, 2022 99:19

Mikhile is BACK! This week we're joined by Sam Costello to talk about Disneyland Paris (Walt Disney Studios Park) potentially cancelling Galaxy's Edge! We also catch up with the latest Theme Park and Amusement Park news including Shipwreck Coast at Chessington World of Adventures opening and Splash Mountain boat sinks again! Follow Sam Costello on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SamCostello

#38 - We've captured ScrewyLoops!

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Play Episode Listen Later Jul 4, 2022 94:30

This week we're joined by Chris from ScrewyLoops as we talk all things Theme Parks and Roller Coasters! This week's topics include Thorpe Park announcing Trailers will open for Carnival, Chessington World of Adventures' new area 'Shipwreck Coast', and Cedar Fair selling California's Great America Adventure's land! Check out Chris's new video on PortAventura: https://youtu.be/BxsATVF24mY New Airtime Addict Merch: https://airtime-addict-apparel.creator-spring.com Make sure to use promo code 'ILOVERITA' at checkout for a discount! Offer ends 03/07/2022*

#35 - Sik: The Ride

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Play Episode Listen Later Jun 1, 2022 108:02

In this episode the gang talks about what ride manufacturer they think will dominate the 2020's! We also catch up with news including Flamingo Land's new 10 inversion coaster being named 'Sik', Drayton Manor opening their Vikings area and an update on Chessington World of Adventure's new coaster being constructed!

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#620 - Creating my own Nemesis: Book Review

Motivated Entrepreneurs

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 6, 2021 4:11

Good morning everybody! Thank you for tuning in to the Motivated Entrepreneurs podcast. Today we have a book review and its called "Creating my own Nemesis" by John Wardley The autobiography of the man who brought the theme park concept to Britain, and created some of the world's most thrilling rides and attractions. He talks about his early beginnings in the theatre, circus, and magical cabaret, his time working on some of the most incredible special effects in the James Bond films (including the famous bus crash scene in Live and Let Die), and how he became associated with Madame Tussauds, the world's most famous wax museum. This led to the development of Chessington World of Adventures, then Alton Towers. Give a listen. Listen on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2VkXGHq Listen on Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/39TYebQ Motivated Entrepreneurs Website: https://motivatedentrepreneurs.co.uk/ Please Like, Share, and Subscribe to Motivated Entrepreneurs Youtube Channel: https://bit.ly/3eA64u5 Cheers, Dean

HALLOWEEN SPECIAL: Lullingstone Castle, Chessington World of Adventures

Activity Quest

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 25, 2021 34:16

This week, Anna Louise gets unprecedented behind the scenes access to Lullingstone Castle. Ghost hunting TV shows and documentaries have wanted to get in here for ages and haven't been able to but we managed to sneak in! Plus George is in Blackpool to find out more about some of the top theme parks. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Folge 53 // Saisonende am Meer

achtercast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 21, 2021 40:01

Frische Luft: Wir lassen das achtercast- Studio hinter uns und senden in dieser Folge aus dem Hansa Park in Sierksdorf direkt von der Ostsee. Zusammen erleben wir den letzten Saisontag 2021 inkl. rasanter Fahrten und dem Lichter-Event "Herbstzauber am Meer" - und teilen unsere Eindrücke mit euch. Los geht's aber mit einem kurzen Recap von Stefans Park-Trip durch England: Wie schlagen sich die britischen Merlin-Parks Alton Towers & Chessington World of Adventures?

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Nick's ERT #81: The Random Park Map Generator

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 7, 2021 38:45

Park maps are fascinating as they illustrate a park's moment in its history - so join Nick and Chris as Nick blindly delves into his park map collection to discuss - in no particular order - Thorpe Park Fright Nights, Cadbury World, Warwick Castle, Universal Orlando, Phantasialand, Chessington World of Adventures, Universal Hollwood, Tulley's ShocktoberFest and Madame Tussauds. What's new? What's changed? Find out!

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Cotswold Farm Park, Chessington World of Adventures, L.O.L. Surprise!

Activity Quest

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 13, 2021 23:48

It's Adam versus Adam in Activity Quest with Producer Adam off to Adam from Countryfile's Adam Henson's Cotswold Farm Park. Plus, George is aboard rollercoasters at Chessington World of Adventures, we've got an at-home craft to do, and there's even a list of events across the country. Remember, whatever you do and however you do it, tell us at FunKidsLive.com/ActivityQuest – and remember to rate, review and follow this podcast wherever you're listening to it. If you know of or own a venue that you think would be perfect for Activity Quest, email activityquest@funkidslive.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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#1 - B&M Jumanji Roller Coaster! What year is it?!

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Play Episode Listen Later Aug 12, 2021 125:00

Welcome to the first-ever episode of The Chain Dogs Podcast! In this weeks episode, we'll be talking about the Alton Towers Scarefest Line-up, Chessington World of Adventures' new Roller Coaster dubbed Project Amazon, Drayton Manor Theme Park's new River Rapids opening with Adventure cove, and Walt Disney World's new accommodation offering: Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser We Live Stream each recording every Wednesday at 8pm over on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTPDLwycfjAv1omQJsiqFXA Follow us on Twitter - https://twitter.com/TheChainDogs

Ep 157: What's Slag Wars?

The All Seeing Guys with Greg & Joe

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 13, 2021 71:53

Welcome to episode 157 of The All Seeing Guys Podcast with Greg and Joe. We catch up on our weeks. Greg demands praise for not pissing the bed in his sleep following a dream all about trying to piss. The guys have been enjoying watching the Euros filling up with beers and kebabs. We have a great batch of Geezedrops from your good selves, we revisit the rides of yesterday from Chessington World of Adventures, learn about the ‘Euthanasia Coaster' that you can only ride once and the masked theory test bandit who amazingly took a while to get caught, and we randomly discover a show called ‘Slag Wars' and theorise what that may be. Wankerty Wank returns!! It's been well over a year but we bring back everyone's favorite segment and it doesn't disappoint. All this and more!

