Buzzshot Blog

Most booking confirmation emails we see have one big problem: They’re written for absolutely everyone.

As an experiment: If you take a look at your booking confirmation from the perspective of a player coming to play a specific room, the chances are it doesn’t quite hit how you’d …

Double, double, toil and trouble. Something spooky this way comes…

…No it’s not a group who says “we brought our own lockpicks”, it’s Halloween!

For many escape rooms, Halloween is the biggest revenue earner of the year. Second occasionally only to Christmas, depending on your business model. People …

That’s a wrap on another RECON! We (the Buzzshot + Escape Industry Newsletter team) just got back from two awesome days in Laval, Quebec at RECON 26, where we spent it connecting with escape room owners, enthusiasts, and partners from across Canada and the USA. It was two …

There are only so many hours in a day! So you run your escape rooms at 10am, 12pm, 2pm, 4pm, and 6pm. Simple enough, right? This gives your Games Masters plenty of time to reset the room, and allows a little buffer for teams to show up late… …

On any given day at your escape room you’ll see lots of types of players come through the doors. Your morning might start with a family with three kids who have never done a room before, followed by a corporate team who have been told by HR that …

For a lot of escape rooms, getting your booking slots loaded into your booking software is straightforward - it's “how many rooms do you have?” and “how many slots do you want to run in a day?”. That would probably work just fine if every bookable experience at …

If you’ve been in the escape room industry for any length of time, you might have heard about the Reality Escape Conference, or “RECON” for short. Maybe you’ve seen some cool photos from previous years attendees, or heard the buzz about “that really cool conference game” someone played …

If you run an escape room, there’s a good chance you’ve got at least one slot in your calendar marked as “Call to Book”. Maybe it’s last minute, same-day availability? Or maybe it’s certain timeslots where you’ll need to confirm staffing before committing to them? Or maybe some …

Some escape room businesses grow steadily, and Pier Pressure grew in every direction at once. Since opening in Brighton in 2018 with a single game and three team members, they’ve expanded to four sites with 50 to 60 staff, eight permanent games in Brighton alone, and a full-time …

Your online checkout is, for the most part, the moment a curious visitor becomes a confirmed player. It’s the last step between someone thinking “oh hey, I should do an escape room”, and you receiving money in your account. So it’s worth asking whether your online booking flow …

When you’re running one of the most celebrated escape room businesses in the country, the bar for software is high. For James Hamer-Morton, co-owner of Deadlocked and Knockout Escape Rooms in Reading, switching booking systems wasn’t something to take lightly. But when Buzzshot Bookings came along, it cleared …

If you’ve been a Buzzshot user for a while, you’ll know that our mission has always been to give escape room owners a powerful, connected platform to run their business. From waivers and team photos, to email marketing and player satisfaction surveys, to detailed analytics to understand your …

It’s Monday morning (or for that matter, any day of the week) and you’ve opened up your escape room’s inbox. If you’re like most, you can expect the usual mix of booking enquiries, questions about the rooms, a player or two asking if they left an item there …

Every escape room owner knows that moment: A player walks in and you're sure you've seen them before. Was it last month? Did they play the Pirate room or the Castle? Were they the ones who needed extra hints, or the puzzle-solving champions who smashed your records?

In …

This summer has been a big one for Buzzshot, we’ve been on the road!

In a post earlier this year, we talked about all the key takeaways from the TransWorld Interactive Entertainment Show in St Louis, MO, but it didn’t stop there. Since TransWorld, we’ve been so …

Email automation is all about sending the right email to the right person at the right time. In the escape room world, that means remarketing to your escape room players in real time, based on what sorts of games they play, with who, and when. Setting up a …

Email personalisation is when you send emails to your players, but personalise them to suit their identities, wants and needs. It can be as simple as including their name in the first line, or as complex as sending specific automated emails based on which rooms they’ve played, how …

What is email automation? And how can you use it at your escape room?

Email automation is the process of sending the right emails at the right time to your players without any additional effort on your part. Put simply: it’s an automated marketing machine that’ll earn your …

It’s been a busy March for us here at Buzzshot! Between working on some exciting new updates for our escape room customer service platform, we’ve also been travelling all around the world. In particular, last month the Buzzshot team attended the TransWorld Interactive Entertainment Show in St Louis, …

James Meggitt is an experience designer based in Fremantle, Western Australia, and the manager of Fox in a Box Perth. With almost 8 years experience you’ll often find him working on puzzley tabletop games or constructing physical room builds around Australia. Over the course of his career, …

New year, new me, right?

