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 your escape room is completely self-contained. But after spending 10 or so years working in the escape room industry, we know it’s often not quite as simple as that! The more creative and ambitious your escape room is, the more likely you are to have a setup that a standard booking system can't represent properly.

Whether you challenge rooms or VR rooms alongside your main escape rooms or simply have multiple experiences that share the same physical space, equipment, or staff members. The complexity of running an escape room means multiple bookings might need to draw from the same pool of resource, and a potential player booking one experience should automatically affect the availability of another.

For a lot of booking platforms, this just isn’t possible! And it makes sense, most booking systems weren’t built specifically for escape rooms. But we wanted to do something different and design something with escape rooms in mind. So we’ve built-in “shared resources” to Buzzshot Bookings from the start. You shouldn’t have to be content with an elaborate workaround.

What is a shared resource?

A shared resource in Buzzshot Bookings is any asset that is used by more than one bookable experience. This could be anything from:

• A physical room or space
• A specific piece of equipment or tech
• A unique prop or setup
• A games master trained on that specific room

And there are lots of different types of room setups we’ve seen it be used for, for example:

Challenge Rooms: Where multiple groups might be playing variations of the same experience simultaneously but capacity is shared. Typically in this model there’s a finite number of time slots, regardless of how many “rooms” you’re showing in the booking system.

A “Jubensha Game”-like Mode: Taking one physical space, but offers multiple experiences that the player can often choose themselves either in advance, on the day. If Group A chooses to play the Murder Mystery Game in the Pirate Room, then not only is Pirate Room now booked, but so is the Murder Mystery Game, and its availability is managed correctly across all the spaces.

Rooms that Share Equipment: Some experiences use unique technology such as a specific prop, an audio rig, or a piece of hardware. Most commonly this might be a VR headset, but we’ve also seen systems like this used where the tech is something more unique, like a cool robot dog! (Yes, really!)

Games that use Multiple Spaces: Some experiences have players move through multiple locations - but just because they spend 15 minutes in one space, doesn’t mean the space can’t be used for the other 45 minutes as well. Shared Resources can note that constraint in your booking calendar, ensuring nothing gets double booked, without Games Masters having to remember and allocate time accordingly.

Seasonal or Temporary Setups: If you’re running a special Halloween or Christmas event that repurposes one of your regular rooms, but may still want to use that original room, then Shared Resources is an excellent way to handle it. It manages the overlap between your regular schedule and your seasonal one.

When you designate something as a shared resource and link it to multiple escape rooms or bookable experiences, Buzzshot Bookings does the tricky part and automatically tracks its availability across different bookings. It takes a lot of worry out of planning, meaning when you’re at your busiest, you still have peace of mind there won’t be any nasty surprises when two groups show up for different bookings that need the same space. The system just handles it and your calendar follows suit.

Shared Resources: Who is using it?

A great illustration of how Shared Resources works in practice comes from Enigma Rooms, a family-owned business with five locations across Yorkshire and the East Midlands. As well as running escape rooms, they operate Viking axe throwing, interactive darts, and The Twisted Room - a fully immersive, magic themed bar.

Nick, the owner of Enigma Rooms, uses Shared Resources in two different ways. The first way is for their axe throwing lanes. Nick described their setup with Shared Resources,

"We've got 24 slots, but we don't want any one of the slots to be more than 6," Nick explains. "So it's shared across 4 lanes. If we get just a couple wanting to book, and have a group of 12, it knows that's 2 lanes gone and there's 1 lane left for the two people."

Rather than managing four separate booking streams, Shared Resources handles the whole setup as one shared space for different groups with staggered start times.

Viking Axe throwing at Enigma Rooms

The second use case is The Twisted Broom itself, because the space hosts both potion classes, afternoon tea and regular table bookings simultaneously. Shared Resources tracks capacity across multiple booking types, so the system always knows how many spots are left in the room regardless of which experience players are booking for.

It’s a pattern we’ve also seen at Deadlocked Games in Reading, UK. We recently interviewed them about how they’re using Buzzshot Bookings, and you can hear all about it here.

Deadlocked runs Knockout Escape Rooms, where they’re using Shared Resources to manage two entirely different experiences. First, the existing game Locktopus, and upcoming four-hour immersive mystery Edenfall. Both run in the same physical space, and when one is booked, the other is automatically blocked for the correct amount of time

My team photo at Locktopus!

Two very different venues, but both have unique needs. As the escape room industry grows and adapts, the use cases and setups will grow more complex. Companies innovating within this space will need a system that grows with them.

How to get started with Shared Resources

Shared Resources is just one of the features we’ve introduced as part of Buzzshot Bookings, alongside embeddable widgets, upsells, abandoned cart recovery, conditional pricing, and more. If you’re already using Buzzshot Bookings, and want to know more about Shared Resources, check out our help article here for a step-by-step walkthrough.

If you’re not yet using Buzzshot Bookings and want to see how it could work for your specific escape room setup, schedule a call with Tom and we’ll walk you through it. Chances are we’ve seen something similar before and we’d love to show you how Buzzshot handles it.