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Ep 156: We Could Be So Good For You

The All Seeing Guys with Greg & Joe

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 29, 2021 86:20

Welcome to episode 156 of The All Seeing Guys with Greg and Joe. In this episode, we catch up on current events, talk about a strange package that arrived addressed to 'The All Seeing Guys' containing a Dennis Waterman vinyl, the guys talk about their recent BBQ, water fights, and chilling in the paddling pool, Greg visits Chessington World of Adventures with a Karen encounter, Joe takes a first aid course which he promptly has to put into action. We talk Tiktokers holding up the queue in coffee shops with ridiculous orders, two kids who murdered a father and tried to YouTube it along with more evidence stacked against them, the podcast takes a bit of darker twist as we talk gun and knife crime and try to wrap up on a lighter note with a potential incest story and Batman not giving head. All that and more, it's a packed episode!

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Introducing Conspiracy Heap

Sound Heap with John-Luke Roberts

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 21, 2021 29:06

John-Luke Roberts, the CEO and Fun Captain of Sound Heap, Inc., welcomes you back again to the very best Sound Heap podcast network – home to 981 brilliant podcasts, and about 72 other ones. This week, a surprise hit leads us to launch a whole new sideline in innovative yet harmless podcasts.You'll hear clips from:How Wide Is Your Coinage?Untold Tellings Told: The Witch Trials of Chessington World of AdventuresMade-Up CrimesPapper On Ya Ding-DongRound Table DiscussionsTwitching in the Slammer: The Secret World of Prison BirdwatchersBritain's Funniest EggsLoving God SimulatorHow To Put Out A Raging Fire (Mainly Guesses)Conspiracy HeapWAPcastYou can follow Sound Heap, Inc. on Twitter, for exclusive clips and news: @soundheapinc.Written and presented by John-Luke Roberts, with Bilal Zafar, Charlie George, Eleanor Morton, Gareth Gwynn, Joz Norris, Katy Brand, Kevin Eldon, Margaret Cabourn-Smith, Mark Watson, Paddy Gervers, River Hall, Sami Shah, Sooz Kempner, Stuart Laws, Tom Allen and Toussaint Douglass.The original music and stings are by Paddy Gervers and Rob Sell for Torch & Compass.Mixed by Rich Evans at Synbox Post.Produced and edited by Ed Morrish.Sound Heap is a Lead Mojo production for Auddy.

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Croc Drop Live Review, London Resort Base Camp & Is The Ultimate Closing forever?

Theme Park Loopy Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 22, 2021 29:13

NEWS EDITION - Sam reviews Croc Drop live from Chessington World of Adventures, we talk about the London Resort latest plans and discuss whether The Ultimate will now close forever. Socials: www.youtube.com/themeparkloopy www.facebook.com/themeparkloopy www.twitter.com/themeparkloopy www.instagram.com/themeparkloopy Coaster Sam Blog: www.instagram.com/coastersamblog Theme Parks by Brett: www.instagram.com/themeparksbybrett

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39: Chessington World Of Adventure Next NEW Rollercoaster | Special Guests: Harry, Ellie & Dan

Off the Tracks

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 1, 2021 73:26

This episode of OFF THE TRACKS (Viewer Takeover LIVE), Your Theme Park Podcast. I am joined by my Co-Hosts Rob from The Park Life, and Chris from That Uk Coaster Guy, PLUS three special guests Harry from (COASTER BOT), Ellie from (Enthusitwat) and Dan from (DIGITALDAN). We will be answering your questions which you have sent in by our social media platforms, and the chat box and discussing our thoughts on this week's news and topics, plus answering your calls with questions and in the comment section too. All of this LIVE, what could possible go WRONG!!!!!!!!!! -------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Season 7, Episode 8

Home Ed Matters Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 26, 2020

In this episode we're investigating spiders webs, picking damsons and going on a staycation down south, visiting Legoland windsor, Chessington World of Adventures and various London destinations.

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Ep 134: A lot Of Hoo-Ha & Sexual Trolls.

The All Seeing Guys with Greg & Joe

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 25, 2020 68:15

Welcome to episode 134 of The All Seeing Guys Podcast with Greg & Joe. We catch up on life in the new normal with our first venture to a pub in months, the crazy heat & weather we've been enduring, Greg went to Chessington World of Adventures, Joe took a trip to Bournemouth, we talk pizza from Micky Marzano's & after having none last episode we return to with fresh slab of Geezedropping. We discuss the Blockbuster Video Airb&b, the Trolls World Tour doll pulled from sale amidst pedophile grooming accusations, and then we dive into the origins of everyday sayings such as ‘dressed to the nines' & ‘Straight from the horse's mouth'. All this & much more.

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21 Aug 2020 | VW ID.4 Begins Series Production

EV News Daily - Electric Car Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 21, 2020 24:16

