How the 2024 Visitor Attraction survey is different, and a new face at Rubber Cheese

In this Skip the Queue podcast episode, I’m joined by my new co host, Oz Austwick, the Head of Commercial at Rubber Cheese.

“It can be really hard to know how to improve your digital presence, how to make your marketing more effective, if you don’t even really know where you’re starting from.”

Oz Austwick is the Head of Commercial at Rubber Cheese, he has a somewhat varied job history having worked as a Blacksmith, a Nurse, a Videographer, and Henry VIII’s personal man at arms. Outside of work he’s a YouTuber, a martial artist, and a musician, and is usually found wandering round a ruined castle with his kids.

“I don’t think I’d ever really seriously thought about digital technology being a major contributor to climate change in the way that I now understand it to be.”

Paul Marden is the Founder and Managing Director of Carbon Six Digital and the CEO of Rubber Cheese. He is an Umbraco Certified Master who likes to think outside the box, often coming up with creative technical solutions that clients didn’t know were possible. Paul oversees business development and technical delivery, specialising in Microsoft technologies including Umbraco CMS, ASP.NET, C#, WebApi, and SQL Server. He’s worked in the industry since 1999 and has vast experience of managing and delivering the technical architecture for both agencies and client side projects of all shapes and sizes. Paul is an advocate for solid project delivery and has a BCS Foundation Certificate in Agile.

What will you learn from this podcast?

• Rubber Cheese Visitor Attraction Websites Survey
• Survey Improvements
• Global Expansion (US focused survey supported by Convious) UK and EU versions of the survey will also be available
• Data Analysis and Engagement

The interview

Your hosts, Paul Marden and Oz Austwick

Paul Marden: Welcome, Oz. Welcome to Skip the Queue. This is one of our regular skip the queue episodes where the Rubber Cheese team take a little bit of time to talk about some of the work that we do.

And I think this episode we want to talk about the Rubber Cheese Visitor Attraction survey of websites that we’ve done for the last couple of years and what we’re planning to do in 2024. So that’s going to be a nice conversation for us to have. But we always start these episodes with a little conversation about places that we’ve been recently. So we spare each other the indignity of the icebreaker questions and talk about an attraction that we’ve been to recently. So why don’t you tell me, Oz, where have you been recently?

Oz Austwick: The most recent one was that my wife and I took the kids to Farleigh Hungerford Castle in Somerset. It’s English Heritage castle. Absolutely lovely. Nice and rural. I mean, it’s just beautiful, lovely ruined castle. There’s a fantastic chapel with mediaeval wall paintings. But, you know, I mean, if you like historic sites, if you like castles, it’s just a great one.

Paul Marden: Wow, that sounds good.

Oz Austwick: How about you, Paul? Where have you been recently?

Paul Marden: I have been to Portsmouth Historic Dockyard with my daughter. We’ve been a few times to Mary Rose and really enjoyed that. But this time went. We had an explorer pass, which meant we could go all over the dockyard. So went and saw lots of things. We saw the victory being refurbished and went on board. They’ve got a lovely old submarine on the other side of the harbour, which is a great place to see. But the bit that really captivated my attention whilst were there that made me think, “Oh, I’ve got to remember this one to talk about on the podcast” was they had some students there doing exhibition from the university and they were marine biologists and it was just such a lovely opportunity.

They had microscopes, they were talking all about plankton and different types of microorganisms that you find in the water. But my daughter’s ten years old and she loves going to museums because I drag them to them all the time. She loves learning about this sort of thing. What I liked about it was you had some 18, 19, 20 year olds who were exposing themselves to kind of a work experience type model, but talking to the kids and showing them. And the kids were learning as they were going. They got lots of opportunities to look through microscopes. They were doing some lovely drawing and art of the microscopic organisms that exist in the water.

And I just thought, I can talk about amazing jobs and what you can go and do in science and what you could do in different of roles in real life, but there’s something about somebody that’s only maybe ten years older than you telling you what they’re learning at the moment and what learning in a university context looks like and the cool stuff that you get to do. And as amazing as I am, I’m not quite as impressive as a 20 year old.

Oz Austwick: And modest too. 

Paul Marden: Amazing, dad. I say it all the time, but it’s not as compelling when I do it. So going to the museum and meeting these young people that are only a little bit older than Millie is and seeing what they do was just. It was such a lovely opportunity. And I know that work experience at museums is quite a controversial subject because I know a lot of people, it can be exclusionary for some people. The only way that you can get into a role is to work unpaid as a volunteer in a museum to get into a role later on.

