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 is working as well as it could be.

Most escape room owners set up their online booking widget, make sure it works, and move on. But a well-configured booking experience can do so much more than take a reservation. It can upsell, cross-sell, capture useful data, recover lost sales, and make check-in on the day a breeze.

Here are a few tips and features you should consider when setting up an online checkout at your escape room:

Make your escape room checkout look like yours

Before we get into the clever stuff, let's start with the basics. Your booking widget is an extension of your brand, and a clunky, default checkout can undermine the excitement you’ve built everywhere else. With Buzzshot Bookings for example, you can customise the colours, layout and branding of your booking widget to match your website. It then embeds directly into your existing site, so players never feel like they've been sent somewhere else to complete their booking.

Ask your players the right questions at the right time

Your online checkout flow is the perfect opportunity to learn more about your players, but only if you ask the right questions. With custom fields you can collect information that makes a difference both to their game on the day, and to how you market to them after.

Want to know someone’s birthday? Whether they’ve played rooms before? Any accessibility needs?

With conditional logic, you can make sure to ask only the questions that are most relevant too. For example, if someone selects a corporate booking slot, your booking flow can show them the questions that make sense for their group. If they’re booking a horror room, you may want to ask about scare level preference. Smarter questions make smoother experiences all round.

Ditch the paperwork with built-in waivers

If you’re still handling waivers on paper, or getting them to sign their waivers on arrival, there’s a better way. At Buzzshot, a smooth online waiver system was one of the first things we ever developed, and so our digital waivers are built directly into the booking flow from scratch. This means your players can sign them before they even walk through the door. The result is a more efficient check-in, and everything is automatically linked to the right booking and right player profile in Buzzshot.

Replace “Call to Book” with “Booking Requests”

A surprising number of escape rooms still rely on a “call to book” system for certain slots. Usually because they need to confirm staffing before they can accept the reservation. The problem is this creates a lot of friction, and the data shows a lot of potential bookings are lost by folks who don’t want to pick up the phone. A Booking Requests feature solves this efficiently. When a player submits a request, Buzzshot Bookings takes their card details and pre-authorises the payment. You get a notification, review the request, and accept or reject it. If you accept, the payment is taken and the booking is confirmed instantly. If not, nothing is charged and the customer is notified. At the time of writing, Buzzshot Bookings is the only bookings platform to offer this feature, and it’s designed with escape rooms specifically in mind.

Request to book

Let players build their own booking

A “shopping cart” might sound like a small thing, but it changes the dynamic of your booking experience entirely. Rather than completing one transaction and being done, players can bundle rooms, add-ons and extras into a single checkout. That means more spend per visit, more often.

In practice, this could look like a group booking your main room, adding a bottle of prosecco to celebrate a birthday, and then grabbing a second slot in the afternoon for the rest of the family who couldn't make the morning session. All in one go. And that’s not all…

Sell upsells and merchandise at checkout

While we’re on the subject of the checkout experience, why stop at the room itself? A great booking system will let you offer upsells and merchandise directly at the point of booking. Whether that’s encouraging players to add on a second room, adding drinks or food on the day, pre-ordering a t-shirt, or a digital game to play whenever they like. You can even sell merchandise without a booking attached, so your play-at-home escape rooms and branded products can generate revenue around the clock without being dependent on room availability.

Deadlocked use their online checkout to upsell their play at home games.

Recover bookings you’d otherwise lose with ‘Abandoned Cart Recovery’

Even the most beautifully designed checkout won’t convert every single visitor. Some people get distracted, and others aren’t quite ready to commit. Abandoned cart recovery automatically reaches back out to those players with a reminder to complete their booking. It’s one of those features that runs quietly in the background and earns its keep.

Let players go private

For corporate groups, celebrations, or players who simply want the whole room to themselves, the option to book a private experience is a vital selling point for escape rooms, and one worth making easy to find. With customer-enabled private bookings, players can select a private session directly at checkout without needing to reach out to you directly to arrange it. It’s a premium option that sells itself, and removes a whole category of enquiry from your inbox.

Or alternatively, sell individual tickets to fill every seat

If you’ve ever watched a room built for six run with just two players, you’ll know the feeling of quietly doing the maths about how much a slot could have earned. Per-person ticket mode lets you sell individual spots in a game, so players without a full group can still book, and you’re filling your rooms to capacity more consistently. You can also use it selectively, enabling these types of bookings only for specific time slots where it makes sense, rather than applying it across the board.

Add gift cards to your online checkout flow

Gift cards are one of the best passive revenue streams an escape room can have, they bring new players through the door, they're popular year-round, and a good chunk of them are never fully redeemed. But they only work if they're easy to buy and easy to use. With an online booking system like Buzzshot Bookings, you can sell gift cards and vouchers directly with automatic delivery to the recipient. Balances carry over, so a gift card can be used across multiple visits. And because it all lives inside the same system as your bookings, redemption is seamless.

Pier Pressure sell physical and digital gift vouchers

Buzzshot Bookings: Make your checkout flow work harder

At the end of the day, your booking widget isn’t just a form. It’s a sales tool, a data collector, a marketing touchpoint, and often the first real interaction a player has with your escape room beyond the website. Getting the checkout flow right, and making the most of everything it can do, is one of the highest-return investments of your time you can make as an escape room owner.

All of the features we’ve described in this article are available in Buzzshot Bookings, built specifically for escape rooms and fully integrated with everything else Buzzshot does. Buzzshot Bookings is available now, you can read more about it here. Whether you’re an existing Buzzshot user, or want to try it out yourself, schedule a call with Tom to see Buzzshot Bookings in action. We’ll walk you through everything.