Show #873 Good morning, good afternoon and good evening wherever you are in the world, welcome to EV News Daily for Friday 21st August 2020. It’s Martyn Lee here and I go through every EV story so you don't have to. Thank you to MYEV.com for helping make this show, they’ve built the first marketplace specifically for Electric Vehicles. It’s a totally free marketplace that simplifies the buying and selling process, and help you learn about EVs along the way too. SERIES PRODUCTION OF VOLKSWAGEN ID.4 BEGINS From VW: Volkswagen’s electric offensive continues to gather speed: Series production of the brand’s first all-electric SUV, the ID.4, gets underway in Zwickau. The world premiere of the ID.4 follows at the end of September. Preparations to roll out the electric SUV at international level are also in full swing. Pre-production of the ID.4 has already started at the Anting plant in China, the Chattanooga site will start the ID.4 production in 2022. The SUV will initially be launched with rear-wheel drive, while an electric all-wheel drive version will be added a later date. PushEVs points out: "The Volkswagen ID.4 made in Europe is using the new NCM 712 battery cells made by LG Chem in Poland. Later on, the made in USA version will get its battery cells from SK Innovation and the made in China version will probably get its battery cells from CATL. Made with very energy dense and affordable NCM 712 batteries – that cost below 100 euros per kWh -, the expensive Volkswagen ID.3 and ID.4 will be extremely profitable electric cars (on average way more than 15.000 euros per unit). That’s why Volkswagen will only try to sell the cheaper electric triplets (UpMiiGo) made on the old MQB platform when it’s required to reach EU emissions targets. This year thanks to the COVID-19 lockdowns, ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) car sales dropped a lot, this is great but also means that Volkswagen won’t have to sell as many electric cars as it was previously expected. The very profitable ID.3 and ID.4 will be enough to comply with EU emissions regulations and VW doesn’t need to sell any more triplets this year." https://pushevs.com/2020/08/20/series-production-of-volkswagen-id-4-begins-in-zwickau/ TESLA IS ROLLING OUT SUSPENSION UPDATE WITH REAL-TIME VISUALIZATION "Tesla has started rolling out a new suspension update with real-time visualization of the suspension for Model S and Model X vehicles equipped with the new fully-adaptive damping suspension." says Fred at Electrek: "Model S and Model X vehicles have long been equipped with a standard “smart” air suspension, but when Tesla launched the new Raven Model S and Model X vehicles last year, it updated the vehicles with a new adaptive suspension." Tesla said: "You can now see a real-time visualization of how the suspension system is dynamically adjusting each wheel’s damping to account for changing road conditions. Tap “Show Suspension Data” to get even more real-time information. Adaptive Suspension Damping now has an ADVANCED setting that allows you to set custom levels of Ride Comfort and Handling in addition to the existing COMFORT, AUTO, and SPORT settings. We have simplified the Tesla suspension control logic to better support both temporary and more permanent heights. If Ride Heights is manually adjusted to High or Very High, your car now automatically lowers after you drive a short distance. For snowy or off-road conditions, tap “Keep” next to the Ride Height slider to keep the height at High or Very High until you reach the maximum allowed speed. For steep driveways or places where you repeatedly need a higher ride height, tap “Always Auto-Raise at this location.” This feature will raise suspension to the saved height when re-entering the location.” https://electrek.co/2020/08/21/tesla-suspension-update-real-time-visualization/ TESLA’S AUTOPILOT TO BENEFIT FROM UK PUSH FOR AUTONOMOUS DRIVING "The UK government already has said that by spring 2021, hands-free driving could become legal on the country's roads. In preparation for this transition, officials and pertinent organizations are now initiating a deeper dive into the technology." says Tesmanian: "The call for evidence will look at the Automated Lane Keeping System (ALKS)--an automated technology that can take over control of the vehicle at low speeds, keeping it in the lane on motorways. Following the approval of ALKS Regulation in June 2020 by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE)--of which the UK is a member--the technology is likely to be available in cars entering the UK market from Spring 2021. The government is acting now to ensure that regulation is ready where necessary for its introduction." https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/hands-free-driving-could-be-made-legal-on-uk-roads-by-spring-2021 CHINESE EV MAKER NIO LAUNCHES BATTERY LEASING SERVICE "Chinese electric vehicle (EV) maker Nio Inc has launched a battery leasing service that will allow drivers to buy an EV without owning the battery pack - one of the most expensive EV components - thereby lowering the starting price of its cars." reports Reuters: "The service, called “battery as a service” (BaaS), entails drivers paying a monthly rental fee for use of the batteries. The cheapest Nio car after subsidies is now an ES6 sport-utility vehicle (SUV) priced 273,600 yuan ($39,553) without ownership of the battery pack, versus 343,600 yuan including the pack. Nio operates 143 battery-swapping stations around China, where drivers can swap spent battery packs for fully charged replacements. Nio’s battery packs are the same shape and size across its lineup, which is comprised of three SUVs. EV models from peer BAIC BluePark New Energy Technology Co Ltd also have standardised batteries." https://in.reuters.com/article/nio-battery-electric/chinese-ev-maker-nio-launches-battery-leasing-service-eyes-global-market-idINKBN25G0V4?il=0 ELECTRIC I-PACE SUV GETS A CHEAPER MODEL... FOR GERMANY Jaguar is working on a new entry-level I-PACE but it could be a Europe-only affair. It looks to be a limited-edition model, which is strange considering it makes less power and costs less than the full-fat