Elevating the Guest Experience in 2022 and Beyond

A platform is greater than the sum of its parts; striving to better its users by any means necessary — features, integrations, expertise and customer success. Our platform is not just designed to help you do better; we want to help you know what to do to win.  

It’s what we’ve always done as a company, and it’s reflected in our product. But we can and will always strive to do more, so we listened to you and worked backwards from there. These are some highlights from 2022.  

Key Takeaways

• RocketPass: The future of mobile guest experience
• Clarity Dashboards: Data and insights to shape your success
• It’s never been easier to use our platform
• New faces and places  
• We had a lot to say, and you listened!
• Diverse clients in a variety of industries and locations
• You saw us at our best — awards and speeches
• Where do we go from here? RocketRez Academy, tailored content

Company News

We expanded our circle and grew our headcount more than 50%, adding some key positions to the team — Kam Sandhu, Chief Financial Officer and Ishani Uppal, People & Culture Manager.  

Many other departments at RocketRez also grew this year, and with that, we’ve got boots on the ground in cities across both coasts and down the middle of North America. And we’re still hiring in 2023.  

Product – The Sum is Greater Than Its Parts

2022 was the year that the tours & attractions industry felt RocketRez make the leap from “ticketing and operations software” to a “guest experience platform.” The business outcomes achieved by adopting our full platform far surpass that of individual feature sets, because every feature we release is tied to the value we create for your attraction.  

The major value themes we see across our customer base are the need to grow revenue, optimize processes, and deliver a best-in-class customer experience. This is how we deliver:  

Elevating the guest experience to new heights

Providing a top-notch guest experience is a major focus in the market right now. We’ve tackled this head-on with our release of RocketPass. RocketPass will open many new opportunities for operators, including the ability to:

• Communicate easily with guests on-site
• Allow guests to pay with card-on-file directly in RocketPass
• Upsell and enable guests to choose their own experiences
• Track every interaction with guests across ticketing, retail, food & beverage and more

RocketRez is a big platform, but after years of adding new features and capabilities, it’s still simple. We are consistently striving to maintain this simplicity, because we know paying attention to these details will absolutely delight your employees. As a result, employees regularly remark that RocketRez is faster and easier to use than alternatives, which increases overall productivity.

We have a saying that “customers are drowning in data, but starving for insights.”

You need to make decisions rapidly, without running reports or modelling in Excel. RocketRez combines data from across your organization like no other platform can, and we’re continually ensuring we're at forefront of data analysis to help you drive revenue across all channels.

We listened to you, our customers, and implemented what you told us were your greatest needs.

RocketPass, in its launch phase, empowers your guests to self-direct every stage of their journey with ease. It’s a mobile guest experience that turns your guest’s ticket into a digital wallet to purchase anything on-site and communicate with your operations. Reach out to our sales team to book a demo and witness the future of mobile guest experience.

Empowering Your Operations with Comprehensive Insights

Clarity Dashboards on RocketRez consolidates all your operational metrics into one place and provides access to more data to gain insight into customer behavior and revenue trends at your attraction.

Scaling Your Operations: The numbers don’t lie. Operators who partner with RocketRez save an average of 35 hours per week by automating tasks. Employee training time on a competitor platform equates to 142 paid hours, compared to RocketRez averaging 62 paid hours. Time is money, and you save it with RocketRez. You can read more about it in our revenue report ‘The Guest Experience Revenue Effect’.

A platform would not be complete without best-in-class partners, and we added several to our roster in 2022:

TourShield

TourShield, from Protecht, assesses the risk factors of a customer’s ticket cancellation (location, event date, event type) and uses an algorithm to provide an on-the-spot price during online checkout for insurance to protect their ticket purchase and provide peace of mind that their investment is safe against unforeseen circumstances. You can read more about TourShield and how it integrates into your business here.

Digonex

Digonex provides algorithm-informed dynamic pricing to operators and their guests to maximize revenue and attendance to their tours and attractions.

Payments with RocketLink

Payments with Rocketlink uses payment gateways — a way for a customer to make a credit card payment easily and securely through a unique URL sent via text or email — to have customers feel safe and in control of their own checkout experience.

Here are some more new features we released this year:

• Collect e-signatures from contracts
• Custom announcements in the Web Engine feature
• Segment timed ticketed events by time of day
• SMS tickets from the Point of Sale
• Enhanced customer communication tools (SMS, email, RocketPass)
• Inventory system upgrades
• Mobile mode for Master Schedule
• Online shopping cart upgrades
• Automated form follow-ups
• Customer details on tickets
• Online gift cards
• Ticket scanning app
• Inventory checker with UPC codes
• Employee timekeeping system

Marketing

The RocketRez marketing department published some of our most engaging content this year. Here’s the best of the best.

