Our Commitment to Our Guests
We love playing escape rooms. It’ what inspired us to start Escape Tactic. Collectively we’ve play over 30 escape rooms, including two more this weekend. We had the chance to spend the Labor Day weekend with family in Utah (the picture in this post tries to capture just one of the many beautiful sunsets we saw!). We were so excited to introduce them to escape rooms. Like many people, they’ve heard of them, but they’ve yet to play.
It was one of the worst experiences we’ve had. Poor space, bad game design, broken clues, difficult group dynamics, and a bad game master – it all led to a disappointing experience. As we recapped on the way home and into the evening, it proved to be a very valuable experience for us. It was encouraging to know we’re building our experiences to be far superior, but it was scary knowing there are escape rooms out there that let this happen.
It has helped us reaffirm what we’re doing and the experiences we want to provide to our guests. We won’t be perfect – far from it. We will make mistakes, and we know you can’t please all of the people all of the time. But we’re committed to delivering the best guest experience we can. Here are five things that have become an even bigger priority for us after this weekend.
- A welcoming environment – Too many times now we’ve walked into an escape room business and either been greeted rudely or not at all. This is baffling to us! As simple as it sounds, we guarantee that when you walk into Escape Tactic you’ll receive a warm welcome that gets you excited for your game.
- Number of Players – our rooms are built for up to 10 players per game. That’s a big group, but we have been intentional about creating space for them. Every one of our escape rooms has multiple rooms, is 650-1,000 sq ft, and has enough puzzles for the players playing the game. We’re not going to cram 12 players into a 350 sq ft room. That’s bad for everyone.
- Game play – great set design with bad game play is still bad game play. Our guests come to play our escape rooms because they want a fun, challenging escape. We’re investing heavily into designing great sets, but our biggest investment is in game play. The disappointing part of the escape room industry is everyone thinks they can create a good escape game. They can’t. This is why we’ve partnered with a professional game designer. You want a variety of puzzle types, clues that fit the theme, and games that can support large groups. And we are committed to providing that for you.
- Working clues – nothing is worse that a clue that doesn’t work or is unfairly misleading. This weekend we had a clue from a compass that was broken, but instead of the arrow in the compass being the clue, it was what looked like an accidental red line drawn on it with pen. And when the answer is “just put a 0 in front of the 3-digit code to make it work on that 4-digit lock,” that is a TERRIBLE clue. The clues should be challenging, not misleading.
- Professional Employees – there’s a right way to treat people, to do your job, and to ask for feedback. We all know it when we see it. Our commitment to our guests is that our employees will always act in a professional manner.
We won’t get it right every time. We may not even get it right at all, but escape room experiences like the ones we had this weekend reaffirm our commitment to putting customer service and our guests experience above all else.
When Escape Tactic opens in early 2017, you can be assured that we’ll do everything in our power to give you an unforgettable escape room experience!
