When it rains, it pours. Seems a number of groups are finding their events are not just wildly popular, but selling out! Months before the event. Especially fall and double especially Christmas trains. I'm seeing groups sell out their Santa trains in August, or use lotteries to decide who gets tickets.

How does your museum deal with having more customers than you can possibly handle?

Many of us also have other times of year which are not as "in demand". How do you divert these peak-event customers onto those less popular services?

Raise the price for the in demand trains. It's just like any other business. If something is in demand the price goes up.

Robert -

How about a "special deal" on the "less in demand" operations. With their ticket for the popular ride, give them a coupon for say....half off (or whatever), for the other operation, with a time limit on how long it is good for.

Les

In my full time employment at a community theatre we drive business to slow nights with a combination of reduced pricing and an occasional "pay what you can" night. This seems to help fill seats and divert crowds from peak nights. Regrading "pay what you can" I found that our average ticket (gross receipts divided by total attendance) for the night is not too far below our annual average ticket revenue. Also, pay what you can is only available at the door and subject to available seats since we still sell regular priced seats for the performance. Only once did we have to block seats in order to be sure we had something available to honor the "pay what you can" patrons.

Wesley

Some operations have a discount price for weekday trains. They can raise those prices to match weekend departures without too many complaints.

This is the schedule board for the Catskill Mountain RR during one of the DOWT days. Its cut off at the bottom, but you can see they added a train at the end of the day.

Yeah... that's what I'm talking about.

Now I'm NOT asking "how do you get people to fill different trips within the same event"? (I already know the answer to that question. Online ticketing will rebalance passengers *within* that special event: it "automagically" guides people to the dates and times which are available. So people go "Oh, 10:30 full? I'll take the 9:45." )

I'm asking THIS: "OK great, your big events are selling out, how do you turn all that 'love' into ticket sales for the REST of the season that is full of empty seats?"

Create more special events, rather than "ordinary" operating days. No reason we can't sell Christmas trains in October when the store displays go up, partner with reenactors for Veterans Day, etc........

Didn't Earl say we should only run the trains the people want to ride when they want to ride them? Maybe all we need to run is special events if they are all that sells well.

dave

To piggyback on what Dave said, which I absolutely agree with, it is important to maintain a consistency among all of your events too.

If people have an amazing experience at one of your special events, but come back for another event and it is not consistent with their first, what impression are they left with?

Our events must present a different experience from a regular visit to your operation. Rather it must present something different and unique. The more different and unique events we can offer the better. It is worth considering that each should be targeting a specific audience subset so that the entire audience of the organization is represented.

To sum up, if you have too many customers for a specific event, but not regularly, you need to have more special events which reach out to that specific audience subset.

Take care,
Steve

There is a certain excursion line I have some experience with where, I swear, they have gotten to the point where EVERY weekend is a "special event" of one sort or another. Actually, now that I think about it, more than one line--many, if you look "across the pond". If you show up just wanting a ride, sure, you can get it. But between the Murder Mysteries, the Dinner Trains, the Easter Bunny Weekends, the Pumpkin Patch Specials, the Picnic Express, the Oktoberfest "Rails to Ales" weekends, the Civil War Reenactments, the Railfan Special, the Back to Nature Weekends, the Scales and Tails and Feathers Specials, the Chili Cookoff Choo Choo,the Fireworks Fun Trains, the Steam Loco Specials, the Thomas the Tank Engine visit, the Track Speeders Weekend, the County History Weekend, the Ski Train Weekend, the Antique Car Rally, the Wild West Rodeo Ride, the Corvette Car Show, the North Pole Express, the Autumn Leaf Specials, the Firemans' Carnival shuttles..........

You get the idea.

And, unless you have the Grand Canyon our the window, present a genuine contextual trip into another time or something else as nice, a damn good idea.

Ho hum ride. Visit once with the kids, no reason to come back and do the ho hum ride again.

Different themed operations on the same rolling stock on the same track....many potential reasons to return for a different and interesting experience, and bring friends.

dave

Oh yeah, by the way, there's no such thing as too many customers, instead it is just not enough capacity to serve your market. Find a way. Figure out what you believe your limitations are, then assume they are false beliefs and act accordingly.

dave

We rail enthusiasts roll our eyes and grit our teeth at the corny "Wild West Train Robberies" that have been a cliche and bad joke in our avocation since the days of Westerns on TV in the 1950s and 1960s.

When I started with one excursion line, I ran into a young, idealistic chap who, with a band of confederates, decided to start an occasional (twice a year or so) "Wild West train robbers" gang to stage "Wild West weekends" at said excursion line. I figured it would be good for a couple years, until they tired of it.

At the last train show I attended this year, I ran into him. THIRTY YEARS LATER, he and most of his gang are still doing it on a semi-regular basis--because "it still draws people!"

One common theme I have heard expressed in this field, and a couple others, is that there's no "magic bullet," aside from having the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls at the end of your ride, to draw people. Not only do you have to manage a whole diversity of event types, but also promotional streams. I've personally paged through the survey forms with the line "How did you hear about tonight's concert/our museum?" and it's always been 10-20 or so different answers spread pretty evenly. "If we could only just do Facebook, or the e-mail list or the postcards or the ads or the newsletters!" lamented one manager.

I have to disagree slightly. Any rail line has an absolute physical limitation, be it in signalling, lack of coaches, etc. You can't move the entire population of New Orleans out by rail in advance of a storm, no matter how many coaches you stage there.

Furthermore, capacity increases have their price. Is it worth going to get four ex-C&NW bi-level gallery cars and having them sit idle as "junk" on a back siding most of the year just so you have extra capacity if/when Santa and Thomas show up? (Yes, one RR museum did just that.)

But the gist of what he's saying rings true: If you can't find a way to meet a badly inflated capacity demand, maybe you shouldn't be trying so hard to get such demand in the first place.

I've never seen the situation move past perceptions into the hard reality of the laws of physics, Sandy........mostly it's just "we've never done it like that before" or "I don't understand it so it must be wrong" or "our people will burn out if we try to do that much."

So, get more or different people, learn about what you don't understand, and do things you haven't done before until you get good at doing almost anything you need to.

If you are comfortable at a certain level but your public wants more, get uncomfortable until you have served them. We do it for them, not for us....our rewards are a byproduct.

dave