But I just loved the idea that we had these students that were local telling the story of what the University of Portsmouth does in marine biology and how these two major institutions came together. And you could just see Millie’s eyes light up as she learned about this amazing stuff. It was brilliant. I loved it.

Oz Austwick: Awesome. Do you know what? I’ve not been down since. God, it can’t have been that long after the Mary Rose landed there. It’s a long time ago. Yeah. I was a much younger Oz at that point.

Paul Marden: I think you might notice that the Mary Rose looks substantially different maybe than the last time you went.

Oz Austwick: Do you know what? It was effectively an aircraft hanger full of water when I was there. So, yeah, definitely go down. And while we’re here, I just want to say. And I might check out their lovely new website, too.

Paul Marden: Why? Do you know somebody that might have worked on that?

Oz Austwick: Yeah. Funnily enough, I do. Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic agency, but let’s leave it there.

Paul Marden: Yes. So you’ve just turned up on the podcast and I’m talking to you and.

Oz Austwick: Yeah, nobody knows who I am, do they?

Paul Marden:  Yeah, exactly. So why don’t you, Oz, just take a few minutes to tell the audience who you are, what you do and why you’re here.

Oz Austwick: Yeah. Okay, so obviously I’m Oz. I am Head of Commercial at Rubber Cheese, also at Carbon Six, the sister agency. I originally came on board as kind of Head of Marketing and then when Kelly decided to move on, I’ve taken on some of her role. Obviously you’ve taken on some of her role as well. So my background is in social media, video first as a content writer in SEO. I’ve worked in technology, I’ve worked in healthcare. I’ve done all sorts of things over the years and I’ve always kind of found myself back in the world of digital wherever I try and go.

So for me, as somebody with a real passion for history and historical sites, there’s a story there, maybe for another episode. But I love the idea that I can work in an agency doing what I do well for venues and organisations that I really love. And I think that’s quite a special thing, to be honest.

Paul Marden: It’s a bit of a privilege, isn’t it, to be telling the stories of some of the places that we’re working with.

Oz Austwick: To be able to go for a meeting and sit and have coffee with somebody in the middle of one of the most glorious, historically significant buildings in the country. It’s just. Yeah.

Paul Marden: For a history buff like you, that. That’s pretty good.

Oz Austwick: It is, yeah. I’m all about the history.

Paul Marden: So we are today going to talk a little bit about the rubber cheese visitor attraction websites survey and we run that now for a couple of years and we just want to talk a little bit about some of the plans that we’ve got for the year ahead. But maybe let’s recap, what have we done in the last two years and a little bit about the survey in the last year?

Oz Austwick: Well, I mean, I guess there’ll be people listening who may not have come across the survey before. So I think from a broad context point of view, a few years ago, Kelly, who was the original founder of Rubber Cheese, was looking for industry standard data and it turned out that there wasn’t any. And at that point she was faced with two options to either just go, “Never mind, and walk away” or go, “Oh, well, I better do something about it”. And she thankfully took the latter route. So for the last two years, this is year three, Rubber Cheese has put together a survey and sent it out to as many visitor attractions as possible and asked them for their views and their objective figures as well, related to their digital presence.

So whether that’s the marketing side of the website, whether it’s e commerce, whether it’s ticketing, we want to know it all and then we combine it all together, do our best to analyse the data and publish a report. Obviously, the world of digital changes very rapidly, and obviously when you do something like this for the first time, you’re not going to get it quite right. So it’s evolved year on year and. Yeah, here we are. And it’s evolving again. Right?

Paul Marden: Yeah, exactly. So we had, you know, more than double the number of respondents last year compared to the first year. We had some amazing people that came together in London for a launch event in the first year, and then we had a great webinar last year launch.

Oz Austwick: I just want to interrupt briefly at this point. If you were at that launch event, then we have already met. I’ll leave it there.

Paul Marden: Yes, part of the Rubber Cheese family before you were even part of the family. Yeah. So we’ve had success in the first two years and we’ve used that report ourselves and we know lots of other people have used it as well. So we’ve had some lovely conversations with attractions who have used it as part of their pitch process to try to identify what good looks like and how to select other people to work with across their different digital presence. So be at the marketing site, the ticketing engine or whatever. But I think one of the things that you and I both said is that it’s a challenge, isn’t it? Because we can go looking for stories and then we can tell stories that exist in the data that we find.

