Read our case study to see how VisiSoft helped Wellington Country Park double their membership sales, increase onsite spend with added dwell time and streamline their accounts integration, stock control, EPOS and online ticketing.
Wellington Country Park needed a reliable online ticketing system that integrated other key processes such as EPOS, stock and accounts.
Along with financial, stock control and EPOS integrations, VisiSoft helped Wellington to migrate their visitor data across to their new ticketing system and set up online membership sales. Since launching online, they’ve seen over 50% uplift in memberships.
Wellington adopted VisiSoft’s EPOS solution in all of their onsite cafes, shops and outlets. Having an integrated solution in place that could manage stock and directly link to their accounts software was a game-changer for the park. Following the successful implementation of EPOS, stock control and a link to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, VisiTickets, our online ticketing system for Farm Attractions, was implemented onsite.
Wellington Country Park was opened in 1974 to the public for the first time by the 8th Duke of Wellington and the 350 acre site sits within the Duke of Wellington’s estate. Since its opening nearly 50 years ago, the park has developed into one of the major outdoor attractions in the area. The farm park style attraction offers long walking trails and fun outdoor activities, perfect for young families to spend the day exploring.
The park currently offers numerous different play attractions including; a jumping pillow, pirate ship themed play area, a large splash zone, various nature trails, a miniature railway and a small animal farm. More recently, the park added a campsite with 86 pitches. With lots of growth and development on the site over the last decade, Wellington turned their focus to how they could continue offering the best visitor experience.
Wellington’s previous ticketing system didn’t allow them to easily capture customers data and (most importantly) sell memberships online. They wanted a new system that would help embrace their growth, report accurate data and provide a streamlined visitor journey from online to onsite.
“Our previous system had problems with the reporting and we gained incorrect figures on a daily basis. This caused issues with our finance department trying to reconcile our figures and create accurate takings.”
– Josh McGhee, Marketing Manager, Wellington Estates.
Moving forward Wellington wanted a system that could integrate directly into other key business operations such as their finance department, marketing and visitor services teams. Providing better reporting and dashboards to these teams meant they could directly impact customer experience onsite and look at ways to continue improving this.
“VisiSoft has allowed us to incorporate everything we wanted to do within their system for both EPOS and online ticketing, we are now able to sell memberships online then easily track these memberships around the park, including visitor habits and spend. Plus, we can now see all of our customer information in one place, this has allowed us to increase our marketing data and work on boosting visitor loyalty.”
– Josh McGhee, Marketing Manager, Wellington Estates.
With a growing footfall of over 200k visitors per year, Wellington recognised that their visitors were demanding an online solution to pre-book tickets and purchase memberships, which is why they turned to VisiSoft to help implement a solution.
The new online ticketing system allows for memberships to be purchased online, along with pre-booked day tickets and event tickets. Customers find the journey to be a much simpler process; with a quick barcode scan of their confirmation email at the admissions desk, they then have fast entry into the park to start enjoying their day.
Shorter entrance queues equal happy visitors. Happy visitors are more likely to ultimately have a higher spend onsite due to both a fun family day out (with happy little ones) and an increased dwell time on site. Plus, with tracked membership transactions, operations and marketing teams have the opportunity to capture important data allowing for better communication with visitors and even more upsells to existing members.
“As a result of the VisiSoft system & being able to sell memberships online, we’ve seen our memberships increase by 50%, if not more. This is because of the simplicity of the online process and visitors not having the hassle of signing up at the admissions desk. So that has been a major result for us.”Nigel Burnett, General Manager, Wellington Country Park.
VisiSoft has helped support the continued growth of Wellington Country Park and the addition of online membership sales has further boosted visitor experience. Wellington are looking to invest in the visitor and make sure that every step of the visitor journey and interaction with the park is an excellent one, that’s why they have future-proofed their business with an integrated visitor attraction management solution. If you’re thinking about updating your EPOS or Ticketing system, get started with a free no obligation demo from our team.
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As well as faster entry into the attraction with barcode ticketing, visitors can also enjoy shorter queues at their favourite cafes and in the onsite gift shop. With easy to use tills training time is reduced and staff can focus on providing visitors with the best experience, knowing they have a reliable system there to support them.
The new online ticketing system, like the existing EPOS and stock control solution, now directly integrates with their chosen finance software, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. This means reduced admin time for finance staff and increased accuracy of data. With better reporting available to see what visitor purchase onsite and where they spend their time, the operations team can help deliver a better visitor experience.
“Our finance team have had a great benefit from having the integration with Dynamics. Only a daily basis our product lines get brought into Dynamics from VisiSoft by product category. This helps our finance team to manage our sales revenue on a daily basis against our budgeting.” – Josh McGhee, Marketing Manager, Wellington Estates
“One of the advantages of working with VisiSoft is that it helps us with our budgeting. In previous cases we’ve not been able to have a clear budgeted figure that we could work to. With VisiSoft it’s very clear, it’s a set fee and we know what we’re paying and that allows us to plan ahead and is much more beneficial than our previous experiences.”Nigel Burnett, General Manager, Wellington Country Park.
The data migration is a key step in any new system implementation and the entire process was documented so both the team at Wellington and the team at VisiSoft knew each step and what was required of them throughout the process. The actual go live was also scheduled outside of opening hours so that full testing and team training could be carried out onsite.
“Throughout the process they were great with giving us advice on the transition and marking all the deadlines of work we needed to complete alongside the work that they were doing to ensure a smooth operation. Since go live, the support team are always very helpful if we do ever have any problems and they are always very quick to respond.” – Josh McGhee, Marketing Manager, Wellington Estates
The new solution supports every team within the attraction providing key insights and tools to enhance visitors’ days out. All of the lovely team at Wellington have embraced the new system and are excited about the future for the park.
“I would absolutely recommend VisiSoft to anyone who is looking for a ticketing system within the attractions industry, it has helped us second-to-none, and we’re very grateful for the support, advice and development they have allowed us to have with our business, and futureproofing our ticketing solution. ” Josh McGhee, Marketing Manager, Wellington Estates
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