Go Big Or Go Home! Skip the Queue podcast Season 7 is now live!

Paul Marden: Welcome to Skip the Queue, the podcast about the world’s best visitor attractions and the people that work in them. I’m Paul Marden. Along with my co-hosts, Andy Povey and Sinead Kimberley, I spend my days working with ambitious attractions like theme parks, museums, galleries, and science centres to help them to attract more guests. In today’s episode, Andy and I talk about what’s coming up for Skip the Queue as we enter Season 7.

 Seven seasons, hey? Good lord. How very exciting. We’ve had our summer holidays. We’ve had our little break, but there’s no rest for the wicked, is there?

 Andy Povey: Absolutely not. You say it’s a busman’s holiday, really, isn’t it?  Working in our industry.

Paul Marden: I think it is, isn’t it? Life has changed quite a lot for us recently, hasn’t it? In the last few months, with the advent of Crowd Convert and Merac coming back to life again, we’ve been out on the road going everywhere, haven’t we?

 Andy Povey: Absolutely everywhere. And I promise I’m not going to bitch about electric cars and charging. That’s the only thing I’ve found that annoys me more than a poor online ticketing experience.

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. So we have both been visiting lots of clients. It’s been very exciting. But we’ve also both had our summer holidays. Which attraction is memorable for you from your recent holiday?

Andy Povey: Do you know, there’s so many. We took our girls to the longest named tourist attraction in the world, I think. Warner Brothers Studio Tour London, the making of Harry Potter. On their 11th birthday. 

Paul Marden: Oh, how was that?

Andy Povey:  We had a beautiful experience. They have this really smart trick there where if they note your birthday, they give you a badge that says, ‘It’s my birthday.’

 It’s modelled on the birthday cake that Hagrid gave Harry. So it’s all completely in keeping and in theme. So my daughters were walking around with these and every member of staff we saw that saw the badge wished them happy birthday. The first member of staff that did it absolutely blew my girls’ minds. They hadn’t associated it with the badge that they were wearing and they thought that they were the most special people on the face of the earth.

Absolutely superb. And the experience itself is wonderful. So that was probably the most memorable. I did something else very recently that was a little bit unusual. So I’m a man in my 50s. I was a teenager, probably not even a teenager, a kid when Grease came out. And all my mates and all my friends raved about it, and I didn’t go and see it. And I’ve been very proud of the fact that I’ve never seen Grease.

Until last weekend. When we went to the Secret Cinema showing of Grease in Battersea Park, wow, wow, what an experience. Live actors, live scenes with the film running in the background, the fairground sitting outside the auditorium, where the final set, if you’ve watched Grease ever, where they’re in the fairground, went out there.

Such a fantastic experience. Really does make me wonder why we don’t have more of our larger parks doing that kind of stuff in partnership with Secret Cinema. It would make you stay for the evening and really extend your day. Absolutely superb experience. So, if you get the opportunity to go and see it, please do.

Paul Marden: How very cool. 

Andy Povey: Tell them Andy sent you, which will mean absolutely nothing.  How about you?

Paul Marden: We recently went to Scotland. We spent a day, which was really not enough, in Edinburgh. And actually, as you’re talking about the Harry Potter experience, we did a little Harry Potter thing because there is a graveyard, Greyfriars Bobby’s graveyard.

 It was the inspiration for many of the names in Harry Potter. And this graveyard was, I mean, it was chock full of every nationality of tourist you could possibly imagine, plus the three of us wandering around all trying to find Harry Potter themed gravestones. Yeah, so we found Tom Riddle’s tombstone. We saw a McGonagall. Yeah, it was just, that was quite magical. But the thing that sticks in my head is we also visited the Real Mary King’s Close. And when you walk along the Royal Mile, falling off the side of the Royal Mile are all of these tenement closes that three of them were capped over a couple of hundred years ago and completely forgotten about. Continuum attractions have turned them into an attraction that you can wander around. You get a guided tour of this time capsule of what life was like in a tenement block. In Edinburgh, it was rated last year as the best tourist attraction in Britain, according to TripAdvisor.

