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 that bar and then some.

Meet Deadlocked and Knockout Escape Rooms

Deadlocked has been a fixture of Reading’s escape room scene for around nine years - growing, weathering COVID-19, then growing again. When the beloved Knockout Escape Rooms came up for sale just a short walk away, James and the team didn’t hesitate. They snapped it up, but not as a business opportunity, instead because they wanted to keep great escape rooms in Reading. James explains,

“It's only because we took over Knockout that we started using Buzzshot,”

Knockout Escape Rooms was already using Buzzshot and what James found when he stepped in made a positive impression.

“We were doing everything manually at the time: watermarking photos, hoping your Games Master remembered to send them. We just had none of those problems with Knockout because of Buzzshot.”

The two escape rooms now operate side by side, sharing staff, sharing Buzzshot and sharing resources. It’s a setup that’s been working very well and recent recognition has confirmed it. Deadlocked was recently ranked #1 escape room in the UK at the TERPECA awards, has earned features on BBC radio and television, and picked up the Cultural Ambassador Award at the What's On Reading.

From Legacy Systems, to Buzzshot Bookings

Before Buzzshot Bookings came along, Deadlocked had been using the same booking platform for over eight years - grandfathered into a price that was too good to walk away from without a compelling reason. Knockout Escape Rooms meanwhile was running on a system that had been purchased outright years earlier. In other words: two businesses, two legacy systems, and not much incentive to change.

James explains,

“Something really good had to come along for us to even consider changing”

When Buzzshot introduced a new feature Buzzshot Bookings and showed how it could combine Deadlocked’s two venues into the one system, with shared staff management and a seamless connection to everything Buzzshot already does, that something arrived.

"The Buzzshot integration is something that adds legitimate value to something you already use. And for us, it's been a huge step up on most levels."

The setup process was straightforward and the results have already started to show. Since launching a newly redesigned website, built partly in response to upgrading their booking system, Deadlocked’s bookings have gone up noticeably. James explained,

"Adding Buzzshot Bookings was one of the things that gave us the impetus to update our whole website. Lots more people are visiting and booking, so it's been great."

Under the Hood: Features Deadlocked and Knockout Escape Rooms Actually Use

When asked which features are making a difference day to day, the team highlighted a few which have been game changers to how they run the two sites day-to-day.

Upsells and Additional Bookings

One of the features the team has found most useful is how naturally Buzzshot Bookings encourages players to do more. When someone books a game, Buzzshot Bookings will automatically show them available slots for other games before and after. The team also uses the product add-on functionality to sell their digital games directly through the booking flow, and because of Buzzshot's conditional email logic, players receive the starting point for their online game automatically, with no manual work required from staff.

Abandoned Cart Recovery

Put simply: "It's been incredibly useful," James says.

The ability to automatically re-engage players who didn't quite make it through checkout has, since switching to Buzzshot Bookings, become a quiet but consistent revenue stream for the business.

A seamless connection to Buzzshot

For James and his team, the biggest operational win might be the one that’s hardest to quantify. When a booking comes in through Buzzshot Bookings, players are already registered on the system before they arrive.

"People are already signed in by the time you arrive, which means that the whole onboarding process takes no time at all. It saves our staff time."

This means everything in one place, from team names to photographs to leaderboard scores, booking history and waivers. No double-entry, no data stuck in separate systems, and no chasing the customers for missing information.

Shared resources for complex room set-ups

Knockout Escape Rooms is home to Locktopus - a room that’s software-driven enough to be reimagined as an entirely different experience without physically changing the space. The co-owner duo James Hamer-Morton and Charlie Bond are currently building something brand new: Edenfall, a four hour immersive mystery jubensha-style game that uses the same environment.

The clever bit? Because both experiences will use the same room, Buzzshot Bookings’ shared resource feature means that booking one will automatically remove availability for the other for its allocated time with no conflicts and no manual checking.

Most Importantly: The Visuals

The team behind Deadlocked and Knockout Escape Rooms are a team of creatives at heart, and James doesn’t mind admitting that one of the main appeals of Buzzshot Bookings is simply that it looks great!

"You can talk about all the business stuff, which is really great, but it was when I saw that you could turn your thumbnails into videos that I was like... yes. That's what I want to do!"

It's a small thing, maybe. But for an escape room owner who cares deeply about the experience their players have at every touchpoint, it matters.

A Booking System Built for Escape Rooms, Proven by Escape Rooms

Overall, Deadlocked and Knockout Escape Rooms are a business that doesn’t change things without good reason to. This meant that anything new had to genuinely earn its place. Buzzshot Bookings did exactly that. From the seamless connection with their existing Buzzshot setup, to upsells that generate extra revenue in the background, to shared resources for their more complicated setups. It’s a system that’s been built to understand how escape rooms actually work.

The result is a booking experience that does the heavy lifting in the background leaving James and the team free to focus on what they do best - building not just extraordinary escape rooms, but really pushing the boundaries on what sort of immersive experiences are possible in the industry. The next chapter for this Reading duo is shaping up to be their most exciting yet!

Deadlocked and Knockout are based in Reading, UK - well worth a visit if you haven't played there yet. If James's experience resonates with you and you're curious whether Buzzshot Bookings could do the same for your venue, the best first step is simply booking a demo. We'll walk you through everything Buzzshot and Buzzshot bookings.