Mairi Nolan

In this series, we’re interviewing and shining a spotlight on some of the other businesses in and around the escape room industry. In this article - accountancy!

Hear me out- Things like “VAT return” and “cash flow forecast” probably aren’t high up in the list of things creative …

In this series, we’re interviewing and shining a spotlight on some of the other businesses in and around the escape room industry. Starting with - game design!

Miquel Mansachs is a puzzle and escape room designer based in the UK, and he founded Escape Puzzles which, for the …

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, …

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!

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 …