Russ Van Natta, VP of Sales at Creative Works, explains the strategy behind finding the right size for your laser tag attraction.
Welcome to another 360 Insights video; where we share actionable tips and information for those in the entertainment industry. Today we’re going to be talking to you guys a little bit about what makes the best sense for my business when it comes to a laser tag attraction. A lot of that can really depend on what your goals and objectives are.
Is this going to be a primary attraction or is this going to be a complimentary attraction to your facility? If it’s a primary attraction then obliviously it’s going to be your bread and butter; it’s going to be your biggest earning work horse, so you want to make sure you have enough of a footprint and overall size to get people through to get the proper revenue. Typically, when we look at a primary attraction for laser tag, we say you’re going to want to have at least 4,500-square-feet in playable space. You’ll also have some additional square footage allocated for your briefing and vesting rooms, but that playable space of 4,500-square-feet (or more) is really going to help you focus on having between 30-40 players (especially when we look at building a second level into that space). Having that overall throughput and capacity, again, is better to have the space then not need it; you can’t get back what you don’t have.
When we work with our clients and really try to educate them on what’s going to work best for them—that’s definitely a good starting metric. But sometimes we have to take what spaces we can work with on a case-by-case basis. While these are good rules-of-thumb for a primary attraction, we’ll always be working with you to help tune in what makes the most sense for the facility that you have.
For the clients that are looking to add this into an overall family entertainment center (FEC)-this might be a complimentary attraction to a trampoline park or a bowling center-then we can scale that down just a little bit for you. At that point, you’re going to need at least 2,500-square-feet with 2,000 of that starting at playable space and the other 500 for briefing and vesting. We can gain additional square footage by adding in a second level and seeing what makes the most sense for us to maximize capacity. With that, you’re going to be look at between 20-30 players and that’s going to at least do two birthday parties at one time based on the average birthday party around the U.S. coming in at around 12 players. All of this drives back into how much we can handle and how that effects our birthday party/corporate business; what’s going to allow us to have enough to not preclude us from getting access to bigger groups, but what’s also not over-engineering and over-shooting what makes sense for the space.
Because square footage is your most precious commodity, we need to be evaluating that on a very specific case-by-case basis, but hopefully this starts to give you an understanding of what makes the biggest impact for you guys.
That’s what we have as far as what your attractions should be and what capacity you should be looking at. Again, primary attraction: 4,500-square-feet or more; secondary attraction: 2,500-square-feet.
We hope this helps. Stay tuned for more tips in the future. Now, get after it!