Transcript: Episode 208: $900 Uber Escape
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[00:00:00] Susan Barry: This is Top Floor episode 208. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/208
[00:00:14] Narrator: Welcome to Top Floor with Susan Barry. This weekly podcast ride up to the top floor features tangible tips and excellent stories from the experts and characters who elevate hospitality. And now your host and elevator operator, Susan Barry.
[00:00:32] Susan Barry: Welcome to the show. Laura Hawkins founded an advertising agency and produced award-winning viral campaigns before pivoting into an entirely new creative venture. While traveling with her family in Europe, she discovered escape rooms and immediately saw their potential. What began as a passion project turned into a thriving business. She operates 14 escape rooms and develops turnkey escape rooms for hotels and resorts like Atlantis in The Bahamas through Gamemasters Escape Solutions. Today we are going to talk about the business of escape rooms, how they create new opportunities for hotels and resorts. The future of immersive entertainment. But before we jump in, we need to answer the call button.
Call button rings
The emergency call button is our hotline for hospitality professionals and basically anybody else with a burning question. If you would like to submit a question for me or my guests, you can call or text me at (850) 404-9630. Today's question was submitted by Andre. Here is what Andre has to say, “It is budget season” — which is true across the hotel industry — “and I have to decide where to advertise our wedding packages. Would you invest in print, Facebook, YouTube, or something else?” Laura, I thought this might be a good question for you given your advertising background and your current foray into hospitality, what advice do you have for Andre?
[00:02:15] Laura Hawkins: Well, of course, a lot of it is gonna be dependent upon how much money they're prepared to devote, how important the wedding business is to their hotel. Certainly if you exploit your social media, or shall I say, leverage your social media as much as possible, that's the wisest move to do things in a budgetary way. My background is very largely television, which gave me a bit of a reputation around town as sort of the non-radio, non-print girl. So I have a very strong belief in advertising and in and in television, but that's not always affordable for everybody. So, make sure you're maximizing your social media and after that, well, obviously in a case of wedding packages, you're gonna be in the specifically targeted magazines and things like that, close to your geographic target. That's obvious, very targeted. The more targeted you are, obviously the less waste you have and the more effective you'll be.
[00:03:14] Susan Barry: Excellent. Well, obviously your background is in advertising. What drew you to that industry?
[00:03:22] Laura Hawkins: Well, I kind of fell into it. I was I was getting divorced and I got a job as a receptionist at an ad agency. And really what happened was just that I got very, very greedy or ambitious, whichever the way you look at it. And I started grabbing projects, jobs to do. So started out by writing radio commercials, then I'd go and produce them. I did the photo shoots. I set them up, like pre-produced them, got all the people involved and hired the photographer and all those kinds of things. So it was about three months later that they pulled me off the reception desk and gave me some clients and sent me on my way. And that's what triggered it. That was in the in the mid eighties.
[00:04:01] Susan Barry: It's interesting the similarities between your experience and what happens to so many people in hospitality that they sort of start because they need a job and need a paycheck, and because they're willing to do what other people aren't willing to do, have sort of meteoric rises through the ranks.
[00:04:19] Laura Hawkins: It's interesting. I often think back at it and think, I don't know, what if I would've took, taken the job in the dentist's office that I was also applying at the same time. I don't think I'd be a dentist — ugh, what an awful thought. Anyways, sorry. Sorry to all the dentists out there, but oh my God, I'm so glad that I ended up falling into this. I was very lucky.
[00:04:38] Susan Barry: Excellent. Well, one of your most famous campaigns was titled Just Slow Down. Can you describe that? I watched some of the spots and I just don't think I can be trusted to describe them.
[00:04:53] Laura Hawkins: I was sort of making a reputation for myself as a television commercial producer, and I won this business with the Winnipeg Police Service. And what I learned from sitting around with police officers was that you can do a lot of things in traffic and get yourself into a lot of trouble, and it's very dangerous out there on the street, you know. For some people who wouldn't be necessarily in any other kind of a dangerous situation, when you're out in the car, you're at risk. And the main thing they want people to do is to drive more slowly. The whole situation was let's get people to slow down and to recognize the difference in the, the result of a collision at a different speed, at a lower speed. So we decided to go quite graphic, if you've seen the commercials, you've seen what we did. They used to call me Quentin Tarantina because, because every year we would go, okay, who are we going to mangle or kill this year? And we did that for about 12 years in a row.