1. Our five-part Revenue Management series:

• Introduction: The life of a Tours & Attractions business in three stages, Start, Growth and Maturity.  ‍
• Part 1: Your goal is to sell your inventory at the most profitable price point that meets the demand of your customers. Here’s how you meet that goal. ‍
• Part 2: Think of yourself as a supplier looking for the most effective distributor. ‍
• Part 3: How managing your inventory can have a drastic impact on your operations. ‍
• Part 4: Some of the best strategies at your disposal to increase revenue by selling products online. ‍
• Part 5: Consolidate and simplify the many moving parts of an operation with KPIs to measure and manage.

The Guest Experience Revenue Effect report

We released The Guest Experience Revenue Effect report, a deep dive into the formulas that make our clients successful on the RocketRez platform. Here are some statistics about what we helped our customers:

• Save 35 hours/week through automation
• Spend 50% less time training employees
• Reduce headcount needs by 3 full-time employees while scaling operations
• Consolidate 5 software subscriptions into one
• Save $200K+ on OTA commissions

The RocketRez Guide to Elevating the Guest Experience

We also released our latest eBook, The RocketRez Guide to Elevating the Guest Experience, and we delve into these topics here:

1. The three types and four phases of Guest Experience
2. How Strategic Marketing Improves the Guest Experience
3. Expanding the Experience with a Modernized Tech Stack
4. The Power of Data Analysis in Driving Revenue for Tour and Attraction Operations

TouchPoint Magazine

We published another edition of TouchPoint Magazine, which flew off our shelves at the November IAPPA conference and has seen hundreds of digital downloads.

Here are some of the most engaging blog posts:

• 3 Ways to Future Proof Your Non-Profit Now
• Five Ways to Reduce Credit Card Fraud at Your Tour or Attraction This Summer
• Tips for Training Seasonal or Part-Time Employees
  

We got loud about our amazing experience at both conferences on LinkedIn, and you listened. Follow us for more good times ahead!

Sales

We onboarded many notable new clients — here are just a few:

• Museum of Illusions, with four locations currently live and four more to go
• Seven Falls Adventures at The Broadmoor, an expansion of our initial services with the Broadmoor
• Aquarium of the Bay
• Miami Seaquarium  

We expanded into new verticals, like haunted houses and waterparks. And with that, new markets; namely our expanding presence in Hawaii and Mexico.  

You saw us at a lengthy list of trade shows and conferences:

• Arival San Diego
• PVA Kentucky
• Hai Heli-Expo Dallas
• AZA Mid-Year Long Beach
• AAM Boston
• Tianguis Turistico Cancun
• IPW Orlando
• Florida Attractions Association
• AZA Annual
• IAPPA Expo Europe
• PVA Southeast Region Meeting
• PVA Great Lakes Region Meeting
• Arival Las Vegas
• PVA Western Region Meeting
• Marine Log Ferries Conference & Expo
• PVA Rivers Region Meeting
• PVA Original Colonies Meeting
• IAPPA USA Expo
• ZAA Annual  

Big Wins

You’re starting to get the picture, but 2022 was big for RocketRez. Here are some wins we’re particularly proud to share:

We partnered with Protecht to launch TourShield ticket assurance.

We won ‘Best Reconfigurable Exhibit’ for our booth at IAPPA.

Our 20-by-20 booth space features two pairs of back-to-back screen-based demo stations to maximize the floor space, with a central island counter offering two hands-on experiences.

The stations also easily convert into an in-line configuration, featuring a reception/demo counter and an additional meeting space on the other side. Can you blame ‘em?

Unveiled RocketPass to the world

We were thrilled to unveil RocketPass to the world at our demo lab at Arival 360 in Las Vegas!

Our team worked hard to craft a product that would provide unparalleled levels of insight for our tour and attraction operators, and convenience for their users.

Everyone was impressed by how the future of attractions could look like, and we're excited to continue introducing RocketPass to the world.

A Toast to Attractions Happy Hour

We celebrated the return of travel with a close group of industry peers at our Planet Hollywood suite. It was an honor to share our successes with those who have been part of our journey so far.

We are grateful for their support and look forward to more great things to come in this exciting new era of travel.

IAAPA Expo: Presented Insights to Hundreds-Strong Crowd

IAAPA Expo in Orlando saw two notable Rez-heads present to a hundreds-strong crowd: CEO John Pendergrast’s keynote ‘The Incredible Customer Journey — Following the Data Through Every Digital Touchpoint’ and Marketing Director Scott Riddell’s EDU talk ‘Digital Sales and Guest Experience Solutions: Online or In-Person, It’s All E-Commerce'.

There was an electrifying buzz in the air and we had incredible Q&A sessions after the talk, where attendees came up to ask follow-up questions to learn more about what we shared.

2023

The RocketRez platform has one intended goal for 2023: helping tours & attractions operators win, and teaching operators what to do to get there. We don’t grow unless you grow.

We’ll be conducting the third edition of RocketRez Academy, this time in Boston, alongside Ticketing and Retail certification sessions in the spring.

The first two RocketRez Academy sessions were a blast, but there’s more to learn. We’ll see you there!

We’ll be releasing more tailored content to help develop your business; guides and information on sales, marketing and business operations to set your attraction as a cut above your industry peers.  

Until then, here’s to an exciting and busy 2023.