But the new year's resolutions don’t need to stop at personal improvement. January tends to be a little quieter for the escape room industry, which means it’s the perfect time to take stock of your escape room business.

But even if it’s not …

Well, another whirlwind of a year for the escape room industry is drawing to a close, and the holiday season is upon us once again. It looks like we’ve escaped 2023!

But before we prepare to bid farewell to 2023, it’s only fitting to take a moment to …

Running an escape room business brings with it a whole host of challenges. Here at Buzzshot, we get to chat to a lot of owners (that’s you!), and more often than not we hear of rooms using multiple systems to manage different tasks across the whole business. 

In …

Escape rooms. Ask a group of enthusiasts what they’re all about, and you’ll hear some unique answers. But to us, escape rooms are a social activity that, at their heart, are really all about bringing people together. Although the escape room industry may be comparatively ‘new’ (after all, …

On any given day, our inbox is absolutely full of emails. Seriously, go check yours. I’ll wait…

…That’s right, there’s a lot of noise in our inboxes, and most of the time we either give it a cursory glance, mark the whole thing as read, or at worse …

Our goal at Buzzshot is to continually find new ways to help you level up your escape room business. From giving you the tools to help you manage your rooms and staff, to creating an easy to use waiver system, to automatically generated and branded photographs… Which is …

One of the biggest challenges to escape room owners is how to increase the per-head spend of each player that comes through your door. At the end of the day, once a player has played all your rooms, no matter how much they love your company, they’ve reached …

Buzzshot is 1,000 years old today!

Wait, what? How can that be possible?

Well, if you add up all the months our subscribers have been with us, it comes in at 1,000 years. As of right now, Buzzshot has been used in escape rooms for a …

How to choose the right camera and device setup for your escape room for the most sharable escape room photographs

Escape rooms have become increasingly popular over the years, and it's no wonder why! They can transport players into a world beyond their wildest dreams, bring people together …

Escape room players come in all shapes and sizes: Some book an escape room very occasionally - perhaps once a year on a special occasion. Others voluntarily travel around seeking out the newest, most exciting rooms to get locked up in each weekend!

But there’s one thing every …

Phantom Peak is a brand new, open-world immersive experience in London that’s quite unlike anything else in the world. What happens when you mix a fictional Wild West world, with experiential live theatre, all the fun of the fairground, award winning storytelling… And puzzles? Phantom Peak is born.

…

Waiver on Through!

At Buzzshot, we’re always looking for ways to help escape room businesses drive more sales, attract more players and grow reputation within the escape room industry. One of the ways in which business owners can do this is by attracting more reviews - and not just any reviews, …

Using post-escape room surveys to supercharge your customer service. Here’s how Pier Pressure, the UK’s highest rated escape room, did it…

As all owners know, running an escape room business is an immensely rewarding job, but it’s also more than a full time job. From creating weird and …

Well, another year is almost over and the holiday season is once again upon us (seriously, how quickly did that come round?!). Just when we thought 2020 couldn’t get any weirder, 2021 came along with a whole new set of challenges and curveballs. But we’ve taken …

Quick question: How are you collecting feedback from your players?

If the answer is a vague “Oh, the Games Master asks if they had a good time”, or, “We send them a link to review on TripAdvisor”, then you’re probably missing out on useful …

And it's free for all new and existing Buzzshot users! Here are all the features, what to expect, and how to get started automating customer feedback for your escape room business

Post-game surveys are an escape room’s simplest and most effective tool to get to know their market …

I'm proud to announce that the first issue of Escape Industry News, brought to you by Buzzshot, is available to read today. Escape Industry News is a brand new monthly newsletter that gives you all the latest happenings in the global escape room industry direct to your inbox …

Buzzshot – working to help you reopen your escape room venue.

Back in 2019 Buzzshot was used by hundreds of …

This article is written for Escape Rooms in England, but it may be useful for anywhere else where the government starts asking businesses to keep track of their customers for contact tracing purposes. Guidance for re-opening safely and advice for publishing a Covid-19 risk assessment on your website …

It's been a crazy few weeks hasn't it? Many of you have had to shut down operations temporarily which is an absolutely huge thing. More broadly much of the world is in lockdown which is isolating, stressful, busy, depressing scary and sometimes very boring. I've certainly been feeling …

Does your escape room produce good quality player photos?