[00:05:52] Susan Barry: Oh, wow. Well, I'm gonna link to some of those spots in the show notes because they are definitely powerful messages about slowing down while you're driving, for sure. Talk about your move into escape rooms. How did you discover them and what made you decide to bring them home to Canada?
[00:06:13] Laura Hawkins: Well as a, as a family, we're board game enthusiasts. You could say, I really believe in the interaction, the talking, the having fun with people, the hospitality aspect of playing games. So we've always played a lot of board games and we were traveling to Europe, my husband and my daughter and I, and we were just looking for things to do. We were moving fast, so we were only gonna be in each city that we were traveling to very briefly. And we wanted to do something fun. So it was actually my daughter that found escape rooms. So we started in Dublin and we played, and it was like quite honestly a really, really bad escape room. But this was in 2014 in the summer, and we went from there to Athens and we played a much better game and got, whoa, this is really something. And then by the time we were headed home, we stopped in Paris and we played there and that was it. We were just completely hooked. And just at that time, there weren't very many escape rooms around in Canada. I think at that time there was about four in Toronto. So we got home and said, let's, let's try this as a business because A: it'll be tons of fun and we think there's big opportunity there. So we flew to Toronto and we played a bunch of games there. Like I said, I think there was four companies at that time. And we came home and we opened two rooms right off the bat which was a lot of fun and scary and very glad we did.
[00:07:29] Susan Barry: Did you know as you were playing that the one in Dublin wasn't that great or is it only in hindsight that you're like that was not the best?
[00:07:38] Laura Hawkins: Oh, definitely. In hindsight when we played it, what happened was I vanished through a closet and left my husband and daughter in the other room, and it was just that little thing that happened that I vanished into this closet, and it wasn't even a secret door. It was, I moved the clothes out of the way and walked through. It wasn't even that exciting, you know? And escape rooms have come a long way since 2014. So when I look back on it now, it was a very, very simple game. And yet we had a fantastic time. We had a fantastic time. So much so that when we went to Athens, we immediately looked to play again.
[00:08:14] Susan Barry: So you went from two to now operating 14 escape rooms in Winnipeg. How then did you make the leap from running those rooms, running your own rooms to installing them in hotels and resorts?
[00:08:29] Laura Hawkins: Well we knew right away after we opened the first two how popular they were. And I can quickly say it was January in Winnipeg, if you can imagine how miserable and cold it was when we first opened and there was this 15-year-old kid and when he came outta the escape room and he was leaving our facility, he pounded the door open like a 15-year-old would do. And he went, “That was awesome!” And I was standing there, and of course this was, we'd only been open a couple weeks at that point in time and it was just something that clicked in my head and I went that being from marketing or advertising background, but that target is a challenging target, right? And if these guys liked it that much, and it goes into my feelings about getting away from electronics and screens and kids sitting in the basement with their video games and all that kind of thing that parents worry about, right? Now they come out and they play with the kids and they play together and they put their cell phones away in a drawer. And it's shocking. And people thank you for it, right? So at that time we started by selling our rooms to entrepreneurs because it was very new to North America. And I thought, well, I bet you there's other people who would like to get into this business that maybe don't have the creative background or don't have the skills to be able to create escape rooms the way we do. So I started to sell them and we sold quite a few across the US and Canada.
And then what happened was, a resort in Virginia called us up and they purchased a room from us. We went down and installed it, and then about two months later. They purchased another room and we went down and installed it, and then they started rearranging the offices and the furniture and these kinds of things to put a third room in because it was very clear to them how much A, the guests were enjoying it, and B, how much money they were making. They were bringing in totally new revenue from space that had previously been sitting there with, I don't know, storage room boxes and things like that. So we went, Hey, this is pretty interesting. Look at this resort. And we travel enough to know that sometimes say for example, you go to an all-inclusive and you're there for seven days after you've done all the wild things for the first four days, you might start to get a little bit bored, right? And especially those teenagers, how do you keep them engaged and interested in that family activity?
So it was very clear to us from that, that we should pivot to that direction for hotels and resorts. Of course what happened just as we made that big decision was COVID hit. So it was inconvenient, you could say, inconvenient. So, we still continued while COVID was happening and we continued to get the word out and that sort of thing. And recently, as I think you mentioned at the beginning, we installed two rooms at Atlantis in The Bahamas. And it's just, it's just killing it. They're just killing it there. So I'm very convinced this is the right way for us to go. I'm going next week to Italy and there's a resort there that's got us coming in to do some work with them.