And it really, really was magical. It was such a fun visit. We were guided around by a tour guide in costume and in character the whole way around. And at the end of it, she introduced herself as coming from Philadelphia.

She was really really great guide, and I just loved it. I’ve seen them in the Rubber Cheese Survey for the last four years, and thought, ‘What a funny name for an attraction? I wonder what that is?’ And so, when I saw it, I had to go. I loved every minute of it, and it was brilliant.

Andy Povey: I agree, it’s a fantastic place. Did you see J. K. Rowling’s handprints just around the corner?

Paul Marden: No.

 Andy Povey: In the courtyard next to the entrance?

 Paul Marden: No, I didn’t.

Andy Povey: See, I think they were trying to do something like the Hollywood Walk of Fame, where there are famous people’s handprints. I should have told you before. Is there something to go back for?

Paul Marden: Oh, we’ll definitely be going back. There was so much there in Edinburgh that we didn’t get to see. You just couldn’t do it in a day. But so much fun. So much fun.

So we are into season seven. And just like the last few seasons, we’ve got lots of ideas, brimming with ideas, few changes. And we thought we would tease them for you here in this short non-episode, just to tell you about some of the things that are coming up. And yeah, shall we?

 We’ll talk about the first thing that you came up with, which was the move to weekly content.

Andy Povey: You’re blaming me for this?

 Paul Marden: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Andy Povey: I mean, the objective was to double the listenership of the podcast. And so you did that by doubling my work. And it seemed like it would be really, really easy to do that if we doubled the episodes.

So, yeah, we’re going weekly. I’m sure we’re going to have plenty to fill it. Because you look at all of the interesting stories we come across, the people that we talk to, the things that we want to talk about, and we end up editing and cutting things. So I’m convinced that we’re going to have loads of really exciting things to talk about. We’re also going to introduce a couple of different themes. So do you want to talk about the Millennium-funded projects?

Paul Marden: Yes, so this is carrying on the theme that I started back at the back end of Season 6. When I spoke to another Edinburgh attraction, Dynamic Earth. They were a good example of a Millennium project that was obviously kicked off 25 years ago. And we had a lovely conversation about what has been the challenges, what has been the opportunities for them in the last 25 years, and what does the future look like? I’m off to the Association of Science and Discovery Centres conference next week. That episode will be out in a few weeks’ time. And we’re going to be talking a lot about science centres. and how they can thrive over the next 25 years. But we’ll be talking to some other Millennium projects as well in the season ahead. 

Andy Povey: So Charles Bishop from the National Space Centre, if you’re listening, give me a call. I’m going to try and hound you to appear on the podcast.

Paul Marden: We’ve also, this is very self-indulgent, but we are going to be going through a little bit of a rebrand. The Skip the Queue brand has stayed the same for the six seasons. And our friends at Plaster Creative Communications have been working really hard. They’re the only reason why we could possibly go weekly with our content because Emily and Sami are helping us to ramp up our content and working with us closely. But they’ve also helped us with our rebrand, which is also going to be an audio rebrand. So there’s going to be some new audio tickling your ears coming up as well, which is very exciting.

Andy Povey: It’s not just the rebrand though, is it? Let’s talk about the other things that we’re going to be doing with Skip the Queue.

Paul Marden: Yeah. Should we talk playbooks?

 Andy Povey: Absolutely. Tell me what it means.

Paul Marden: So I, for a long time, thought that there was something that Skip the Queue could do because, you know. Yes, this is our baby, but it is a lot of hard work from across the industry that goes towards making the podcast the success that it is. And we’re going to move that successful collaboration into a series of playbooks where we’re bringing together people from across the industry to help guide attractions into… the state of the art and what’s possible within the sector across a number of different subjects. And we’re starting that with e-commerce. So we’re currently collaborating with our friends at Stephen Spencer Associates and at Navigate. And we’re producing the first in that playbook series all about what… What does it take to be able to build an amazing e-commerce experience for an attraction? How do you curate the products?

 How do you come up with the ideas? How do you put the technology together? And then how do you get anybody to come and visit and buy from you? So that’s very exciting.

