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Hi Fellow Haunters,
Welcome to the New Year!
A few haunt locations have started a Christmas event over the past few years. I studied the events around the country and did my research for a few years on such events.
I have been doing Spookywoods haunted attraction for 24 years in a row in the same location with a huge fan base now. Our Maize Adventure daytime events which targets families and school groups seemed to be a natural fit to promote a Christmas event.
After being asked when are you going to do Christmas for years we finally jumped in this past December. Due to the news of people out of work and cutting back I decided to offer a low cost Christmas event.
We had a Free Animated LED light show with Fire effects and only a $5.00 hayride of the Story of Christmas and two truckloads of Christmas trees. We cross promoted with discounts on every ticket with our daytime and haunted events in September and October, but the result was people just were not coming out.
Many factors can be discussed on what happened, but from my point of view the families in my market are hurting bad. People are losing their jobs and having to cut back all they can.
Yes our Haunt did awesome in October as it always seems to do. But you have to understand the target customer coming to the haunted attraction does not have to pay the mortgage and has money to spend on hanging out at a haunt.
It rained 3 weekends and bitter cold down into the 20's. Couple that with the tanking economy and I ended up getting on the News and giving away our stock of Christmas trees instead of seeing them all get fed to the chipper. That turned out to be the largest amount of PR we ever received for Kersey Valley, Inc. We were picked up by every TV station and local papers and even the AP news wire. Larry posted the link to one of the stories when it came out. It was worth more in PR and goodwill than the loss I'm sure.
My reason for posting this thread is just to inform you the haunter that may be thinking of doing a Christmas event, you better think long and hard before doing anything outside of Halloween until the economy turns around.
Spookywoods haunted attraction does have a big advantage over our family focused events, kids blow money, parents pay the bills!!
Welcome to the New Year!
A few haunt locations have started a Christmas event over the past few years. I studied the events around the country and did my research for a few years on such events.
I have been doing Spookywoods haunted attraction for 24 years in a row in the same location with a huge fan base now. Our Maize Adventure daytime events which targets families and school groups seemed to be a natural fit to promote a Christmas event.
After being asked when are you going to do Christmas for years we finally jumped in this past December. Due to the news of people out of work and cutting back I decided to offer a low cost Christmas event.
We had a Free Animated LED light show with Fire effects and only a $5.00 hayride of the Story of Christmas and two truckloads of Christmas trees. We cross promoted with discounts on every ticket with our daytime and haunted events in September and October, but the result was people just were not coming out.
Many factors can be discussed on what happened, but from my point of view the families in my market are hurting bad. People are losing their jobs and having to cut back all they can.
Yes our Haunt did awesome in October as it always seems to do. But you have to understand the target customer coming to the haunted attraction does not have to pay the mortgage and has money to spend on hanging out at a haunt.
It rained 3 weekends and bitter cold down into the 20's. Couple that with the tanking economy and I ended up getting on the News and giving away our stock of Christmas trees instead of seeing them all get fed to the chipper. That turned out to be the largest amount of PR we ever received for Kersey Valley, Inc. We were picked up by every TV station and local papers and even the AP news wire. Larry posted the link to one of the stories when it came out. It was worth more in PR and goodwill than the loss I'm sure.
My reason for posting this thread is just to inform you the haunter that may be thinking of doing a Christmas event, you better think long and hard before doing anything outside of Halloween until the economy turns around.
Spookywoods haunted attraction does have a big advantage over our family focused events, kids blow money, parents pay the bills!!
You were very fortunate to be positioned as a conduit for a Christmas miracle. 
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