When are leisure attraction tickets booked?
Digitickets report reveals nearly half of attraction tickets are booked on the day. Here’s what that means for your marketing.
Wondering when are leisure attraction tickets booked? Every farm park, theme park and pumpkin patch has asked the same thing.
If you run a farm park, visitor attraction or leisure business… how far ahead do you think your customers decide to visit?
A week? A few days?
The latest Visitor Attraction Intelligence research from Digitickets suggests the reality is rather different.
The report analyses more than 3 million anonymised day tickets across UK visitor attractions, looking at when people actually commit to their visit.
And one number immediately jumps out:
45.9% of online bookings happen on the same day as the visit.
Even more significantly, 67.9% happen within 24 hours. For anyone responsible for marketing a farm park or leisure attraction, that has some pretty big implications…
Because it doesn’t mean people only think about visiting you on the day.
It means there’s an important difference between when somebody discovers you and when they finally press the Buy button.
And getting that distinction right should influence everything from your advertising and emails to your website, ticketing system and school-holiday campaigns.
(Read the full Visitor Attraction Intelligence report here.)
First: people are booking very late
Across the whole data set, looking at different leisure attraction types the report found:
- 45.9% booked on the day
- 67.9% booked within 24 hours
- And just 32.2% booked two or more days in advance
- For those who did book at least two days ahead, the average lead time was five days
That’s a significant amount of revenue being decided very close to the actual visit.
And for farm parks specifically, the report found:
- 44.4% booked on the same day
- 57% booked within 24 hours
- 43% booked two or more days in advance
- The average lead time among those advance bookers was five days
So if your online booking closes the night before, your website is difficult to navigate on a mobile, or buying a ticket involves more hoops than a Crufts agility course… You could be creating unnecessary friction at exactly the moment a large proportion of customers are ready to spend.
Want more help understanding this sort of stuff and implementing the right marketing strategy for your farm park? Book a FREE business growth call at the bottom of the page.
Should you keep online bookings and prices available later?
The report itself makes the point that keeping online bookings open can allow somebody to book while travelling to you, or even once they’ve arrived in the car park.
The lesson isn’t simply “people book late”. It’s that your sales process has to work brilliantly right up to the last possible minute.
Different attractions take different approaches here. Some keep online prices cheaper right up until arrival, others remove the discount 24 hours beforehand, and some stop online bookings altogether on the day.
So, what’s the right approach?
Well, there are a few things to weigh up.
Encouraging people to book early gives you more certainty around visitor numbers, staffing and revenue. And offering an advance booking discount is a perfectly sensible way to encourage that behaviour.
But could removing that discount, or closing online bookings altogether, mean losing spontaneous visitors who might otherwise have bought tickets?
Then there’s profitability. You might make more money per ticket at the gate, but is that worth potentially losing sales? Equally, there’s no point offering discounts to people who’d happily pay full price anyway.
Operationally, online bookings can also reduce queues, make admissions easier and help you capture valuable customer data.
Ultimately, it comes down to understanding your own customers and numbers. There’s no universal right answer, but your booking cut-offs and pricing policies should be deliberate commercial decisions, not simply something you’ve always done.
The aim isn’t necessarily to sell every ticket at the highest price. It’s to generate the greatest overall return from the visitors you can attract.
(Find out more about how we help farm parks with their marketing here.)
School holidays make the booking window even tighter
You’d perhaps expect families to become more organised during the school holidays… But apparently not!
The report found that more than 70% of bookings actually take place within 24 hours during school holidays, compared with 63.3% during term time.
During the summer holidays, that figure rises to 75%.
Among customers who do book further ahead, there’s another interesting shift too.
During term time, the typical advance booking was around seven days out.
During school holidays, that drops to around three to four days.
For farm parks in particular, that makes sense when you think about how families often plan their time.
“Shall we go somewhere Wednesday?”
“Depends on the weather.”
“What are we doing tomorrow?”
“Let’s have a look.”
Your customer may know that half term is coming for weeks. They may have seen your Facebook Ads, spotted your Halloween event, opened one of your emails and mentioned you to their partner.
But the actual purchase can still happen at 8.30pm the night before. Or 9am that morning!
That’s a really important distinction, because booking late doesn’t mean discovering you late (which may be the biggest marketing takeaway in the entire report!).
Somebody buying a ticket tomorrow could have been considering you for the last three weeks. Hence why disappearing from your customers’ radar until 48 hours before an event would be a mistake.
(Find out more about how we help farm parks with their marketing here.)
So really, your marketing needs to do two different jobs.
First, get into people’s heads early.
Then, give them a reason to act when they’re finally ready to make a decision.
The report specifically highlights search, social platforms, AI-generated answers and third-party listings as places where attractions should be creating awareness well before the final booking window.
From a 3XM perspective, that fits with something we’re rather keen on: having an actual marketing strategy rather than firing out isolated bits of activity and hoping something sticks.
Strategy and implementation have to work together! Your early-stage marketing and your last-minute conversion marketing aren’t competing activities.
They’re two parts of the same customer journey.
DON’T switch your advertising off because bookings haven’t appeared yet!
