The price a guest is willing to pay for admission to your park, resort, or attraction is an immediate indication of how much they value the experience you offer. Savvy park operators leverage intelligent online ticket pricing strategies to solidify the value of their attraction and ensure happy guests eagerly anticipate their visit. 

An effective pricing strategy ensures that you’re covering costs, setting ticket prices that people will want to purchase, and guaranteeing that your business can make a profit and grow. But, not all pricing strategies are effective! A defective pricing strategy can seem just fine at a glance, so you may not even realize there’s something big missing. However, over time, subtle losses in revenue for every ticket sold for your attraction will put immense pressure on your bottom line. Given the upheaval from the pandemic and changing economic situations, it’s more important than ever for travel and leisure businesses to create a pricing strategy beyond “discounted tickets on Tuesdays.” If you aren’t thinking intelligently about your ticket and pass pricing strategy, you’re missing out on opportunities to increase revenue and encourage advanced bookings through your e-commerce platform.

When considering how to improve your pricing strategy, it can be challenging to get started. Just how do you choose the most effective approach for your resort, waterpark, or ticketed attraction? 

Start by looking at different real-life pricing strategy examples to compare why one performs better than another. At Catalate, we believe that a dynamic pricing strategy is the most effective approach, and the data backs this belief. 

Read on to learn why a dynamic pricing strategy ensures the highest success rate for parks and attractions.

Better data for better pricing decisions

With Catalate’s global network of parks, resorts, and attractions, our team has access to millions of ticket and season pass searches at different price points and dates. This gives us the ability to compare attraction data internationally and view different strategies in a controlled environment.

We selected 3 different examples, each comparing 2 resorts from similar attractions — as it relates to region, size, and window ticket rate — with different pricing strategies. As you’ll see, the results are quite notable.

Example 1

• Two East Coast Resorts in the United States
• Each does ~200K visits annually

Each point in the scatterplot below represents a distinct price point for each trip date of the season for a standard 1-day ticket. Partner A, shown in green, implemented a dynamic pricing strategy. Partner B offered a static — one price — ticket per trip date. The two revenue charts show the result of these different strategies.

Our clear takeaway is that Partner A achieved 57% more revenue than Partner B and was able to earn more revenue on almost every day of the season. Partner A’s overall yield for the season was slightly lower than Partner B, however, their average booking window was longer which means Partner A was able to capture more revenue in advance. Yield, in this example, refers to the purchase price divided by the booking window price for the product. An average booking window for the season, also known as lead time, indicates how far in advance guests can book their tickets. Because Partner A was able to generate a higher booking window, it gave them the ability to prepare their resort and staff for expected attendance levels on any given day.

Example 2

• Two Western Canadian Resorts
• Each does ~400K visits annually

In Example 2, we are looking at two resorts with double the visitation and in a different region than those in Example 1. Partner A, in orange, had a dynamic pricing strategy whereas Partner B offered 1 or 2 prices per day.

By leveraging a Dynamic Pricing strategy, Partner A earned dramatically higher revenue per day and 12x more revenue overall than Partner B. Their yield also followed the same trend with Partner A delivering a lower overall yield than Partner B and yet, still achieving a higher average booking window than Partner B. Because Partner A’s strategy also increased booking window significantly, their revenue results were outstanding.

Example 3

• Two Resorts in the US Sierra Nevada Mountain Range
• Each does ~100K visits annually

In the third example, Partner A, in green, leveraged a Dynamic Pricing strategy, while Partner B offered a large range of prices, but still only offered 1 ticket price per day. Partner A earned 40% more revenue than Partner B. Partner A’s yield for this product was lower than Partner B, but similar to Examples 1 and 2, Partner A was able to achieve more revenue, further in advance than Partner B.

So, why does a Dynamic Pricing Strategy work?

Since demand is highly variable throughout the season, a dynamic pricing strategy makes sure that customers are seeing the right price, at the right time, for the right day. By using a dynamic strategy, a non-peak Tuesday will have a lower starting price than a peak Saturday because the demand for both of those days is different. Dynamic ticket pricing that rises over time also encourages customers to buy now, since they know the price is going to go up if they wait to buy. With a Dynamic Pricing strategy, you’ll lock in revenue in advance and ticket revenue increases at a dramatic rate as more tickets are purchased. 

Catalate has a dedicated team that tests and adjusts our pricing strategies to ensure the highest revenue possible for each day during the season for every partner. Our pricing engine is built on millions of data points of consumer behavior online and prices each date according to real-time demand. The large network of resorts that use Catalate’s pricing model allows a continuous assessment and improvement of pricing strategies at a much faster rate than a resort or attraction implementing a manual pricing strategy.

These 3 examples show that a Dynamic Pricing strategy can work for resorts, parks, and attractions of different sizes in different regions. Get in touch today and we can build you a pricing plan focused on increasing online revenue for every day of your season.

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Catalate is a global pricing and e-commerce company empowering ski resorts, parks, and attractions to increase online revenue. As the only purpose-built ticketing platform for the industry, Catalate has developed successful strategies for hundreds of Partners across $1 billion in online sales.