[00:11:36] Susan Barry: So we're on the right track. So you talked about the revenue implications. Can you dive into that a little bit more? Like what's the business-case from a hotelier's perspective? How does it compare? How does an escape room installation compare to, I don't know, to building something like a waterpark or a spa or something like that?
[00:11:56] Laura Hawkins: Well, I guess the way I look at it is it is a more generalized amenities that everyone loves. So it's perfect for families, multi-generational groups. As you said, weddings, so bachelor at parties, bachelor parties, they love it. They come all the time. But in particular corporate groups because there's so many things that you do in an escape room that help when a corporate group needs some team building. They need to understand more about cooperation or respectful workplace or listening and being under a time crunch. So we get a lot of corporate business. So if a hotel is interested in differentiating themselves from the guys across the street, and they've all got meeting rooms and they've all got a nice bunch of food that they deliver and they, you know, they all have easels and or whatever electronics they have to do a boardroom group. This is something that could be a complete differentiator to a hotel. So, yes, they're gonna make money on their spas, I understand that. But the target audience for that spa is considerably tighter than for an escape room, which grandparents love to play in. You can play with your 8-year-old and the teenagers, the challenging group that the families really wanna keep them part of having fun together, right? So the thing is it's a no lose situation. It's truly a no lose situation. Everybody loves them. They love our games, which I'm very grateful for and I'm very proud of. But it's just, they have so much fun. They give you their money. And then they thank you at the end. And you get to watch these people have this great time. It only takes one person to run a room. It's very low maintenance. You get the room, it just kind of churns away and does stuff making your guests happy and you gather in a lot of money. Atlantis is pretty much sold out all the time. And we recently heard from them that they're saying it's one of the most popular amenities at Atlantis now. It costs considerably less than their fabulous waterpark that they have there and probably their mini golf course. So the revenue is just a constant all day generator. And one other quick thing is that I always say the game is 60 minutes, but people always wanna talk about the game after their 60 minutes, so they go to the bar or the restaurant.
[00:14:16] Susan Barry: Yes.
[00:14:17] Laura Hawkins: And they talked for at least an hour afterwards about their experience. So if you're trying to bring in locals or people in the area, people from other hotels to your hotel, to your bars and your restaurants, it's tremendous traffic builder.
[00:14:32] Susan Barry: It seems like just from the nuts and bolts perspective, the labor cost is really low and there's not a lot of perishable inventory involved. Like you set it up and then you're done. You're not replacing kleenex and towels and all of those things. So sort of like a one time expense.
[00:14:53] Laura Hawkins: Well, that's, that's exactly right. Especially now that we've been doing it as long as we've been doing it, because we've been selling the rooms now for 10 years. When we started, we had this African room and it had these really cute wooden masks. Well, people would get really super excited and they'd put the mask on the floor as they ran to do something else, and then they'd stomp on the mask and they'd break the mask and all of that. So we had to move off. We've kind of learned how to make durable props and things for the rooms. Now we've learned our lessons.
[00:15:24] Susan Barry: We like to make sure that our listeners come away from every single episode of our show with some really specific, tangible things they can try either in their businesses or in their personal lives. When you design a new room, where do you start? Do you start with the story or theme? Do you start with what the puzzles are gonna be? Do you start with the physical space? Like what's the chicken and what's the egg?
[00:15:48] Laura Hawkins: No, we definitely start with what's the theme. When we're working with a hotel or a a resort, we have to work within the space that they have available. So we're very flexible and we have lots of customizations that we can do. We can do something related to the geography of the area, a legend of that area. We can customize in that way, no problem. But then we get into the theme. We've done, I guess 18, 19 rooms now. I just love doing it like it's actually a lot more fun than car crash commercials. Although I had, I had fun doing that too. But for me it's like, for example, we have a Mayan room and so doing all the history studying up on it, looking up so that we would have things to make the puzzles out of. I mean, that's super energizing for me. I just love doing it. So yeah, we start with the theme, get a storyline going, and then the puzzles all develop from there. Again, we're pretty good now at knowing how many puzzles we need, how difficult they need to be. We make sure that there's lots of different things to do. They're very tactile things to do. You've got knobs to turn, you've got doors to open. We've got secret passageways, we've got smelling. We've got one of our rooms, you have to eat limes, which really cracks people up every time that happens. Because every single time, I would have to say 99% of the time they yell at the Game Master, where's the tequila? It happens every time. So we try to mix it up quite a lot with, with. Those kinds of things. But again, it's very modular and very customizable to whatever the space is that's available.
