Lucrative Pricing Strategies for Attractions

TL;DR — Discounting is one tool inside a full pricing portfolio, not the default. A discount is only a win when it drives incremental volume. Constant deep discounts train the market down. Lead with experience and bundling, match the product to the guest you want, then price it — and you don't need enterprise software to start.

I sat down with two entertainment and attraction veterans who ran the pricing and marketing portfolios for one of the country's largest seasonal attractions portfolios to demystify revenue strategy for the smaller attractions operators who don't have a Wall Street earnings call every 90 days. Most conversations about pricing in the attraction, entertainment and hospitality world happen inside enormous, publicly traded companies, behind closed doors, surrounded by analysts and financial and accounting models.

The people who actually pull those levers rarely get to talk plainly about what works, what doesn't, and what a smaller operator should (and shouldn't) copy.

Beth Painter spent years building and running pricing strategy for large nationally recognized attractions, the kind of operations that grew from reading numbers off paper into real-time, on-demand analytics.

Daryle Powers sat on the marketing side of the same company, responsible for filling parks and protecting brand value at the same time.

They were work and decision partners then, and both have now stepped outside the day-to-day grind of running a portfolio of theme parks, and the thing they kept coming back to is the one decision that quietly makes or breaks small and mid-sized attractions, the reflex to discount.

This is a natural look into how these two partners think and what they would recommend.

The short version

• Treat discounting as one tool inside a full pricing portfolio, not the default move.
• A discount is only a win if it drives incremental volume. Compare against what you would have sold anyway, and against last year.
• Protect perceived value. Constant deep discounts train the market down, and moving a price back up takes a long time.
• Lead with the experience and with bundling. Match the product to the guest you want, then price it.
• You do not need enterprise software. A spreadsheet, an honest comp, and the discipline to check your work go a long way.
• Stop pricing on a pre-2019 gut. The consumer has changed, and pockets of your audience behave nothing like they used to.

Here's our conversation, lightly edited for length.

When does discounting stop being strategic and start being a reflex?

Zach: Let's start with the question everyone in this business wrestles with. When does discounting go from being a smart tactic to becoming a reflex?

Daryle: Think of it as limited time offers you pull off the shelf when you need them, like weather mitigation or a flash sale to juice volume, while you maintain your pricing credibility the rest of the time. That's healthy. It becomes a crutch when it turns into the playbook itself: gimmicky price points, bundled packaging, incentives that drive conversion but could have been sold through up-sell. In the short term, you move bodies, but you could be just trading revenue down. The danger is you start running to that lever every time you see it work.

Beth: I'd push on the word itself, honestly. I don't think of it as "discounting." I think of it as one big pricing portfolio, and some of those moves are things other people would call a discount. There's a place for that even at the strongest brands. Where it goes sideways is when you're constantly, significantly below the price you believe your product is actually worth, and you start to look like a fire sale or a garage sale that never ends. That's a combination of the price and how you're promoting it.

Is "discounting" even the right word for it?

Zach: Beth, you don't love the word "discount." If you're sitting over the whole pricing strategy, what's the better way to frame it?

Beth: It's all one portfolio that must work together. Sometimes you do something tactical at a much lower price point, and that's a promotion. Sometimes you're just trying to hold the base price you think is right for the product, and a lot of it is testing. In an economy where people are nervous about spending on entertainment, you try something, you watch it, and if it doesn't work, you pull it out. What stops most smaller operators isn't a software limitation. It's that they set prices once and move on to the next task, because they don't have the people to go back and look.

How can an operator tell if discounting has become a crutch?

Zach: Say I'm a smaller operator and I'm worried I've already slid into the trap. What's the mirror check, the tell-tale signs that discounting has become a crutch?

Beth: The simplest one is average price paid against attendance. If you're going to discount, you'd better get the volume, otherwise you just eroded your brand value for nothing. I'd watch gross revenue as the honest scoreboard. Everybody talks about per cap and attendance, but at the end of the day the goal is cash: how much total revenue did you actually generate? You also have to know your threshold for pain. A publicly traded company likely has a very low one, because there's another earnings call in 3 months. A family-owned business may be willing to be more patient and protect the value of its product, because moving a price back up after you've trained the market down takes a long time.