Andy Povey: So that’s more of your gift shop. Retail e-commerce.

Paul Marden: Absolutely. Absolutely. And there’ll be room as well within the series for us to talk about other things as well. So we are completely open to ideas. So listeners, if you’ve got ideas of a playbook that you’d like to see, it could be about digital sustainability. It could be about ticketing. It could be about any aspect of operating an attraction. Come and tell us and come up with ideas of who we could work with and we’ll put something together for you. So I think that’s really exciting, and that will be coming out in a few weeks’ time.

Andy Povey: Very interesting. Look forward to that.

Paul Marden: We were excited in Season 6 to break out of the four walls of our little dungeon offices, working via video conferencing and going out and about, weren’t we? We absolutely loved visiting the NFAN Conference, ASDC. We worked from the floor of so many different events, didn’t we? And tried lots of formats. And we definitely, definitely want to do more of that. And there’s an exciting turn because weekly isn’t enough, is it?

Andy Povey: If you’re going to do it, go big. Go big or go home. 

Paul Marden: We have been invited to the IAAPA Europe Conference Expo in Barcelona, no less. And we are going to be coming into your ears daily, not weekly, daily.

So we have got an amazing lineup of people that we are going to be talking to from the conference floor. But there’s also so much time to fill. We don’t know who we’re going to talk to. We’re going to be hitting the floor and just grabbing people, just like we did at NFAN. You’ll be out, Andy, just hooking people. And we’ll be talking to them. And we plan to do those interviews during the day, and Wenalyn and Steve, our long-suffering editorial and production team, will be working furiously through the night to publish the following morning.

Andy Povey: Fantastic. So do we need to talk about our launch episode for Season 7?

 Paul Marden: Yes.

Andy Povey: As this is just the trailer.

Paul Marden: Yes. So in 29 minutes, I will be recording my launch episode. So I’m meeting with Massimiliano Freddi, who is the IAAPA board chairman. We’re going to find out more about Massimiliano. Not only is he the first Italian chairman of IAAPA, which has been in existence for over 100 years, I believe. We are also going to find out about what he does in his day job and the attraction that he runs over in Italy. So that’s a very exciting first episode. So we will be launching that episode 17th of September, and then we will be live from Barcelona starting on the 23rd and going out daily from there on for the rest of that week. I mean, what more could we want?

 Andy Povey: It’s justification for the family for me going to Barcelona after just having returned from Menorca so daddy does a holiday work.

Paul Marden: We’ve at least got to walk down Las Rambla and chat about the conference we can’t just be within the expo location surely. A little vino tinto on.

Andy Povey: I’m sure we will be at Tribudabo at what, in my experience, this is the third time I’ve been to IAAPA in Barcelona. But the opening night party in Tribudabo has always been one of the most fantastic events I’ve ever been to. The view over the city at night with rides and superb food, drink and entertainment going off behind you is just  out of this world.

Paul Marden: But it’s work just for anyone that’s listening outside the door right now.

Andy Povey: Very hard work for very important people

Paul Marden: Yes so we are still planning out the rest of season seven, obviously going weekly, lots of opportunities for us to talk to lots of people. If you’ve got ideas for themes or people that we could interview, we are absolutely all ears. So hit us up on LinkedIn, hello@SkiptheQueue.fm, or go to the website, skipthequeue.fm. Yeah, and you’ll find all of our contact details and we’d love to hear from you with ideas of what we could do for the rest of this season. What would you find interesting? Apart from that, we’re going to sign off. I’ve got an interview to go to in 25 minutes. We will be back with you on the 17th of September with our first episode and from IAAPA on the 23rd of September for the rest of that week.

Andy Povey: You’re going to be on IAAPA. Come and find us. Come and have a chat.

Paul Marden: Looking forward to it.

Paul Marden: Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, the digital agency that creates amazing websites for ambitious visitor attractions.

Do you know someone we should be talking to?

Do you know someone fascinating we should be talking to?

If so, email us at hello@rubbercheese.com – we’ll get back to you shortly.

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