This is where the data could save attractions from making a fairly expensive mistake.
Imagine you’re promoting your big summer event. You launch the campaign three weeks ahead. Plenty of people see the ads. Website traffic climbs. Videos get watched. But ticket sales aren’t exactly setting the world alight.
It’s tempting to conclude: “It’s not working.”
The data suggests you need to be rather more careful though.
If a significant proportion of your audience won’t actually book until the final few days, or even the morning of their visit, then judging an awareness campaign purely by immediate ticket sales can give you the wrong answer.
That doesn’t mean chucking money endlessly at campaigns that aren’t performing. It means understanding what job each stage of your marketing is supposed to do.
Earlier activity can create awareness and consideration, but – closer to the date – your messaging can become much more conversion-focused.
Different ads. Different messages. Different budgets.
(Find out more about how we help farm parks with their marketing here.)
Weather-sensitive attractions have another challenge
Anyone running a farm park doesn’t need us to explain the British weather.
Twenty-two degrees and sunshine when you start planning the campaign. Torrential rain and a weather warning by the time the holidays arrive.
The report points out that encouraging people to commit earlier can therefore have real value for weather-sensitive attractions.
Once the family has bought the tickets, another attraction, competing plan or slightly less attractive weather forecast has less opportunity to derail the visit.
The report suggests testing things such as added value, flexibility and weather guarantees to see what encourages earlier commitment.
So rather than automatically reaching for a discount, ask: What could make booking today feel safer or more attractive than waiting?
The answer won’t be identical for every attraction, but it’s absolutely worth testing a few things out and seeing what sticks best.
Farm parks aren't quite as last-minute as some attractions
There’s another useful bit of context in the sector breakdown.
Farm parks saw 57% of bookings within 24 hours. By comparison, country parks and gardens reached 80.9%, while theme parks were at 52.9%. Farm parks also had 43% of bookings made two or more days ahead.
That suggests farm parks have opportunities at both ends of the journey.
You absolutely need to cater for the last-minute family deciding what to do today, but there’s also a significant group willing to commit earlier. These things are never simple, are they?!
So this is where your event marketing, database, paid advertising and follow-up become particularly valuable.
We’ve seen first-hand with farm park clients how strong campaigns around seasonal and character events can build a loyal audience and drive attendance. 3XM’s work with Over Farm, for example, has included helping build a following around its farm park, pumpkin PYO events, character days and seasonal activity.
The aim isn’t simply to advertise louder when the date gets close.
It’s to build demand early enough that when the customer’s decision moment arrives, you’re already one of the obvious choices.
(Find out more about how we help farm parks with their marketing here.)
Practical takeaways: what should you actually go and do?
If you’re responsible for marketing a farm park or leisure attraction, here are the things we’d be looking at off the back of this research:
1. Check when your own customers actually book. Don’t assume your booking curve matches the report exactly. Pull your numbers by same-day, one-day, 2–7 day and longer-lead bookings, then compare term time, weekends and school holidays.
2. Keep online booking available as late as practical. If people can arrive at your site at 10am, there’s a strong argument for making it incredibly easy to buy at 9.45am (particularly from a phone).
3. Test the booking process on mobile. Go through the journey yourself. How many clicks does it take? Is anything confusing? Can a slightly stressed parent with two children asking for snacks complete it in 60 seconds?
4. Start promotion well before the booking spike. Don’t interpret a short booking window as a short marketing window. Get your event, attraction or offer in front of people early enough to enter their consideration set.
5. Change the message as the date approaches. Earlier messaging can build excitement and awareness. Closer to the visit, become much more direct: what’s happening, when it’s happening, why they should come and how they can book.
6. Don’t disappear during the school holidays. The evidence suggests decision-making gets later, not earlier. Maintain visibility throughout the holiday itself rather than putting all your budget into the weeks beforehand.
7. Use your database. Someone who hasn’t booked three days before an event isn’t necessarily a lost customer. Timely emails in the final days, and potentially on the morning itself, could arrive right inside the decision window.
8. Test reasons to book earlier. Added value, limited availability, flexible booking or appropriate weather-related reassurance may encourage commitment without automatically resorting to discounts.
9. Capture customer details where appropriate. A booking isn’t only today’s admission revenue. The report highlights the value of email capture for encouraging repeat visits and post-visit reviews.
10. Measure marketing against the real buying journey. Awareness activity and conversion activity have different jobs. Set your expectations and reporting accordingly.
(Find out more about how we help farm parks with their marketing here.)
Don’t confuse a late booking with a late decision-making process
If there’s one thing we’d take from the research, it’s this: don’t confuse a late booking with a late decision-making process.
Your future visitor might book at 8.42am on Saturday morning. But they could have been deciding between you and three other attractions since the previous Tuesday.
Good attraction marketing therefore needs to be present during both moments.
Build awareness early. Stay visible. Make the proposition compelling.
Then make it ridiculously easy for people to buy when they’re finally ready.
That’s strategy and implementation, and for attractions with short, weather-sensitive booking windows, getting both sides right really matters.
(Read the full Visitor Attraction Intelligence report here.)
Want to discuss putting a proper marketing strategy in place at your attraction?
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