model, called the ‘EV320 SE’. That numbers refers to the metric horsepower, which translates to 238kW. " according to stuff.co.nz: "Jag reckons the SUV will hit 100kmh in 6.4 seconds, compared to 4.8 for the existing EV400. Velocity tops out 180kmh versus 200kmh but range is an identical 480km. Being a special edition, the EV320 gets optional extras thrown on as standard. That includes 20-inch wheels, an electrically-opening boot, electric heated mirrors, LED headlights, 14-way adjustable leather sports seats, driving assists and a pair of touchscreens on the centre console. The UK isn’t getting this model, with currently confirmed countries including Germany and Norway." https://www.stuff.co.nz/motoring/122514625/electric-ipace-suv-gets-a-cheaper-model-for-germany BRITISH ARMY TRIALS HYBRID-POWERED MILITARY VEHICLES "Hybrid technology is being tested by the British Army in two of its armoured vehicles as a way to improve sustainability and enhance stealth capabilities." says the Daily Mail: "The innovative hybrid electric-drive system will be developed by Coventry-based NP Aerospace along with General Dynamics UK, Supacat and Magtec. Alongside delivering multiple technical and operational enhancements, the introduction of hybrid technology will ultimately reduce the Army's reliance on fossil fuels" https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8646565/British-Army-trials-hybrid-powered-military-vehicles-improve-stealth.html UK SAFARI RE-OPENS USING ELECTRIC VEHICLES "" Hyundai is helping leading family Theme Park and Zoo, Chessington World of Adventures Resort get going again by providing electric cars for the resort's a brand-new Safari Adventure VIP Experience." says Motor1: "In a first for a UK attraction, guests will be driven by a park ranger in a fleet of fully-electric Kona crossovers, travelling among zebras, giraffes and more in the resort's African animal Wanyama Reserve." https://uk.motor1.com/news/439716/uk-safari-re-opens-using-electric-vehicles/ LYFT JOINS EV100 "Lyft, the ride-sharing company from the US, has joined EV100 by announcing its commitment to reaching 100% electric vehicles on its platform by 2030." says Smart Transport website: "The company is estimating that making the switch will save drivers on its platform around $10 billion in reduced vehicle operating expenses. EV100 is an initiative by international non-profit The Climate Group, bringing together over 70 companies committed to accelerating the transition to electric vehicles (EVs) and making electric transport the new normal by 2030. Other members include Lime, AstraZeneca, and Ingka Group (IKEA)." https://www.smarttransport.org.uk/news/latest-news/lyft-joins-ev100-and-commits-to-full-ev-switch-by-2030 RENAULT INTRODUCES ZOE IN SOUTH KOREA "Renault, through its Renault Samsung Motors subsidiary (owned in 80.1% by Renault and 19.9% by Samsung), is introducing in South Korea its flagship electric car Renault ZOE." reports InsideEVs: "After deducting generous subsidies of about 11.9 million won ($10,075), the effective prices are from 28.1 to 32.1 million won ($23,900 to $27,300). We can guess that Renault targets to sell at least a few thousand ZOE per year in the country, which might become the largest export market for ZOE outside Europe." https://insideevs.com/news/439808/renault-zoe-south-korea/ ELECTRIC VEHICLE SALES TRIPLE IN AUSTRALIA "Sales of electric vehicles in Australia tripled in 2019 despite a lack of government support, according to the industry’s peak body. The country’s network of electric vehicle charging stations was also growing, the Electric Vehicle Council’s annual report found, including a rise in the number of faster charging stations" writes The Guardian: " There are now 28 electric models on sale, with eight priced below $65,000. Six more were due to arrive before the end of 2021, including two priced below $50,000, the council’s report said. The Morrison government promised a national electric vehicle strategy would be finalised by the middle of this year, but the policy has been delayed. The prime minister, Scott Morrison, last year accused Labor of wanting to “end the weekend” and force people out of four-wheel drives." Mein Urlaub mit dem ID.3 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mein-urlaub-mit-dem-id3-herbert-diess/?trackingId=%2Fp6xj%2FhYvRFRWxMENi8%2FbA%3D%3D Herbert Diess, Chairman of the Board of Management of Volkswagen Group. Blogging his Summer holiday in an ID.3 From Google Translate: "We had a great time with the ID.3 on the way to Italy and there. Vacation trips with modern electric cars are already working really well today. The cars offer so much comfort and drive so confidently that the vacation can begin with great serenity even with the vacation trip. The charging infrastructure between Munich and Lake Garda was also well developed, only the charging stations will have to be displayed more precisely on our navigation systems in the future - there is currently a discrepancy of around 200 meters with some. Many people saw the vehicle live for the first time during my trip. I was really pleased with the reactions. The curious and interested looks show: The ID.3 is cool! https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mein-urlaub-mit-dem-id3-herbert-diess/?trackingId=%2Fp6xj%2FhYvRFRWxMENi8%2FbA%3D%3D You can listen to all 872 previous episodes of this this for free, where you get your podcasts from, plus the blog https://www.evnewsdaily.com/ – remember to subscribe, which means you don’t have to think about downloading the show each day, plus you get it first and free and automatically. It would mean a lot if you could take 2mins to leave a quick review on whichever platform you download the podcast. And if you have an Amazon Echo, download our Alexa Skill, search for EV News Daily and add it as a flash briefing. Come and say hi on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter just search EV News Daily, have a wonderful day, I’ll catch you tomorrow and remember…there’s no such thing as a self-charging hybrid. 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European Vacation: Chessington World of Adventures with David Sims