But it’s not quite the same as when people ask us questions, because they tend to ask us questions we haven’t really thought of. And then we go looking at the data in a different light, don’t we, and find just amazing things that exist in the data.

Oz Austwick: It’s a constant surprise to me, both how different every attraction is and yet how they all have certain similarities. You can group them together and you can see these similarities in the data, but most sites, this is something we came across recently. We were going to a meeting with a fairly well known venue that’s got two or three different strands to what they do. So we spent a bit of time looking at which of those different strands they actually fit into, because it can be really hard to know how to improve your digital presence, how to make your marketing more effective, if you don’t even really know where you’re starting from and what the data in the survey allows anyone that wants to access it to do is to see where they fit.

And you may think that the country park is what you are and the house is second, or you may feel that, I don’t know, maybe the adventure playground or the science centre, whatever it is, whichever of those. You may think that you’re one, but the data says you’re the other and at that point it’s not a problem. But at least you need to understand, if you don’t have the information, you can’t make any decisions that are going to be helpful in the long term. And I think. Sorry, I know I’m talking a lot here, feel free to shut me up.

Paul Marden: That’s what we’re here for.

Oz Austwick: I think it’s a huge surprise to me that more people aren’t coming to us and asking us about this.

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely.

Oz Austwick: This survey isn’t really a cynical way for us to make money. The survey pretty much loses us money year on year, but it’s really valuable and I think every time we’ve done it, the conversation has been, “Do we need to do this again?” And the answer is, well, “Yeah, we do.” Because not only is it a valuable thing to do year on year, but to show how things have progressed and to show those evolving patterns.

I think it’s really important and it’s a phrase I use all the time, but the rising tide floats all the boats together and if we can put this information out there and it helps everyone improve, then great. You know, as an industry, those that are part of the industry, those like us that sell into the industry, we all get better at the same time and I think that’s a really important point.

Paul Marden: Absolutely. And there’s loads of things that we’re doing this year as we launch the survey to try to improve it so that, you know, you’ve just been talking about those attractions that are many different things and definitely in previous years we’ve made it really hard for those attractions that are many different things to be able to identify what they actually are. And that ended up being lots of people saying, I’m an other attraction and our biggest category was other, wasn’t it? So we want to try and make it much easier for people to identify themselves.

Oz Austwick: I hate Other as a category. I realise it’s entirely our fault, you know, if we don’t give the right categories and we give you the option to say Other, that’s what you’re going to tick, but it’s the least helpful thing we could possibly do because what does Other actually mean? So we’ve tried really hard to be more accurate in the choices that we offer in the survey this year.

Paul Marden: Yeah. So should we talk a little bit about what we’re going to do this year?

Oz Austwick: Yeah. Yeah, let’s do that.

Paul Marden:  First of all, we’re really fortunate this year that we’ve got two amazing sponsors that are supporting the survey and the work that we do. So we’ve been really lucky that our friends at Convious have come back again for the third year running to sponsor and support what we do. And they’re sponsoring the digital report and the launch webinar that we’ll have towards the end of the season and show everybody what the results are that we found. So we’re really appreciative of the work that the team at Convious have done. It’s not just a financial sponsorship, it is a real collaboration that they bring to the party and they really do help us a lot.

And then this year that we’ve also been joined by the team at Expian who are a ticketing platform and they are sponsoring our new Advisory Board, which we’ll talk a little bit more about later on. But we asked for people in the sector to come and join us, to advise us and in order to be able to make that a reality, Expian have sponsored that advisory board throughout the entire year. So that’s. It’s brilliant. It’s great that other people are seeing a real value in the thing that we’ve been doing for the last couple of years and want to sponsor us going ahead and making it better year on year. So thank you to both Convious and Expian for supporting us this year.

Oz Austwick: I think just at this point, again, I’d like to interject and maybe a little shamelessly say that there are still a couple of aspects of what we’re doing with the survey and the report that it would be really nice if we could maybe get some help from another sponsor. So if you’d like to maybe get involved, we’re thinking about an in person launch event like we did in year one. That’s a big deal to organise, to run, to fund. So if maybe that’s something you’d like to help with, get in touch, that’d be great.

Paul Marden: We are always happy for new people to join the party with us and help to support the good work that we will trying to do here. So, yeah, there’s more information about that on the website at rubbercheese.com/survey.

Oz Austwick: Survey yeah, I think it’s maybe worth mentioning the advisory board in a little bit more detail. I know that it’s something that you’ve been really keen on for quite a while now that we try and make it clear that this isn’t a digital agency that builds websites for the visitor attraction agency telling you how to have your website and that you should come to us. It’s actually an objective report of the digital landscape and that if we can make that more objective and more transparent by getting together a group of experts then we absolutely should.

