In this article, we share five attraction maintenance tips for family entertainment centers.
As an FEC owner or operator, it's important to develop and follow a detailed attraction maintenance plan.
If not, you may encounter more unplanned interruptions or other service breaks that'll prevent your customers from being able to use your attractions. This can result in a major loss of revenue over time!
What can you do to make sure that customers still have a good experience at your facility in spite of an emergency?
Preventative action is the best way to make sure that your attractions are safe to use every day.
Here are 5 attraction maintenance tips that will help you create a better plan for your facility.
Preventative maintenance is just what it sounds like. It’s routine maintenance that is conducted—even when nothing is wrong—to prevent any unplanned service interruptions and to keep everything running smoothly.
Attractions are huge investments! You need to be prepared to properly attend to their care if you want them to withstand the test of time.
If you own a trampoline park, for example, how often do you inspect the springs of the trampoline? Are there any missing springs? Are the coils still wound tightly? Are they clean?
Preventative maintenance can also give you an idea of what components are close to failing and might need to be replaced. The last thing you want is an attraction failure to occur right in the middle of a busy Saturday. This is the time you need your attractions to perform at their best!
Do you have an attraction maintenance routine in place for each of your attractions? Is this something you can do yourself, or do you need to hire a technician? These are some of the questions that need to be considered when formulating or updating your attraction maintenance plan.
Many times, it's best to not risk taking things into your own hands. Search online or reach out to other family entertainment centers in your local area for recommendations on a service professional who specializes in maintaining the types of attractions in your facility.
Once you find a reputable attraction maintenance professional, keep their number on hand and work out a schedule for them to come by on a routine basis. Even if there isn't anything wrong, have them check that everything continues to work properly.
Try your best to have preventative attraction maintenance performed outside of normal operating hours. This way, potential revenue from the attraction won't be compromised and the customer experience will remain top-notch.
Make sure each of your attractions gets routine, documented maintenance, and that all of your employees understand how to safely operate each attraction you have at your facility.
Hold staff meetings periodically to practice team member responses and keep emergency plan sheets in an easily accessible location for everyone. This will come in handy for future employees and will ensure everyone is on the same page.
Make sure to include a section in your waiver that frees you from liability should guests need help in an emergency before medical staff arrives. Make sure to get statements and contact information from all parties involved and take the necessary pictures.
Look into what your country and/or state laws say about your responsibility/liability when helping someone in an emergency before a trained medical staff can arrive. Documentation will function as proof of your dedication to customer safety.
You can't predict everything and sometimes things go wrong with an attraction that you didn't expect to happen.
Corrective attraction maintenance is performed after a failure with your attraction has already occurred. Depending on the severity of the problem, fixing the attraction can take an unknown amount of time and be quite costly, no doubt being a significant expense you didn't expect to incur.
Of course, every failure can't be prevented from happening, but prioritizing routine attraction maintenance will go a long way in making sure corrective maintenance issues are few and far between. Set a goal for a specified amount of money that would help you during an unexpected time of crisis.
Every day your attraction is inoperable is a day of lost revenue potential. You don't want your attraction to be out of commission longer than it has to be!
If you search online, you can find a forum or message board for almost anything. Ask your fellow FEC operators how they handle their attraction maintenance. They may have some valuable input from their experiences and save you from learning things the hard way!
FEC Operators is a Facebook group made up of over 1,800 experts in the family entertainment center industry with all kinds of experience. We, at Party Center Software, also have our Party Center Community group on Facebook with over 800 members who are actively helping each other with common FEC questions every day. Request to join these groups and your business—and customers—will thank you!
What did you think about the attraction maintenance tips in this post? Let us know in the comments below!
We hope this article helps you properly prevent and take care of potential attraction emergencies at your family entertainment center.
If you're interested in learning more about what you can
do to be prepared for other potential emergencies at your FEC, check out our resource, IN CASE OF EMERGENCY: An Emergency Preparedness Guide to Help Your FEC Overcome the Unexpected.
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