Podcast: The Ride

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 14, 2020 116:01

David Sims (Blank Check, The Atlantic) joins us to discuss England's Chessington World of Adventures. A park filled with very delightful, VERY British characters!Sail on over to The Second Gate for a day trip to Popeye Village Malta!Patreon.com/PodcastTheRideTHIS EPISODE IS SPONSORED BY BROOKLINENGet 10% your first order from brooklinen.com by using offer code ’RIDE’ at checkoutFOLLOW PODCAST: THE RIDE:https://twitter.com/PodcastTheRidehttps://www.instagram.com/podcasttherideBUY PODCAST: THE RIDE MERCH:https://www.teepublic.com/stores/podcast-the-ridePODCAST THE RIDE IS A FOREVER DOG PODCASThttps://foreverdogpodcasts.com/podcasts/podcast-the-ride

england adventures ride atlantic theme parks sail european vacation david sims forever dog forever dog podcast network chessington world very british

055 The House Of Cards

Inside My Wardrobe

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 2, 2020 35:08

Well here we are heading toward the end of week 2 of our official lock down and it’s been really interesting to see our emotions come to the surface as the dust has begun to settle don’t you think? Whilst the virus is in the air, there is also this weird sense of uncertainty, a kind of low hum of what next? We don’t know what to expect, we are all in the dark and this naturally causes this feeling of unease, of agitation, and of heightened emotion – I’ve had so many messages from you and read so many posts from others all saying the same thing, random tears, feeling fine one minute and then overwhelmed by an imposing sense of doom the next – it’s just a roller coaster and it’s a ride that we can’t get off - ….I remember years ago going to Chessington World of Adventures with our church youth group and I’ve never been one for heights and I was literally man handled on to the Vampire Ride, for the first few seconds I fought it, my fear rose to the surface but once I realised there was no going back, I embraced the fear, screamed my heart out and made it to the end. Giving birth is the same, once it starts, there’s no going back, you know its going to hurt and you can’t guarantee the result but there’s no pressing stop. We keep seeing the words “in this together”, there’s been no greater equaliser in our lifetimes, a disaster that has pretty much effected everyone and I feel like whilst we have all spent our lives merrily discovering our individual senses of self, doing our own things, building our own futures, suddenly we have become realigned with this deep connection with one another, and this deep NEED for one another – don’t you think? …saying that, there is nothing equal about our situations, I can only imagine how claustrophic it is for someone without any outside space, or families cramped into small houses, multiple children sharing rooms or even beds – even worse when you look out beyond the UK and look at countries such as India and where people live in incredibly close proximity and the idea of washing your hands is completely foreign, the mind just doesn’t know where to go – so yes we have so much to be thankful for safely in our homes – but then saying that, I know having grown up in a violent family myself, there are people who are not safe at home either, they say domestic abuse is up by over 20% ….the situation is so much bigger than the virus and that feeling of being powerless, of just waiting for the light at the end of the tunnel, the not knowing about jobs and businesses …I mean the financial implications are massive for many! The government have done a great job with the packages they have provided but at the same time, I know of plenty of people who have slipped through the net – its exhausting! For me this is where looking back to history is helpful, there have been many many disasters over the years, tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, and fires that have killed hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of days – that has brought entire villages, towns and cities to their knees, eradicated businesses and crashed economies ….and then it comes to an end, and they rebuild This will pass, like TB, like Smallpox, like measles, all of which have taken billions of lives over the years, we will find a vaccine and we will eventually fight back – but in the meantime – what do we do? I had to contact my daughter’s school this week as they are piling on the work, reminding everyone to be ready for virtual school at 8:55 as if they are still at school – and totally not addressing the fact that everyone’s lives are different right now – it virtually impossible for most to just keep on going doing the same thing as before when everything else around them is different – I have to say, personally I’m still working and leaving the house to commute and take provisions to my mum when she needs them so in many ways I don’t feel isolated – but my mind seems to be going at a different pace, it’s like the entire world has suddenly slowed down and I have to say I’m loving that, whilst I’m probably more busy than usual, and I know it’s the same for many parents who are now desperately trying to keep children stimulated and entertained whilst also working whilst also providing more meals than before and absolutely no peace anywhere – weirdly a bit like the eye in the storm, if we could lift all the pressure that says learn an instrument, pick up a new skill or suddenly become super fit, if we could find somewhere in our minds to stop and just be, in the midst of this new normal, I don’t know about you but I start to assess where we have come from! There are lots of silver linings to be found in the midst of this if we are willing to find them – Cathy talked last week about the humming bird and the vulture – they both find what they are looking for, one looks for life and the other looks for death. …. Suddenly we are forced to stop and acknowledge that perhaps there really is more to life, that through this re-connection with one another and the world around us, we really start to be aware of our deeper sense of self and spirituality. We have lived through the rise of the great “I”, the individual, that to be fair, has been going on probably for the last couple of centuries but in the process, it has slowly drawn as apart from each other and with the rise in technology and the ability to be socially connected in so many ways, the irony is that we have also become hugely disconnected at the fundamental levels and through this period of isolation, we are reconnecting. I’ve noticed the last few times that I’ve gone out for a walk, as we give each other space, as we take the wide birth, we then make the effort to seek out eye contact, say hello and make that connection – which is in STARK contrast to our lives previous to all this where we had our heads down, were generally considered weird if we said hello and did all we could to avoid eye contact but really not bothered about stepping into someone’s space – IT’S ALL CHANGE isn’t it? For years it’s been that way since smart technology really began to take over, especially in towns and cities, it’s eyes down and keep yourself to yourself. And we’ve been so obsessed with self for so long – I’m glad it’s being challenged, aren’t you? We have had control for such a long time, and influence over the outcome of our daily lives that we’ve fallen into this false sense of security that self is what counts - so of course suddenly when something comes along that we have zero control over, its going to feel as though the rug has been pulled from under our feet, of course we then struggle to stand, both individually and collectively. So if you’re feeling weird and wobbly right now please don’t think you are the only one!! Do you remember the weebles back in the 70s? They had weights in the bottom of them and the phrase was “Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down” – those weights grounded them – suddenly all the superfluous bits of 21st century life have been cast aside and we are left with who we are and the thing that grounds us, whatever that might be, faith, love, trust, elements that have been revered for centuries but at the same time can be easily swept aside when “self” starts to take centre stage – suddenly we are becoming reconnected to those absolute basic human needs that psychologist Maslow set out all those years ago – I talked about it in an episode way back ….. I was listening to Rob Bell’s podcast last week and I loved how he worded the fact that amongst all this fear, worry, sadness, and loss, is an invitation to be found and the challenge that comes with embracing that invitation, to acknowledge the fact that we have been plastering over crack after crack after crack over the years, and we have been hurtling towards this breaking point for a very long time. For how long have we been saying we feel like