CEO Roundtable: Tourist Attractions

Springfield Business Journal Editorial Vice President Eric Olson discusses the state of the tourist attraction industry with executives Mike Crocker of Dickerson Park Zoo, Travis Leaming of Fritz’s Adventure-Branson and Brad Thomas of Silver Dollar City.

Eric Olson: What new campaigns or strategies are you using to attract guests going into this unusual season?
Mike Crocker: My marketing and public relations director came up with an idea to do a Dickerson Park Zoo voice contest. People can form duets and sing like a siamang. If you’re not familiar with what siamangs are, they’re the largest of the gibbons which are a type of lesser ape. Each species has its own unique song that it does. We’ve been contacted by The Wall Street Journal asking about it, by a radio station in Miami.
People are wanting to get outdoors. What we’ve found is we are having huge attendance levels on nice weather days. We’re seeing record attendance, numbers that we’ve never seen before other than on special event days. People are spending a lot of money when they’re here. That’s probably stimulus related. We’re struggling just to keep our gift shop inventory stocked.
Olson: Who knew you can go sing like an ape at the zoo? What are the campaigns and strategies looking like for attractions in Branson?
Travis Leaming: We are all indoors, so that’s been a little bit more of a struggle. We are trying to just get back to promoting a sense of normalcy while keeping our guests safe and really having an idea of choice. The majority of our tickets now, and a lot of our push, has been online reservations. Usually, it was just come in, walk up, get your tickets.
Brad Thomas: I reflect every day when I get up and come to the city what life was like a year ago. There were 42 of us who were working a year ago; that had included those of us answering the phones (and) those of us attending the barnyard and 24/7 security. There were 42 of us and that was the case until the end of May when we made our announcement that we would be opening the middle of June. The difference between 2021 and 2020 is vast.
People are wanting to get out. Our big challenge ... is to communicate to folks that we are open; we’re going to do everything we can to keep folks safe. The world in which we’re living today is different than the world we were living in, say, even four or five weeks ago because now a greater percent of the population is getting vaccinated. More of our employees are vaccinated, more of our guests are vaccinated. The most exciting thing is that the COVID numbers are coming down. Hospitalizations are down. Deaths are down, not just in southwest Missouri but the markets that actually feed into southwest Missouri. That’s good for all of us because now we can have a little more breathing room. We believe that there’s a lot of pent-up demand.

Attracting guests
Olson: Does that hold true for the other attractions, too, in terms of expanding your reach and advertising your messaging beyond the traditional scope of years past?
Crocker: For the zoo, it really hasn’t changed much. We’re not really a destination attraction; we’re a regional attraction. We draw mostly from about a 75- to 100-mile radius. If somebody is wanting to go to a zoo, you look at where the other zoos are located. You got Kansas City to the north, Tulsa to the west, St. Louis to the east and further going south at Little Rock. People get to a midway point and then make a choice where they want to go. Our marketing methods really haven’t changed much because of the pandemic. We’re actually finding that we’re getting at least a little bit of overflow from those other zoos because what has happened is they’re still operating in a mode of, I think, online ticket sales only and they’re limiting the number of people that come into the zoo.
Thomas: What we’re already seeing in these early days is that visitation is strong and that those markets that come to Branson – really Chicago to Dallas – that those folks are absolutely wanting a place that they can go. What makes the Ozarks so hugely attractive to these families is we’ve got a little bit of everything. We’ve got the indoor attractions, we’ve got theaters (and) shows, but we also have hundreds of miles of shoreline and a lake system. Now is the time, we believe, to go out and remind folks what there is to do here and why this is the summer to visit because if we’re out of sight, then you know what? We’re out of their mind.
Leaming: We really do believe there’s the shift with the pandemic happening that everybody is planning everything. Our digital presence, we’ve skyrocketed and changed so much over the last year to make sure that when they’re sitting down and they’re looking at their entire vacation, and they plan that all out, that we’re somewhere seen within that, just that top of mind awareness.
Olson: Where are you targeting those messages so that your attractions are in sight and top of mind?
Leaming: TripAdvisor is very big for us. That’s what we’re hitting really hard. We had a complete revamp of our website to be more friendly last year. We just took that time that we had, being shut down, to work with the developers.
Olson: Where’s your success stories on social media?
Leaming: Facebook’s still the No. 1 for us and that’s where we spend time. Instagram right behind that and then dabbling in others. There’s definitely generational gaps in between those different apps.
Thomas: As we market in today’s world – I think this isn’t unique to a theme park, it’s every business – we have to have an integrated plan. We can’t just rely on a social message. We can’t just rely on a direct message or a television or a print message. We have to have an integrated plan and making sure that we know what markets we’re going to reach, meaning actual destinations that we want to go talk to, what age group. If we’re trying to reach families for the summer, which is absolutely the heart of Silver Dollar City’s success during the summertime, we’ve got to go where moms are because we know that mom is planning that trip. We’ve got to be messaging in those places that mom is looking at. Like Travis said, we look at what does she use and in our key markets, Instagram obviously is important. Facebook is incredibly important. You’ll notice in your grocer’s freezer that there happened to be some ice creams in there that have a couple of names of Silver Dollar City roller coasters, and that’s because we want to be where mom is. If a mom is in a northern Dallas suburb, she sees a Silver Dollar City Outlaw Run ice cream, it’s just that little reminder.