[00:17:22] Susan Barry: If a hotelier's listening to this and they're like, “Oh my gosh, I have to do this, this is a great idea,” What advice would you give someone who's thinking about adding an escape room?
[00:17:33] Laura Hawkins: I think the most important thing they need to do is go out and play an escape room. It's still incredible to me how many people have not played. It blows my mind, in fact because gaming and family activities are important, people need to do those things. So I would say go out and play. And I think in most cases, most cases, they're gonna get hooked just like the rest of us. And they're gonna say, wait a second. My guests would love this. My guests would love to do this. I think one of the, the things I was considering was, should they start with a holiday room, a Christmas room? I'm working on one right now. That's just. So exciting. It's so fabulous. I cannot wait to see this room. It's just coming off the sort of the, the pages right now and it's really, really fun. It's called Reindeer Games, so there's my sneak peek, but it's really, really, really cute. It's really fun. But at Christmas time, people just go to anything there is in, in that genre, right? They just wanna do Christmas holiday things, you know? And so if a hotel's I'm not sure it's gonna be a year-round thing, obviously I believe they're a year-round thing. They're great. They're weather resistant, they're really super easy to run. Everybody loves them. But if you're not sure, you could do that holiday season room.
[00:18:47] Susan Barry: Oh, I wish you were installing that in Atlanta so I could go. That sounds so fun. Have you seen the holiday popup cocktail bars? I always think that's such a clever and cool idea for something different to do around Christmas, and I would for sure add a holiday escape room to my list.
[00:19:04] Laura Hawkins: It's, it's unbelievable. We just get people just craving, I mean, I get calls and emails all the time. When are you doing more rooms, when you do? We have lots of people who've done all of our rooms. Wow. I'm going, I'm going as fast as I can. I'm trying, I'm trying.
[00:19:18] Susan Barry: So you said everyone should try it before they decide to put it in their hotel. So I'm gonna ask for this, I don't know if you're gonna give me anything. But if I'm a player, what is a tip for actually escaping the room? I've definitely heard about people who didn't make it in time. So do you have any secret tip that you can share with a player?
[00:19:43] Laura Hawkins: Absolutely, it's my favorite topic. So I love to talk about escape rooms, and I love to help people who are gonna enjoy it more. So the most important thing to do is communicate. Do not walk into the room, hide yourself in a corner with something in your hands and not tell anybody else what you're doing. So it's a good idea to take a bit of an inventory of the room, talk to each other. The most important thing is to talk to each other. And we do have those kind of people that go and squirrel off by themselves and they end up with a problem. The other thing that happens in rooms sometimes is that if we go to help them, because we're always watching and we're we're there to help if they need it. Is that we'll say, yeah, but have you looked in all the drawers? And then that's the only time I would say people get disappointed in themselves because this wide open drawer that wasn't even locked, six people in the room, no one opened the drawer and the answer is right there. So be sure you do your looking around and inspecting. Because that's the only time I think people can get really, really mad at themselves. And I feel disappointed for them because most, when you solve a puzzle. You get such a rush of adrenaline. It is so exciting. I don't think there's another thing that compares with it. Maybe hitting it really lucky on a slot machine. You get that, “Woo! Oh wow, that was great.” Well, that's what it's like when you've been really smart and you solve something. And honestly, weeks later people will be talking about that puzzle they solved. They remember it. So that's the thing. It's incomparable, incomparable entertainment, I call it.
[00:21:12] Susan Barry: We have reached the fortune telling portion of our show, so you have to predict the future and we will let you outta the escape room if you get it right. So what is a prediction you have about the future of immersive or three dimensional entertainment, like what's the next escape room?
[00:21:32] Laura Hawkins: Well, I am a purist escape room person. I think escape rooms have got a long, long, long way to go and some escape room owners have gotten into more technology and more sophisticated props and things like that. And the reality is you can't beat that feeling of opening a lock. So while everybody's experimenting a little bit with game shows and different things like that, the pure escape room has got a long, long way to go, and I'm obviously a big aficionado. Having said that, I'm also working on a immersive dinner theater experience with actors, terrific food, great cocktails and some puzzles to solve that I think is gonna be a really great experience for people as well. Partly because of that holiday season thing we were talking about earlier about how people are just dying for something to do and to do it at Halloween when your cocktails are all bloody and all those kinds of things, I think is gonna be a really good idea as well as an add-on beyond the escape room world. But I really don't think immersive entertainment is going anywhere. I think people will keep experimenting as they should people love to play games.
