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Recently in another thread, the question of "Guides or No Guides, and Why?" came up, and one proponent said that guides could be very useful for setting up scares, and so on, and that they can work. Other conventional wisdom says "not".
Any ideas?
C.
PS - I was tempted to make this into a poll, but I think that it would either be surprisingly split, or not surprisingly one-sided, ergo, no real value in a poll. Better to just discuss it's merits (or lack thereof).
We used them originally to prevent wandering and to keep things flowing. When the volume started increasing though we eliminated the guides. Things are flowing nicely without them and people seem to prefer not having a guide, in our haunt at least.
I kinda liked having guides. Here lately, one particular haunt started guiding halfway, then leaving you to walk the rest. It probably took 3-4 minutes to get to that point and it was like a 9 minute haunt. This is of course, as long as the guide knows what he's doing and is GOOD! That makes a difference.
From a haunter standpoint, I couldn't tell you. I've only done parties and yard haunts and never guided myself. Usually a 5 minute walk about is what I had.
Dewayne
In NE, we can't have dead ends, or parts where the path of egress is blocked. One way around this... if you have a guide you can. With high volume it seems a guide for every group could become taxing on staff demands. An idea I'd like to share with everybody is TEMPORARY GUIDES. By having a "friendly" actor show up and say "this way hurry!" And lead them to a dead end, monster appears behind the group, finally the guide gets the door open, then gets killed in the next room! He then gets back into the first room for the next group.
Im sure its been done, but maybe that will help somebody. As a customer I can say that constant egress gets boring and empowering. Having a constant guide gets annoying, but is disempowering (which is good) So this way we can provide both feelings.
Hello All~
As far as the "Guides or no Guides" concept.
My person feeling on this is two-fold.
1) Location of Haunt. When I used to work at a Haunted cave we DID have guides.. kind of.. the people from one "scare area" to another would take the patrons to the next "scare area" due mostly for safety of the patron, and the equipment. At the time a MAJORITY of the haunt was underground.. dark .. water pools .. etc. etc. so for US it was quite important to have people as "Guides" that were experienced and or knew the the cave like the back of their hand and knew what could and could not be done. It actually worked out quite well cause the "guides" we had were all regualr tour guides for our historical tours and could jump i at a moments notice if something went "wrong" .
2) Personal Preference. This like others have mentioned in this thread and in the other thread is what THEY feel is the best way to get the throughput they want AND/OR need to make a successful season for THEIR HAUNT.
In all reality there is not really a wrong or right answer for this . Mostly its personal preference.
For ME I WOULD guides as the situation itself warranted. It would also come down to .. if there was a "rowdy group" I would have an EXPERIENCED actor(that I would also set as a roamer for the night just for that reason) and have them either lead or follow the group to make sure they(the group) didn't do any damage that i or the other staff members would have to take care of later that night or the next day.
Just my thoughts .
~LoneWolf
Same with us, traffic flow was becoming an issues. We had wait times of 1 hour on heavy traffic nights with guides and when we took guides away it went down to 30 min wait times on heavy traffic nights.Quote:
Originally Posted by BigT