For some businesses, the photo is almost an afterthought - a quick snap and maybe a post to Facebook - but photos can be so much more.

One thing we’ve observed is that players really like having photos taken! …

Introduction

Ask somebody who is just starting up an Escape room what they do in their spare time and you’ll likely get a very quizzical look - that is if they have time to turn around and consider the question. So when I asked a question like this …

When you think about marketing your escape room, what usually comes to mind?

Many people think of online marketing or advertising via local publications, but probably one of the most under-utilised methods is direct mail marketing.

As it sounds, this is where you send advertising materials in the …

It’s always worth making your Escape Room group photos stand out from the crowd. One way to that is through the easily created but interesting modification, called the vignette effect. Users of Buzzshot can have this effect applied automatically of course, but here we'll look at how you …

Every escape room needs a reliable online booking solution.

There are a number of different options you might choose. Some have been specially built with escape rooms in mind, whereas others are more generic booking systems.

Here, we’re looking at four different systems that are each frequently used …

How well do you rate your escape room website?

Good? Poor? Could be better?

The important thing about your website is that it should be meeting the goals you have for it - promoting your escape room and ultimately, getting those bookings!

Some websites do a better job …

Attracting corporate clients can bring many benefits to escape rooms.

For example, most corporate groups will tend to want rooms during weekdays, which are often slower times for escape rooms. Corporate groups are also often larger than your average booking and typically have bigger budgets.

We know from …

Virtual Reality (VR) for escape rooms is where electronic gaming and escape room puzzles meet.

This is a growing area of business for escape rooms, incorporating virtual worlds that can be comprised of basically anything within the limits of the game designer’s imagination.

Players are immersed in the …

The key to a successful escape room is to offer an amazing customer experience. The key to that customer experience? Hiring great staff.

If this is your first time hiring staff, or if you haven’t hired for an escape room before, you may be wondering, who do I …

Do you collect email addresses from your escape room guests?

Collecting them and building a list is a great way to keep in contact with customers and market your business. The trick is that you have to know a thing or two about email marketing to do so …

How well do your escape room players rate their check-in experience with you? Have you ever asked?

If not, gathering some survey data from your players can be a very helpful place to start when examining your systems and processes. As a general rule, people appreciate efficiency and …

How did you find the last new restaurant or leisure activity you tried?

Maybe a friend told you about the place, maybe you saw an advertisement, or perhaps, like around 86% of consumers, you read reviews of the place first.

This makes getting reviews very important. According …

So, you’ve set up your escape room, you have your great reviews, you’ve even managed to work out how to get repeat visitors – but how can you find that extra source of revenue without the additional outlay? This is not a George Lucas production, your games master …

Escape rooms belong to a relatively new game genre that game theorist, Dr Scott Nicholson, considers to be ‘at the intersection of games and themed entertainment’ (from his 2016 paper). The industry is only a decade or so old, yet escape rooms seem to have …

Yep, those heavy handed over-enthusiastic “over-stimulated” players that smash and crash and clatter around. Until surprise, surprise, something breaks. So what do you do? Here’s my take on it - it is something that every escape room owner should plan for. Right from the design of the room …

I wanted you to be the first to know, the rumours are true! Buzzshot was the platform chosen to support the player admin for the groundbreaking new London Escape Room, ‘Sherlock: The Game is Now’. We’ve been secretly working with genius developers Time Run and while I won’t …

I'm pleased to announce that Buzzshot supports Xola's just-released waiver software support and we're in their new App Store. Buzzshot has supported integration with Xola for some time but with this new support from Xola it's even better than before.

Buzzshot is the Escape Room software …

We're constantly adding new things to Buzzshot to make it the best way to manage check-ins, waivers and photos for your Escape Room and to give you happier players and more reviews.

But there's so much more software out there that does different and complementary things. That's …

Nothing in this article or on this site is legal advice. Specialist legal advice should be taken in relation to specific circumstances.

The GDPR is creeping up on you…

It’s not a monster though- in fact it’s a fairly sensible bit of Data Protection law designed …

I'm pleased to announce that Buzzshot version 2.3 is now available in the App Store and the Play Store.

Buzzshot is software for Escape Rooms that handles waivers, team photos, Facebook upload and automatically contacts your players after their games to help you get those great reviews!