[00:22:40] Susan Barry: I feel like I'm your target audience. Like when you describe that dinner theater, I'm like, yes, I want a ticket. Now, if you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about how hotels approach guest experiences in general, what would it be?
[00:22:59] Laura Hawkins: Yes, I'd like to see a little more courage. Just as an example, I'm going to Italy next week and we're traveling and I'm looking at all these hotels and I have to make decisions about where we're gonna stay and the similarities between one another... It's actually hard for a guest to choose other than on price, which you don't wanna be choosing just on price. And a hotel owner doesn't want you choosing just on price, I think. That's the last thing you want, right? So differentiation. For a while you at water parks, that was good. And then spas and maybe a hot tub or those kinds of things. Well, I believe escape rooms should be the thing, very logically.
[00:23:35] Susan Barry: Not that you're biased or anything!
[00:23:36] Laura Hawkins: No, I realize, I know I'm biased. But when you see people play and you see how much fun they have, and if you've got a corporate group and you're trying to plan a big corporate event and the guy across the street doesn't have this and you have this, it's a huge differentiator for very little investment realistically. And the corporate guys are gonna be thrilled that you did it. So there's nothing but happiness and joy. Do you notice? Happiness and joy in the escape room world.
[00:24:04] Susan Barry: Okay folks, before we tell Laura goodbye, we are going to head down to the loading dock where all of the best stories get told.
Elevator voice announces, “Going down.”
[00:24:18] Susan Barry: Laura, what is a story you would only tell on the loading dock?
[00:24:22] Laura Hawkins: Well, I have a few. I was trying to decide between the fire, the hurricane, and the one that I've decided to tell talk about. So we were gonna do an installation in upstate New York and it was a big one. So there were six of us that were going to do the installation. And it was summertime. It was beautiful weather, but our flight was delayed coming outta Winnipeg. We're gonna be late. We're not gonna make our Chicago connection. And they said, “Oh yeah, you will.” And I'm going, “No, no, no, we won't.” So we get to Chicago. Of course, we missed our connection. So now I've got these six people. The thing was, we had a truck arriving with everything in it at 8:30 the next morning in Lake George, New York. And we had a forklift and we needed to be there. We just needed to be there. So I said to the Chicago lady, how far east can you get us tonight? So we arrived in New York at about 1:30 in the morning. And then I hired an Uber, because we were originally gonna get a car, but everybody was beat. I mean, it was 1:30 in the morning, right? And I thought, oh, I've got younger guys in the car that do my installations for me. I don't wanna be driving - I did Just Slow Down commercials, if you remember.
[00:25:27] Susan Barry: Yes.
[00:25:27] Laura Hawkins: So I said, no, no Uber. So anyways, $900 later we piled the six of us in the car, this large car. It was fair enough, it was a long drive. Got to Albany at five in the morning, sat there till the rental car places, opened at 6:30 and then jumped in a rental car and drove the rest of the way to Lake George. There we were. When that great big truck arrived and we were there with our forklift and we were set.
[00:25:54] Susan Barry: What a journey. Did you sleep on the way to Albany or were you too freaked out?
[00:26:01] Laura Hawkins: No, I think I slept. I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure I slept. Thing was we installed those four rooms there and two years later he moved all the rooms to a bigger space. We went and did all of that, but we did it in October, and the new place had no heat. So we did the entire thing wearing parkas. Putting our hands over the space heaters, drill, drill, put your hands on the space heaters, paint, put your hand over the space heaters. The whole thing in parkas. And we're Canadians, we're a pretty hardy crowd. But there was no heat in this place. So that's my two Lake George stories. Both cases were very challenging and tons of fun and I wouldn't change a thing.
[00:26:41] Susan Barry: Laura Hawkins, thank you so much for being here. I have to go because I need to go find an escape room to do so, I know our listeners feel the same and I really appreciate you riding with me to the top floor.
[00:26:01] Laura Hawkins: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:34:48] Susan Barry: Thank you so much for listening. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/208. Jonathan Albano is our editor, producer, and all around genius. He even wrote and performed our theme song with vocals by Cameron Albano. You can subscribe to Top Floor on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen and your rating or review will go a long way in helping us give you more of what you like.
[00:27:33] Narrator: Thanks for listening to the Top Floor Podcast at www.topfloorpodcast.com. Have a hospitality marketing question? Reach us at 8504049630 to be featured in a future episode.