Roaming Vs. Guided patrons

[Smiley]

Okay, how many of you haunt owners let your patrons walk and observe the haunt grounds at their own pace once you let them in? Hands, let me see those hands...

Now, how many of you haunt owners have your patrons guided? As in have an actor guide them through the haunt, talk about the different rooms, keep an eye on everyone; that kind of thing. Hands, now....


As a patron, as a haunter, which do you perfer?

[MindWerxKMG]

Free-flow, unguided!

[Ratbitw]

we don't have

a choice , fire marshall says they will be guided.

[graystone]

Graystone

Unguided. I have found that sometimes the guide can make or break the experiance.

[TheNightMare]

I prefer unguided

[mindtumor]

We let them go through unguided.

[neffuri27]

We are fully guided

Otherwise folks here might walk off with the whole haunt.haha
Seriously, our storyline requires a guide to activate props and
tell part of the story and put patrons on the bunker mine
elevator ride etc...

Many Blessings
Kimmy

[tkaska]

unguided

LOL! Love it, Kimmy -- "walk off with the whole haunt!" -- I'm feelin' that!
Unguided...we tried guided, but we felt some of our guides detracted from the experience...especially if they knew someone in the group.

[Jim Warfield]

Definately a guided tour at The Ravens Grin Inn. This is our house we also live in it, need I say more?

[Old Tree Studios]

After much deliberating, head scratching, arguing, and calculator crunching... we have settled on a guided tour for the design of our new venture. Yes, it is clear that the almighty "Throughput" number will suffer somewhat, but we are working on ways to minimize the damage as much as is possible.

For our method of scares, it just wont work with an unguided environment. We had a similar discussion in another thread and it seems to be one of those situations with no right answer. It just depends on how you design your haunt and your scares to decide what works best for you.

Mike

[Bill Schnell]

Unguided. If you go guided, then the guides have to be really good actors or they will ruin the entire experience.

[Jim Warfield]

A Ravens Grin tour usually lasts about 90 minutes and if there was no guide to make sure they kept moving I would have to become a motel, granted a real strange motel where everyone sleeps standing up on in piles everywhere?

[N2SPOOKINU]

Unguided unless they just cant make it on their own and are holding up the line. Then we have someone assist them by walking behind the group to move them along on their journey.