Brand messaging
Olson: I want to drill down on your brand statement. What is at the core of your attraction as it transfers to these marketing messages that you just spoke to?
Crocker: The message that we try to put out is that we’re mostly outdoors. That’s been a strength of ours for quite some time in relation to the pandemic. You can see pretty much the whole zoo in two to three hours. It’s about a 1.2-mile walk to get around the zoo. It’s not an all-day thing and you don’t have to come back the second time to see part of the zoo that you missed. We emphasize that our mission is saving species, wildlife conservation.
Thomas: We want to bring families closer together. Hopefully, their experiences while with us allow them to have a deeper relationship because every family is going to have challenging days and when the challenging days come, if the relationship is deeper, then the challenging days aren’t quite as challenging. Our mission statement’s really clear: We want to create memories worth repeating.
Leaming: Families adventure together. The 2-year-old has a blast in our little tikes area. He can put on a harness and mom’s like, “Whoa, I’ve never seen this anywhere.” Dad is having a blast on the brand new treetops course that we just put in and he’s 45 feet up in the air, zipping across everything else in the building, which is bringing those families together. That just goes back with our mission statement. It’s very simple. like SDC’s. It’s to create wow moments.

Recovery mode
Olson: The tourism industry is one of the hardest hit throughout the pandemic. But it’s one that hasn’t directly received federal financial help, yet. That might be changing with the Save Hotel Jobs Act that’s before Congress. But why do you think that is?
Thomas: Everybody wants help because I think during this pandemic, if you look at the economy and you look at businesses that were harmed, there weren’t just one or two industries that suffered. The pain was across most industries.
I’m a proud product of southwest Missouri schools. I had amazing teachers and amazing professors and they went through all kinds of business case studies about how to plan, how to budget, how to forecast, how to strategize. In my everyday life, I get to employ those learnings. But boy, guess what? Nobody equipped us for what do you do when your revenue goes to zero. There are business cycles that can happen, there are glitches that happen, and you end up with those downtrends and those uptrends and you modify your business. But when you go to zero revenue, what you have in the bank is all you’re going to have in the bank for you don’t know how long. The pressures that the businesses and industries across this country had, it’s mind boggling.
Do I want tourism to get some help? Of course. But I also recognize that there are a lot of needs and there’s a lot of pressure on our governmental budgets, and we’ve got to be mindful of those kinds of things.
Olson: As an industry, do you feel neglected? Small businesses got their share; restaurants got their share. Here’s the hospitality industry that’s maybe left in the dark.
Leaming: We felt very fortunate that we do live in this part of the world that we only had 56 days completely dark. Then we use that time, again, use our experience and knowledge and wisdom, to really revamp our business to where we’re really well positioned.
Thomas: The depth of loss across this country was so deep. I don’t know how every business could possibly be made whole. So, I don’t have a chip on my shoulder. Our company wants to get as much assistance as we possibly can. But I think in the heat of the battle last year, when employees were furloughed because businesses had to close, I’m thankful that those employees had some additional assistance last summer to help them sustain because I think had that not occurred, the pain and the suffering of front-line workers and employees all over this country would have just been horrific.
Crocker: We were real lucky at the zoo. First of all, we’re a division in local government and the city had made a focus to not have to lay employees off. The zoo itself is operated by two different organizations by the Parks Department, we’re a division of that, and then we have a nonprofit support organization, Friends of the Zoo. Friends of the Zoo came very close to running out of money and having to lay off everyone. We narrowly avoided that. Through the Friends of the Zoo side of our operation, we were able to get federal money. We have gotten two different grants through the Payroll Protection Program and then we got one through the CARES Act through the county.