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. We’ve got an amazing group of people that have agreed to join us. We have more people asking to join than we have the capacity to be able to include in the board, which is humbling in and of itself. And those people who offered, who aren’t part of the board this year. That doesn’t mean to say we don’t appreciate you and we’ll be really keen to find other ways in which those people can help us going forwards.

But yeah, we’re looking for the board to kind of provide advice and guidance help us. You know, going back to what you were saying a minute ago about people helping us to identify what’s important to the sector so that we then go and follow the data, we ask the right questions, we look deeply into the data, we understand where the interesting stories are and then reflect that back to the sector as a whole in the final report. That’s so much easier when we’ve got a board of people that are advising us what matters to the heads of digital of the attractions around the country. So yeah, we’ve also got some really helpful advisors from different sector support organisations. So suppliers like ourselves who know what the larger sector are talking about in different areas.

And those people as well will be helping us to understand what are the right questions to ask. How should we ask them? They’ll also be helping us with testing the survey before it goes out into the wild and supporting us with understanding what the answers are at the end of it and what they think are interesting. So I’m really excited about the Advisory Board and totally appreciative of everybody volunteering their time to join that board and giving us that advice. So that’s a really exciting thing for us to be doing this year and totally appreciate the work of Expian to sponsor that.

Oz Austwick: Absolutely, yeah. Couldn’t agree more.

Paul Marden: So there’s some other things that we’re going to do, aren’t there, in terms of trying to improve things?

Oz Austwick: We’ve got some goals. Are they ambitious? I don’t think they’re that ambitious, to be honest. But, yeah, I mean, obviously the most important thing when doing something like this and repeating it on annual basis is that we want to make it more useful. We want to make the data more valuable to the people that need it. So we’ve spent a lot of time going through the previous survey and looking at what we asked and what we got in response to those questions, whether we got the information we thought we would and whether that information is even of any help to any. I think we’ve cut it down fairly significantly this year, I think.

Paul Marden: Yeah, we’ve taken a red pen and scored through quite a lot of the questions, haven’t we?

Oz Austwick: Yeah. I wonder if perhaps maybe people were getting a little bit tired of the survey by the time they got towards the end, because it was really long and it’s still quite long, but I think there’s very little in it that isn’t really, or at least to me, feels really valuable to be able to say, “This is where I am. And if I can compare where I am to the wider industry around me, that would be a helpful thing to be able to do.” And I think pretty much every question does that. We’re hopefully going to grow the sample size because year one to year two was a really significant step up. If we get the same size step up or even the same percentage step up, I mean, that would be absolutely incredible. I’m not sure we will, but I think.

I think we need to keep growing it. We need to get it to more people and make the data in itself more relevant. Because obviously, if you’ve got a tiny sample size, it’s really difficult to draw any conclusions from that data. But if you’ve got a huge sample size, then you can say that the averages across this are probably relevant. And that’s information that I should know.

Paul Marden: I talk about that a lot, don’t I, when I’m slicing and dicing the data that, you know, sometimes it can be hard to draw conclusions because there’s insufficient data there and it could easily be chance that gives the answers that you get.

Oz Austwick: Well, absolutely. And it’s so hard to look at it and think, is that cause or effect? You know, we can say that there’s a pattern or is it just fluke? 

Paul Marden: Exactly. I think some of the questions, some of the data is illustrative of what the wider sector looks like. So when people answer questions about the content management system that they use by far the most popular one was WordPress. I’m willing to bet good money that is fairly illustrative of the outside world.

Oz Austwick: Yes.

Paul Marden: Yeah. You know, WordPress is the hands down most popular content management system on the web, so it’s not. It’s hardly surprising that it is then the most commonly used one in attractions. But some of our numbers around ticketing systems, e commerce systems and some of the conversion rate information as well, I would not be surprised if that is being skewed because the sample size isn’t necessarily big enough. So the more people that join, every person that is submitting their data is making a substantial difference to the quality of the answers that we give afterwards. And I also think that kind of the intersectionality of stuff. So when you’re talking about historic houses that have got animal based attraction at the same place. Yeah.