we’re on a machine that is just getting faster and faster, that technology is improving at such a pace that we just can’t keep up any longer? I know I’ve used the phrase multiple times over the years “stop the world, I want to get off” – well the world has stopped for us, not for us to get off, but so we can collectively take stock. By embracing what’s landed right in the centre of all of our lives with this virus, we are offered the chance to change. You might remember last week I mentioned how I had been chatting with my daughter about school. For years she has asked to be homeschooled and this has really given her the opportunity to try it. Granted she’s a little older now in year 10 but still, we talked about how this is an opportunity to create life to function in a way that works for us, and not the other way around – we live in a bunch of systems, family is a system, the education system, governmental system – so many rules and boundary lines and whilst some of them are necessary, we can also take this time to create something new, rather than being too quick to leap into back the old system when the time comes. In the midst of all the stress and grief and worry and fear that we are experiencing right now, there is also this gift hanging about offering to us the chance to really examine what matters, who matters, how we are spending each and every moment, what we are doing with our lives, where we are going and where we have been. Do we want it to continue in the same way? Over the last few years I have managed to drop my phone down the toilet twice and after the initial shock of oh good Lord now what am I going to do, it has offered to me a blessed relief of disconnection and both times I found I was sad when the time came around to reconnect – not because I don’t love connection with the outside world, you know I do – but I am always aware of exactly that, being connected and stretching out far and wide …we all need to switch off and disconnect at times and this is why I have always guarded our family holidays with this ring around it that says no screens. I personally don’t find the speed of life manageable 24/7, I find it destructive and sometimes it feels like we are heading towards the edge of a cliff so I cannot help but feel that in the midst of this there is a chance to change pace, change focus, reassess our values, and take stock. I wondered if it what is too soon to talk about this but this is where my head is right now and I don’t want to let this time slip by without making the most of it. We are finding that one school is setting way too much work and piling on the pressure to continue as if nothing has changed whereas the other school is completely opposite. EVERYTHING has changed and if we continue to just do the same thing, and not allow our emotions to raise up to the surface and our minds to rummage through our thought processes, no matter how absurd they all seem right now, we are just creating a whole new set of denial to push down – and in that case, we may as well just be robots – but I’m not up for that. I’m human, and in order to really have the full human experience, we need to connect at all levels – emotionally, spiritually and physically. I fear that if we don’t take this time to examine how we are doing life, once we’re out the other side we will just revert back to our old ways – that is unless we take the time now, to embrace what we’re feeling and really think about what it is that matters. I was going to talk about mental health this week but I’ll save it for another time as I think this is enough for now – but to be honest, I do not believe that the system that we have been living in has been helpful to our mental health, any of us, for a very long time. We talk about mental health now partly because we are more aware of it but partly also because we’re all struggling with it so much more in one way or another. So the question is why are we all struggling with it? And is it a case of more therapy and more drugs or is it a case of a monumental change of the way we do life? The other thing I have been acutely aware of this week is history – we can take great comfort from history as what we are experiencing in so many ways is not new…. This time will indeed pass and we can draw comfort from that knowledge. However also in revisiting various historical texts, we are also reminded that in ancient traditions, there was always the sabbath – something that we have pretty much managed to eradicate, there were breaks that were placed into the rhythm of life - we used to Rise with the Sun and go to bed with the sun - but now we just keep on going. We aren’t built to live this way, so of course we’re all reaching breaking point but the question for me is “what next?” And this is part of our process right now, it’s not about coming up with answers. I think this is more about starting to ask questions, having the time to explore, to rediscover, to reconnect, to reimagine, and when the time comes, we will then be ready to rebuild life in a way that we want it to be, in a way that works for us so that we are not serving life, but instead we are living it. Half of the reason why we don’t feel fulfilled is because we have been on catch up for such a long time, never feeling like we’re ahead of the curve but always feeling like we are behind it, always trying to catch up with technology, always trying to catch up with the next best thing, Always demanding our right to have this and our right to go here, or our right to say how we feel about x y or z without necessarily considering or caring about the consequence, or the effect on the bigger picture. The pursuit of happiness, knowing our rights, having ALL of our perceived needs met – holidays, technology, new cars, new trainers, designer handbags, the latest mascara, the flash watch, the list goes on – In new York, as of I think 2018, more people lived alone than not – what does that say about us? The system has raised us to be individuals who consume and this over inflated sense of self has pulled us all apart from each other when you could say that the very reason for humanity is for love and connection. We keep saying written everywhere we are in this together, and maybe that is something that we can draw on, a sense of togetherness for the first time possibly in our entire lives that we have been aware of community, something bigger than ourselves, something more than consumption and what we own, what car we drive, what holiday we go on, what job we have. Suddenly we have the opportunity to be defined by more than what we do and what we have but more by who we are and how we connect, deeply, at heart and spirit level. This virus has come and thrown a ball right in the middle of all the skittles that we have been carefully lining up for so many years, you know that feeling when you’re building a House of Cards and the dog rushes by and they all fall down. It’s like we’ve been building this House of Cards for such a long time and we thought it was perfect and orderly and exactly what we wanted ……and suddenly we see how fragile it is. The question is do we start again and pick up where we left off or do we look to do it differently? You know what I’ve observed over the last few years? I don’t know anyone who doesn’t say they were sent to social media at some stage or that they just want to be able to stop, or that they just wish that life would slow down. I don’t know anyone, there is not one single person I can think of that says I love life at this pace. I don’t know about you but I do not want this time, and the lives that will be lost during this time to go to waste. We celebrate and commemorate on November 11 every single year the lives that have been lost for the sake of our freedom. I don’t want the lives that are lost during this virus to be wasted because in a way, it is through this that our planet is being given the chance to heal and we are being given a chance to change - We are in this together So Let’s be in this together, let’s feel this together – allow ourselves to slow down enough to let those feelings come to the surface, no more numbing with a busy life, no diverting our attention elsewhere, no pushing down or denying, but actually allowing ourselves to feel what we feel and take the time to do that. It is so good for our physical and mental health to actually acknowledge and feel our feelings rather than in true British style, bottling them up and storing them on the shelf So whether it’s fear, frustration, cabin fever, anger, sadness, or whether hilarity and hysteria kicks in, whatever it might be, allow the roller coaster to take you where it goes We need this time to learn how to feel again, to reconnect with our humanity, to stop behaving like robots and start behaving like living breathing human beings again We are in this together – let the house of cards fall, it wasn’t working anyway