Jobs outlook
Olson: What’s the current hiring climate?
Thomas: We have lots and lots of job openings and we’re doing everything we can to ensure that we’re letting folks know that we have jobs. We are looking at student programs. We have several college student programs that we rely on each summer. We didn’t have any of those last year. But we’re plugging those back in now which account to a couple hundred of our employees for Silver Dollar City, White Water and the Showboat, and we’re doing a variety of things to ensure that we get the word out about those positions. We’re working hard to make sure that even in a pandemic world that we are retaining those who are working here because there just aren’t enough applicants out there for those who leave. Once we lose an employee, it is very, very difficult to replace that employee.
Olson: With those jobs, are the applicants qualified? What’s the disconnect on getting those filled?
Thomas: We’re not getting a lot of applicants, and we do require that an applicant be friendly. If they don’t want to be in a service kind of industry, this isn’t the position for them. And then we do have background checks and we do have some drug testing. When you go through those hurdles, then that starts narrowing down some of those applicants.
Crocker: At this time of the year, usually starting around February, we start hiring for our seasonal positions. We struggle every year because we’re mostly hiring high school kids and college students. They’re not out of school yet, so they’re not available to work during the week. But even considering that, we just aren’t seeing the numbers of applicants this year that we have typically seen in the past.
Thomas: A lot of what we’re seeing in 2021 is a continuum of what actually started happening in 2018 and 2019 as the economy was heating up. I think what most people would say to us as we look into the future is you’re going to have labor shortages. You have to have plans to make sure that you’re looking at 2022, 2023, 2024. How do we retain good workers and how do we then attract folks? Because the labor pool is relatively flat. Population isn’t growing dramatically and every day, millions of baby boomers are going out of the workforce. You put all of that together and that puts pressure on not just the tourism industry, but businesses throughout the Ozarks and throughout the entire country. I don’t think this is a short-term deal.

Attraction horizon
Olson: Do you have any changes on the horizon at your attractions?
Crocker: We did take the opportunity when we were closed last year to get a lot of things done that would have been nearly impossible to do while we were open. We did a renovation of the cheetah exhibit, we did a renovation of another viewing area and another exhibit. We built landscaping for the wildlife area in the zoo.
Leaming: We are extremely excited as we have just finished up our second round of renovations here in April on our brand new treetops course. It has led to new zip lines inside, 30 new elements. We’re excited to go into this new summer season with those brand new attractions.
Thomas: We’re super excited to bring the Harlem Globetrotters to Silver Dollar City. It’s a highly entertaining family experience. And then as we move on into the summer, we have a series of concerts that are really super fun. We’ve got an ABBA tribute. These are Broadway performers that are top-notch. Pumpkins, that event was a slam dunk for us back in 2019. We actually picked up our attendance by 100,000 people in a five-week period over the previous year. We’re expanding that as we move into this fall and we’re super excited to be able to have more capacity inside the pumpkin area. And then we got a lot of announcements that will be forthcoming for 2022.

Interview excerpts by Geoff Pickle, gpickle@sbj.net.