When you start to zero in on those smaller sample size or smaller groups, they get so small that it’s very hard to draw any conclusions. If we can make the sample size bigger, then those intersectional groups will still be fairly small. If there’s a Venn diagram, there’s not a lot of overlap in some of these groups and they will be pretty small groups, but you’ll still get some interesting answers rather than a sample size of one, which some of the smaller groups do drill down to that at the moment. So the more people, the better. And the more diverse types of attractions that fill in, the better.

Oz Austwick: Yeah. I think it’s probably worth recognising that some of the groups that people fall into are going to be really small.

Paul Marden: Yes.

Oz Austwick: I mean, how many safari parks are there in the UK, for example? It’s not a lot. And if only one safari park fills in the survey. So if there’s a call to action from this bit, it’s like, please fill it in.

Paul Marden: What else are we going to do? So we talked about simplifying the survey. We want to increase the sample size. We wanted to introduce some new themes as well this year.

Oz Austwick: Yes. The survey is designed to represent the digital landscape of the visitor attraction industry in the UK, but obviously there are things happening in the digital world that we’ve not spoken about in the survey. For example, AI, there’s a big. A big amount of development. There’s a lot of AI stories hitting the news. People are using it for all sorts of things. We’ve never asked any questions about it at all. Does anybody use it? Is it relevant? What’s going on out there? We don’t know. So we’re going to be asking a little bit about that. And the other main theme that we’ve not really looked into before that we’re going to be asking a little bit more about is sustainability. It’s become really clear over the last sort of six months or so, looking at the conversations we’ve had with venues.

Everybody’s doing stuff, not everybody’s doing the same stuff, not everybody’s doing the right stuff, but everybody’s doing something. And it would be really nice to know what’s standard. And obviously there’s stuff on site that you can do at the attraction itself, but there’s things you can do around the website and the hosting and the way that your digital presence works. So we’re going to be asking a little bit about that as well.

Paul Marden: I think in every conversation I’ve ever had about digital sustainability, I learn a little bit more about the subject. And I can remember there was an amazing speaker at the Umbraco conference a couple of years ago that spoke, who’s now a friend of mine, and he just told some amazing stories about the impact of digital on CO2 emissions. And it was, you know, I used to work in an airline. It was fairly clear to see that airlines are fairly polluting. You can see it coming out the back of the plane. But I don’t think I’d ever really seriously thought about digital technology being a major contributor to climate change in the way that I now understand it to be. So, finding out what other people are doing, we’re willing to bet that quite a lot of attractions will have a sustainability plan.

Fewer will have done any sort of benchmarking of their digital platform, and fewer, again, still will have done anything to actually reduce their CO2 emissions. But that’s just instinct. I’m really interested to understand what the actual numbers are at the end of this, because once we start measuring it, we can start improving things as an industry.

Oz Austwick: I think it’s fascinating, and that goes back to exactly what Polly was talking about when you interviewed her two episodes ago I think.

Paul Marden: Something like that.

Oz Austwick: About the fact that, you know, we all start from somewhere and you can look at this and think, oh, I’m actually not doing a great job, but you’ve got to be honest about it because you’ve got to know where you are. You know, everything that comes to us is completely anonymised. We don’t give out anybody’s data. We give out, you know, the raw data in a way that means that nobody can track anybody else. So you nothing that you say is going to put, you know, anything that you’re maybe a little bit unhappy out there. But if doing this survey forces you to think about what you’re doing and look at it and think, actually, maybe I do need to do this, then brilliant. You know what an amazing achievement that will be.

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. So we want to enable people to give better answers. So we’re going to reduce the number of category type questions that we’ve got and drill down to real numbers. We’ll get better understanding of conversion rates. And there was some other standardisation that we wanted to do, wasn’t there?

Oz Austwick: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we noticed that. And again, it’s going back to this, trying to reduce the fact that you can just tick other when we’re trying to look at what sort of attraction are you when you’re filling in the survey. In fairness, we’ve got a pretty good idea of the different attractions there are out there and we created a fairly good list, but we still got quite a lot of Others. So were kind of looking at how we can improve that list and we thought, well, why not standardise it with a list that’s already out there? And it turns out that VisitBritain has a perfectly good list, which is really quite comprehensive.

So we’re using their list for attraction type rather than ours because it allows us to standardise the data a little bit more and hopefully people will already know where they fit. But I think we’ve also allowed people to tick more than one option this time, which previously we didn’t. If you were a historic home that also had a safari park or an adventure playground or something, you’d have to pick which of those am I?

