By the FEC Directory

As you start looking around, searching and speaking with amusement equipment vendors, you will start to hear a very common phrase from many in the industry; "Play-A-Bility". Which is a very appropriate term when it comes to family fun centers, as this is truly what it is all about.

There are two distinct forms of Play-a-bility; Guest Play-a-bility and Equipment Play-a-bility.

Guest Play-A-Bility

Overall, play-a-bility speaks to how playable, or how much fun your center is. When it comes to play-a-bility it's not just about your activity list. From the activities, to the party packages, your guests want it to be a fun experience, from start to finish. Upon leaving your center, the best you and your team can shoot for is a positive word-of-mouth that will go home with your guests and act like a computer virus, affecting everyone your guests know (in a positive manner of course!). More on "Viral" marketing in upcoming months...

Play-a-bility affects every aspect of your center and your center's employees (or as Disney calls them - cast members) and should be a central component in your overall sales & marketing and guest experience strategy. Professional and on-going staff training will help your employees to understand this - you are only as good as your last performance. Your facility staff need to be trained on how to add play-a-bility to their daily guest interactions. Specifically, for childrens entertainment centers, parents (especially mothers) wish to see their child engaged, excited and sharing many "mom, look at me..." moments. This is done by recognizing that once the guest arrives, he/she is your full time responsibility. It is up to you and your team to literally spread the fun, to create a sense of Play-a-bility at your center.

This may be encourage through your staff by empowering them to go into the activity areas and engage your guests. Get them to play on, in and with the activities along side your guests encouraging them to 'try this' or 'do that for a better score' or creating non-competitive challenges for kids within the play environment. For example pulling aside a small group of children and offering them some colored face paint if they rip up the playground and come down that big red slide. This helps to create the aura of Guest Play-A-Bility and will return to your center in the form of repeat visits.

Equipment Play-A-Bility

When making decisions on your centers activity list there are many factors to consider. Cost, space allocation, capacity, through-put, safety, time-to-return-on-investment, and others. All of these combined really add up to the Play-A-Bility factor. As a facility expense (cost, space allocation, capacity, through-put, safety, etc) how does it provide a return? Is the activity worth the expense? Your task in securing activities is to make your facility as fun, as interactive and as entertainingly engaging as possible... so does this particular activity measure up? Lets look specifically at soft-contained-playgrounds and how they are typically priced.

To best determine what kind of a return an indoor soft contained playground will provide, we need to draw a comparison between costs and play-a-bility. First off, pricing for soft contained play is based on a two factor formula. The first factor is capacity. How big of a playground do you need to handle all of the traffic you expect on your busiest weekend day? and far more importantly, 2) The Play-a-bility offered by the playground.

The Play-a-bility factor is driven by the kinds and amounts of activities within the playground. For example, the more activities you have the more, interactive and diverse those activities are, the more "playable" and ultimately the more fun your playground is going to be for your guests, and that has a direct connection with an on-going repeat play desire (a good thing). Ultimately Play-a-bility, not only in your contained playground, but in your entire activity mix, drives a high repeat desire for families to return and play again and again.

So when it comes to pricing for indoor playgrounds, here's what we have learned... pricing for contained play on a sliding scale is based on capacity / playability, typically we see anywhere from $700 - $1200 per child capacity. For example, if you need a playground that can handle 100 children at one time, on the lower, inexpensive end it could run $70 - $80k and on the higher end $115k - $120k. In the above example, the playground would be exactly the same size, the same color - the only difference would be the play-a-bility or the amount of activities contained within the playground. However, employing a "Reconfigured" playground from SmartPlaygrounds can save you 20% - 30% off the above pricing.

The above figures would most likely not include any major themeing, as themeing can be very expensive and can quickly eat up 20% - 30% of your budget. To learn more about themeing, review Creating Wow! Get out there and get going! Happy Hunting.