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Chessington World of Prize (4-9)

We've Got No Idea What We're Gonna Say

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 19, 2020 20:00

Live (not dead) from the South Wimbledon Studios, Ben & Nick are back with more insights into the world. If you want to hear about Donald Trump, training Priests, and animals with eyes - you've come to the right place. You may regret it, but it is the right place...

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10: OFF THE TRACKS Ep#10 (Podcast) | Chessington World Of Adventures | Question Time.

Off the Tracks

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 6, 2020 22:42

Off the tracks your number 1 podcast on YouTube this week, we discusses the theme park Chessington World Of Adventures, what rides they are, if they are good or bad, how family friendly is this park and so much more. And not forgetting question time. As aways thanks for the support. If you have a question, send it to our social media platforms or leave it in the comments below this video. Lewis's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX42t-5_yDzogP42bE4OpLA Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TPFamilys/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TPfamilys Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tpfamilys/

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2020 Week 3 - Super Nintendo World, Another Rise and a Raptor

Theme Park News in a Minute

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 17, 2020 1:44

• Universal Studios Japan have release a hype video for Super Nintendo World, as if we weren’t hyped enough already. The music video featured Galantis and Charlie XCX. We also saw potential 4 people ride vehicles for the Mario Kart ride and got our first look at Power-up wristbands. • Disneyland’s version of Rise of the Resistance opens today, using the same boarding group system that has been used at Hollywood Studios. • Epcot has started previews for a couple attractions coming in the next few weeks,Canada Far and Wide and Beauty and the beast singalong with the latter having its opening schedule released. It will Run 11am-7pm with Impressions de France running 7:30pm-9pm. • Legoland California unveiled an 8.5 foot tall space raptor from the Lego Movie 2, at what will be the entrance of Lego Movie World, which will open in spring. • The share price of Six Flags had a dramatic dive this week after they filed a report with the US Securities and Exchange Commission declaring that the company has filed a formal notice of default with Chinese development partner, Riverside. • Chessington World of Adventure has announced that they will open a new Rainforest area in 2020 that will include three kids rides. • Disney has shown off the huge Gusteaus Sign which will be outside the upcoming Ratatouille dark ride in Epcot’s World Showcase. • Ocean Park in Hong Kong has announced its spending 10.6 million yuan to open 7 new scenic spots between 2023 and 2027.

#107 Dudley is Hissing 4

Doctor Who's Line, is it?...Anyway!!!

Play Episode Listen Later May 26, 2019 41:16

In this week's exciting episode the Doctor returns from Chessington World of Adventures for a final (!!!) climactic meeting with Jeff...that is assuming he isn't sidetracked by Spandex & Igor's questionable cuisine, of course!!! Queue up your DVD player or media file & we’ll tell you when to press play on Season 14, episode 11 - "Deadly Assassin, Part 4" so you can watch the story along with us. Don’t worry if you don’t have access to the episode though, you can easily listen to the podcast on its own without losing too much of the experience (although it's always a bit better with the video showing you what's happening!)

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#106 Dudley is Hissing 3

Doctor Who's Line, is it?...Anyway!!!

Play Episode Listen Later May 26, 2019 39:58

In a break with tradition, the Doctor has decided to forego the story for a week & instead has headed to Chessington World of Adventures, where doubtless he won't be shot at, poisoned, set on fire, or given liquorice....or will he? Queue up your DVD player or media file & we’ll tell you when to press play on Season 14, episode 10 - "Deadly Assassin, Part 3" so you can watch the story along with us. Don’t worry if you don’t have access to the episode though, you can easily listen to the podcast on its own without losing too much of the experience (although it's always a bit better with the video showing you what's happening!)

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Folge 9 - Brexit Nr. 1 - wieder Meer ohne Meerblick

Launch und Lifthill - euer Freizeitpark Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 26, 2018 48:13

Und mal wieder hat es viel zu lange gedauert bis wir es geschafft haben euch diese neue Folge zur Verfügung zu stellen. Aber wie sagt man so schön: was lange währt wird endlich gut! In Folge 9 starten wir unser kleines Erlebnis in England mit dem Adventure Island, dem Dreamland in Margete und meinem ersten britischen Merlin-Park, dee Chessington World of Adventures. Natürlich wieder mit einem Überblick über die Parks und unserer Meinung zu ebenjenen. Natürlich ohne irgendeinen Anspruch der Vollständigkeit und ohne Haftung für den ganzen Blödsinn, der zwangsweise dabei rum kommt. Wir hoffen euch macht die Folge genau so viel Spaß beim hören, wie sie uns beim aufnehmen bereitet habt. Schaut gerne bei Instagram vorbei! (https://instagram.com/launchundlifthill) Cheerio, Felix und Marvin! Folge direkt herunterladen

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Episode 102 - We Read Poor Reviews of Chessington World of Adventures

The Theme Park Trader Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 1, 2018 63:15

Join us for episode 102 of the Theme Park Trader podcast. Happy 2018 everyone! We are back to a bit of normality on the podcast this week and for the first episode of the year we thought it would be fun to target another UK theme park by reading out poor reviews of Chessington World of Adventures! Be sure to check us out over on www.themeparktrader.com. If you like us then please check out our podcasting friends Dis After Dark

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s4-09 - Chessington World of Prize

We've Got No Idea What We're Gonna Say!

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 9, 2017 20:00

Live (not dead) from the South Wimbledon Studios, Ben & Nick are back with more insights into the world.If you want to hear about Donald Trump, training Priests, and animals with eyes - you've come to the right place. You may regret it, but it is the right place...

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Le Revo-Rama à Madame Tussauds, London Eye, Shrek’s Adventure et Sea Life (London part 6) (vidéo)

Le Revo-Rama. Le podcast du blog Rêves Connectés.

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 24, 2016 38:38

Divertissements familiaux variés et étonnants au coeur de Londres ! Sixième et dernier épisode de nos Revo-Rama réalisés à Londres cet été. Après la ville de Londres, Doctor Who Experience, Legoland Windsor, Harry Potter Studio Tour, Chessington World of Adventures, nous vous proposons de découvrir en vidéo une série de divertissements au coeur de Londres proposés […] L’article Le Revo-Rama à Madame Tussauds, London Eye, Shrek’s Adventure et Sea Life (London part 6) (vidéo) est apparu en premier sur Rêves Connectés - Le Revo-Rama.

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Le Revo-rama à Chessington World of Adventures (Revo-Rama in London part 5) (vidéo)

Le Revo-Rama. Le podcast du blog Rêves Connectés.

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 10, 2016 15:57

Chessington World of Adventures, un parc d’attractions londonien méconnu en France Après la visite de Londres, Doctor Who Experience, Harry Potter Studio Tour, et Legoland Windsor, nous avons fait escale à Chessington South pour découvrir le parc Chessington World of Adventures. Très peu connu en France, il est pourtant facilement accessible étant à 25 kilomètres […] L’article Le Revo-rama à Chessington World of Adventures (Revo-Rama in London part 5) (vidéo) est apparu en premier sur Rêves Connectés - Le Revo-Rama.