Daryle: Know which guests you're attracting. When you discount your way into volume, the in-park experience tends to erode. You bring in a different crowd, it shows up on social, and the guests you wanted stop coming. Your passholders don't come back for that second and third visit. So, if you need volume, you go out surgically, with a short flash sale or a true limited-time offer, to drive it without blowing up the integrity of your revenue forecast. The schlocky, "everything must go" advertising is what gets you in trouble. It signals a different kind of experience before the guest ever walks through the gate.

How should attractions think about value before reaching for the discount lever?

Zach: Let me reframe the whole thing around the perception of value. A bottle of water's value is next to nothing when you're standing in Niagara Falls with a lot of water falling on your head. Drop that same bottle in the desert after 3 days without water and it's worth a million dollars. Before we ever race to the discount lever, how should an operator think about delivering value?

Beth: Start with the experience, because that's completely independent of price. If the product isn't remotely interesting to a family with young kids, it doesn't matter what you charge. Match the experience to the demographic you want, then price it. After that, give yourself a wide enough range of products and price points to cover every kind of guest, from the family for whom this is a big, expensive choice to the family for whom it's routine. Instead of just discounting, look at bundling. Give the guest real value while guaranteeing yourself the revenue. Just don't over-bundle it into something that's a great "value" but more than they can actually afford. It's still got to be a date they can pay for.

Daryle: Bundling and channel matter enormously. Look at how a movie theater handles a beautiful weekday. They don't slash the ticket, but they might bundle popcorn or price midweek below the weekend, because they don't need volume on the days people show up anyway. Same logic, flipped, on a rained-out weekend at a park. The other thing operators forget is the blend. You need a mix of visit types. The higher-dollar single-day guest is in it to win it, there open to close, buying the food, the front-of-line, the merch. Their visit is worth far more than a passholder who comes and goes. You can't survive on all passes or all promo-chasers, and you can't survive on only the guests who pay top dollar. You need the balance.

Beth: A lot of what looks like discounting is really about urgency. Summer feels long. "We'll go tomorrow, we'll go next week, the weather will be better." A short-term offer exists to break that. Sometimes it's not even a discount, it's a price point used to make someone decide now instead of letting the whole season slip by.

Can a smaller operator do this without enterprise analytics?

Zach: You two created and worked inside sophisticated, fully connected analytics systems. Can a smaller attraction operator without that technology still do this, on gut and a little data?

Beth: You don't need the full tool. You need to get your hands on your data, and it does not have to be fancy. I've literally built Excel heat maps to spot patterns and set a base price. After that it's testing, and the discipline to go back and ask, did that actually do what I wanted? Because people will tell you, "We ran a promotion and sold a ton of tickets." Okay, but did you sell more than you would have anyway? If you sold the same number you sold last year at a lower price, that's not a win. It has to be incremental. You need a real comp.

Whatever you do, don't start out trying to build with the airline-and-cruise-line version of revenue management. There's a simple version that gets you moving, and then you get smarter every single day. That's the goal.

What is the one pricing trap to avoid right now?

Daryle: I'll close with the one trap I see everywhere: you cannot run today's business on your pre-pandemic gut. The consumer has changed dramatically. You may not see it in the big averages, but there are whole pockets of your audience behaving completely differently than they did in 2019, and a lot of operators are still hoping to simply get "back" to that year. Watch your sales cycles. Know when your value is being delivered for the price you're charging. Keep the discount where it belongs, as a lever you reach for on purpose, not a way of life.

Beth: The honest truth is most attractions need all of those guests, including the ones who only ever come for the promotion. That's fine. Just manage it deliberately, and make sure everything you offer the rest of the year works for everyone else. Discipline beats sophistication. A little data, a little patience, and the willingness to actually go back and check your work will take you further than any expensive platform.