And obviously, you know, for the big attractions around the country and for an awful lot of the smaller ones, we would look at them and go, “Oh, they’ve ticked that. That’s odd. I wonder why they’ve done that.” Whereas now you’re able to say, “Actually, I’m three different things.” And that’s great, because again, it allows us to be a little bit more granular. And if it turns out that maybe there are other attractions that have the same breakdown of what they do as you, that will become clear, hopefully.

Paul Marden: So one of the big areas that we want to, we’re excited to grow into is that we’ll be having a US focused survey for the first time, supported by our friends at Convious.

Oz Austwick: Lots of Zs instead of Ss in that one.

Paul Marden: Yes, we’ve had to do some localisation and that will be published alongside the UK version of the survey. And we’ll have a US report and a UK report that we’ll be launching at the end, thanks to our friends at Convious. But we’ll also have versions of the survey localised for attractions in the EU, because there was actually, last year, we got quite a number of european attractions submitting and we think that can improve when the survey tool itself is focused on the EU and is, you know, the numbers that we’ve got in the survey are denominated in euros rather than in pounds. So, yeah, that’s increasing. The number of international responses, especially in North America, is super important for us this year.

Oz Austwick: Yeah. And I think it’s worth saying that it’s quite a potentially valuable thing to do as well, because if we can look at the surveys and say that, weirdly, the UK sites tend to rate here, but us sites rate here for something, why is that? What do they do differently in the US that allows them to be more successful in this instance than we in the UK are here? You know, with any luck, either, we’ll be able to say no. Globally, this is all pretty much on a par. So you can see where you set in the world, rather than just in, say, Shropshire. But you could also say, right, well, these guys are doing better. Let’s look at what they’re doing and try and emulate that and improve what we’re doing to bring it in line with what we know is possible.

Paul Marden: So lots to change, lots of improvements that we’re making. Pretty big ambitions to grow the survey in a number of different ways, but not in the number of questions that are there. So hopefully, it will take less effort for people to submit their responses this time and the survey will be launched around the time that this episode comes out. So you’ll be able to go onto rubbercheese.com/survey and follow the links and submit your data, which is pretty exciting for us. We’ll be sat there watching the responses rolling in. I got very excited last year, watching people respond.

Oz Austwick: I can’t wait, genuinely. I know that sounded sarcastic, didn’t it? It wasn’t supposed to. I genuinely. I’m quite excited about this. Yeah.

Paul Marden: You might need to work on your sincerity. There’s an area of improvement there are.

Oz Austwick: Recording this at the end of the afternoon on a Friday, so, you know, this is as good as you’re gonna get, I’m afraid.

Paul Marden: So. We’re really keen for people to go onto the website and fill in the survey, but there’s other things that you want as well, isn’t there, Oz?

Oz Austwick: Well, for me, I want people to talk to us. I want people to talk about the survey. I want them to talk about last year’s survey and the rapport. I want people to come along and say, “Look, it’d be really interesting to know where I sit it in this. This is our attraction. This is what we think. Is it true?” Get in touch, give us a shout, let’s have a chat. You know, let’s have an excuse to get together with a coffee and a laptop and look at some spreadsheets. But, you know, if there’s something that you want to see from the survey moving forwards, because I think it’s probably safe to say this isn’t going to be the last one we do.

Then again, let us know if there’s things that we aren’t talking about and you’ve got a better viewpoint and you can see that there’s a gap in what we’re asking. Please let us know because we can’t do this by ourselves and we’re not really doing it for ourselves. So the more people talk to us, the better, really.

Paul Marden: So if you want to talk to us, all the usual social channels that we normally talk about, but also send us email at survey@rubbercheese.com. Both Oz and I will get that. And really keen to spark the conversations and see where it goes from there.

Oz Austwick: Yeah. And if we bump into each other at an event or you see me, give me a shout, I’ll buy you a coffee. I mean on him, obviously.

Paul Marden: Of course. So your episode number one on skip the queue, how was it for you?

Oz Austwick: That was all right, actually, wasn’t it? Yeah. Okay. I mean, hello. Let’s, let’s see. Well, I enjoyed it.

Paul Marden: I’ve enjoyed it. Not quite the same as talking to Kelly, but not the same. Not better or worse, just different.

Oz Austwick: I’ll take that as a compliment.

Paul Marden: You take it however you like, mate.

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.

Author:

Kelly Molson Managing Director

Host of the popular Skip the Queue Podcast, for people working in or working with visitor attractions, she regularly delivers workshops and presentations on the sector at various national conferences and universities including The Visitor Attractions Conference, ASVA and Anglia Ruskin University.

Read more about me