Things usually heat up at Xmas in the entertainment business and escape rooms are no exception. Sometimes you’ll have resets that are full of glitter and sparkles - oh what joy! In the more adult end of the spectrum the groups are drunker, noisier and just have that …

A few weeks, or was it months ago I wrote a piece on training GMs - and I said (sorry to repeat myself)

Obviously when you recruit a GM you’re looking for someone personable, adaptable, able to think in the moment and improvise and so on - …

It's finally here! I'm excited to announce the latest and greatest version of Buzzshot is available for all customers now. This new update features a bold new design by the talented Megan Sayers and numerous UI improvements.

Buzzshot 2.0 is:

• Easier to use


• Much more …

Customers - Why?
The customers - what keeps them entertained. It’s always a mystery to me why some people come to Escape Rooms. I guess there is a certain amount of excitement in trying to solve the puzzles. There are those eureka moments when you get the answer. …

I’ve not posted anything for a while for two reasons. One was a holiday in Croatia, the highlight of which, in this strange twisted mind set that the ancient walled city of Dubrovnik instills in a certain kind of person like me, was a day kayaking around and …

I’m sure that every GM gets tired and fed-up of people who come late. People who cannot follow the simplest of instructions, who cannot tell the time. One of the saddest texts I ever had, on a busy Saturday afternoon, four weeks before Christmas, arrived only ten minutes …

Speaking as a GM who occasionally (ahem) misses something on a reset I have to say that it does happen. I've made checklists (which were helpful for new GMs), but the main thing is going round and re-checking everything as you go round the room. Also when I …

There’s been a bit of discussion in one of the escape room Facebook groups recently about troubles that people have had with putting strangers together despite the fact that “the small print clearly states that others may join you.” !

“Despite the fact” ? - there …

“Freshness!” It’s far more than air fresheners and holding a lot of people in a confined space and whether you go for the fresh scented bouquet of a just washed urinal or let the natural odours of all mingle and ferment together. Room hygiene? Well yes that’s certainly …

The Bad Day

Lady Chastity’s Reserve, variously and colourfully described with gratuitous reference to psychedelic drugs, as “Crystal Maze on Crystal Meth” is a rather naughty, very atmospheric and very immersive experience currently available in Brighton and London. I talked to founder and owner Ben Tucker about starting up an …

At some time most escape rooms will get a less than favourable review - maybe it’s because something went wrong like the A/C failed or maybe it was a slightly off day for your GM.

There it is sitting at the top of all your five star …

This story of my trousers is slightly off topic for an Escape Room GM, but bang on for customer care ( but don't forget this post!.) Three months ago I bought some quite expensive trousers from Spoke - ones that I can wear for smart but still …

First of all you should be quite clear that you will not accept people arriving in a dysfunctional level of inebriation - it should be clearly laid out in your terms and conditions. It is a sad fact, especially since Escape Rooms are becoming more and more popular …

Everybody knows that Customer Care is vital in any Escape Room - we all know that you have to be nice to your customers, it’s just a business truism nowadays. The thing about real customer care - the care that benefits your business properly is that it goes …

I am a GM in a very Gothic, atmospheric room - it’s eerie decor, weird soundscape and little scares (Nervous Player “ Is there anything scary in there?” Me: “Madam, I will have to refer you to my lawyers to answer that”) are part and parcel of the …

Of course no one would be a Escape Room host if it wasn’t for the huge number of entertaining and just downright nice people that you meet and interact with. And interact with is the key word.

Glancing through escape room reviews there is a common theme …

There comes a time, for every game master when it isn’t that the group you have in are desperately rude or drunk or unpleasant, but there is something about them, something about them that you just don’t like. Now it could be said, and probably quite rightly so, …

While obsessionally looking at other Escape Room feedback and pictures I did find some real beauts. I particularly laughed in a knowingly, unkindly way, at the bearded winners of one Escape Room as they stared glumly out from their winner’s sofa, their mouths set firm against the ordeal …

I touched on the GM manual in my last post. Many escape rooms have them but, and this is something I mentioned last time, they are so seldom up to date. We’re all busy people, and escape rooms change all the time - things get broken, new …

Obviously when you recruit a GM you’re looking for someone personable, adaptable, able to think in the moment and improvise and so on - essentially the qualities needed to run a large company with the acting and improvisational skills of the combined cast of Who’s Line Is It …

We all want feedback from the games we’ve run, of course we do. Except. Except for those groups that turn up every once in awhile that are really just mouths and lungs with legs to move them around, mostly at random.

These are the groups that make …