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Nick's ERT #30- Nick and Robert's EPIC ERT (European Road Trip)

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 11, 2015 180:33

Nick Hutson and Robert Coker discuss the ERT (European Road Trip) that took place in August. Join them for a three hour mega discussion! In a space of 7 days Nick and Robert visited 12 attractions across three different countries! They were, in no particular order, Madame Tussauds, Shrek's Adventure, Alton Towers, Chessington World of Adventures, Thorpe Park, The London Eye, Sea Life London. The London Dungeon, Brighton Pier, Efteling and Bobbejaanland!

Nick's ERT 21: A Journey from Summers to Halloweens at THORPE PARK

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 16, 2014 55:24

Nick joins Season Pass Holder Matthew Summers to guide him through his first scare maze event - at Thorpe Park's Fright Nights. They also spend the easier part of the day doing Legoland (for the first time) and Chessington World of Adventures. We also feature an interview with Sean Coogan, who's Thorpe Park's live entertainments manager. Closing out the episode is a discussion with Lee Conway, Nick and Matt. Along with many other fun surprises down the dark path of the Thorpe Park movie studios. Enjoy!'

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Animal Radio® Episode 723

Animal Radio®

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 11, 2013 110:50

Barking Blondes Anna Webb and Jo Good are perhaps the two funniest ladies you've ever heard. They have an affinity for our "fur-kids" - and they'll tell you how two bitches taught two bitches to survive without men. Flea Fodder Once again we are having a record year for fleas. And this has, quite by accident, become the thrust of today's show. Dr. Cristiano Von Simpson and "Dogfather" Joey Villani offer up great advice for ridding your pet of fleas once and for all. Can you use Listerine or Vinegar as effective protection? Dr. Debbie busts the myths. Rent-The-Chicken.com Phil Thompkins and his wife Jenn are quite the entrepreneurs. They've successfully launched a chicken rental business just in time for a renewed interest in the feathered fowl. "Chickens are the new dogs" and many simply like having the egg supply. Zero-Tolerance For People Wearing Animal Prints A wildlife park in the U.K. has started banning animal print clothing after zookeepers noticed the fashion choice was confusing the animals. The Chessington World of Adventures has even brought in "Animal Print Bouncers" to make sure visitors don't get in wearing anything patterned after zebras, giraffes, leopards, tigers, or other wild animals. What's "Stud Tail?" Did you know it's fairly common for unaltered male dogs (and cats) to be missing hair on the base of their tail? It's just another one of the problems when you fail to neuter your dog. You can even avoid some cancers by snip-snip-snipping. Purr Therapy A new cafe in Paris is offering patrons a dose of stress relief with their coffee. The Cat Cafe has a dozen resident cats to provide "purr therapy." The manager there says a cat's purring has been shown to help relieve arthritis or rheumatism and to lower blood pressure and heart rate. It seems the whole concept is a hit. So many people showed up for the cafe's recent opening that about 300 had to be turned away. More this week

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tspp #218- Listener Feedback/VoiceMail & Chessington Report!! 12/2/12

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 3, 2012 60:17

*Subscribe @ iTunes* This week Doug Barnes and Brent Young respond to listener Voice Mail and iTunes reviews. Also, we get an in-park report from Chessington World of Adventure park with Nick Hutson!! Great Stuff--Tons of Fun!! Enjoy! Links: Chessington World of Adventure Musical Talk Pixie Vacations This Week's Closing Song - "We Come Running" by Youngblood Hawke (iTunes Link) Check Out The Season Pass Podcast Website at: www.seasonpasspodcast.com Follow Us On Twitter! - www.twitter.com/theseasonpass Like the TSPP Facebook page! - www.facebook.com/theseasonpass Contact us: doug@seasonpasspodcast.com brent.young@seasonpasspodcast.com Call the Hotline with Park Trip Reports, Podcast Comments, or Anything else you would like to announce. –1-916-248-5524 Thanks to each one of you for listening to the show. Your support is extremely appreciated. © 2012 Season Pass Podcast

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tspp #151- Len Testa and the Unofficial Guide to British Parks Part 2! 12/24/10

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 24, 2010 66:22

*Subscribe @ iTunes* This week Len Testa returns to the Season Pass Discussion Room to finish conversation on The Unofficial Guide's soon to be released book on British Theme Parks. Len, Brent and Doug talk Blackpool Pleasure Beach, Chessington World of Adventures, and Legoland Windsor. Enjoy! Thanks to all the listeners for nominating the Season Pass for "Best Travel Podcast" for the Podcast Awards (Second Year In A Row!!). www.podcastawards.com. Show Links: Touring Plans Unofficial Guide Series Blackpool Pleasure Beach Chessington World of Adventures Legoland Windsor The Newly Designed Season Pass Podcast Website is at: www.seasonpasspodcast.com Follow Us On Twitter! - www.twitter.com/theseasonpass Like the TSPP Facebook page! - www.facebook.com/theseasonpass Contact us: doug@seasonpasspodcast.com brent.young@seasonpasspodcast.com nick@seasonpasspodcast.com Call the Hotline with Park Trip Reports, Podcast Comments, or Anything else you would like to announce. –1-916-248-5524 Thanks to each one of you for listening to the show. Your support is extremely appreciated. © 2010 Season Pass Podcast

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SPORTSDESK – CLIVE ALLEN SOLD FOR ONE MILLION TO CHESSINGTON WORLD OF ADVENTURES

On The Hour

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 2, 2008 0:23

SPORTSDESK – CLIVE ALLEN SOLD FOR ONE MILLION TO CHESSINGTON WORLD OF ADVENTURESClick the headline to listen to the audio clip at the On The Hour website. Deluxe case-bound 4-CD sets of On The Hour series 1 & 2 are released 24th November 2008 via Warp Records (preorder now). Digital audio downloads of the both series are available on iTunes and Bleep now. SPORTSDESK – CLIVE ALLEN SOLD FOR ONE MILLION TO CHESSINGTON WORLD OF ADVENTURESClick the headline to listen to the audio clip at the On The Hour website. Deluxe case-bound 4-CD sets of On The Hour series 1 & 2 are released 24th November 2008 via Warp Records (preorder now). Digital audio downloads of [...]

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tspp # 32, FanCast 2 -06/14/08