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What do Merlin get out of The Sun free ticket offer?

A

Altonadvocate1

TS Member
Merlin!

We've all had a laugh at their legendary love of the green stuff.

Reduced opening hours, SBNO attractions, closed off peak days, virtually non existent park entertainment budgets, rising prices, etc.

But then amongst all of that, we have The Sun free ticket offer.

Just buy a few copies of the aforementioned rag, tick the box to solemnly swear that you "get it every day", enclose a stamped, self addressed envelope and within a couple of weeks you have 2 free tickets to Alton Towers, Legoland, Chessington, Thorpe Park, or one of numerous midway attractions worth up to a hundred quid. This isn't small fry either... They literally give away millions of tickets.

What do our famously frugal friends (alliteration, i love it) at Merlin get out of this?

The best I could come up with is.

1. Publicity.

2. People are disappointed with the dates they get so buy tickets anyway.

3. People get 2 free tickets then come in a much larger group, most of them paying.

4. People spend lots of money on park when they are there.

5. There is a high uptake on the discounted resort stays that come with the free tickets.

Now I don't "get it every day" (chance would be a fine thing), but it got me thinking...

This promotion must cost them revenue as well, for example those who would have bought a ticket anyway, had the free ones not been available.

PBB don't give away millions of tickets.
Flamingo Land don't give away millions of tickets.
Disney don't give away millions of tickets.

So assuming there is some huge revenue stream, that I am missing here, it raises the question, why don't other major theme park groups do it?

As far as I know, it's just Merlin, certainly on this huge scale.

Does anybody know?
 
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...and you don't even send a SAE anymore!
Massive extra sales of food, drink, tat, express parking, beer, fasttrack etc.
Standard overheads are massive, the park has to pay all the staffing etc whatever the punter numbers on the park.
Done them every year, even last year when I had a season pass.
And it was done for many years before Merlin, they just continued it.
 
Advertising is the main one.

Let's assume that Merlin don't pay The Sun anything for the advertising. The Sun gets people buyin multiple copies to collect tokens. Merlin get several days worth of advertising.

A full page advert in The Sun is around £55,000 so assuming a ticket is worth around £26 to Merlin (as that is the revenue they would get from a 2for1), that's 2115 tickets they can give away for the same cost as a full page advert. Given they actually get in the paper for several days while the tokens are printed and sometimes on the front page, it's going to be several pages worth of "free" advertising.


Then as you say those guests with the free tickets are going to spend something on park, food, drink, games and ride photos all make them some money.
 
Me and my partner did the free sun tickets about 5 years running and we used to do them from her parents house too so we went twice

Each time we did them we'd use express parking plus buy fast tracks both of which we wouldn't normally buy
 
I would say a lot of people who have sun free tickets probably spend more on park than someone who's paid for a ticket, as you feel you have got in for free.

Wherever that's express parking, fastrack, bigger meal, photos, merchandise, etc.

And giving free tickets doesn't really cost Merlin anything, as they have got to pay the staff if they have 10 guests or 10,000 guests on park.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 
djtruefitt said:
And giving free tickets doesn't really cost Merlin anything, as they have got to pay the staff if they have 10 guests or 10,000 guests on park
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Fairly true but there is a point where they can cut staffing down when it is quieter. Not running fast track merge points. Only running one train. Cutting down on the number of food outlets or fewer cashiers at the larger ones.
So I would say probably 10-5,000 guests is one set of costs then 5,000 plus is another etc. Or something like that.
 
a search on ebay for alton towers tickets, and i would say 90% of them are sun free tickets, so thats revenue towers are loosing
 
bluesonichd said:
a search on ebay for alton towers tickets, and i would say 90% of them are sun free tickets, so thats revenue towers are loosing
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Nope, the tickets wouldn't bring revenue to AT if they were used by the person who actually applied for them. Doesn't matter if they are sold on eBay or just used by the applicant, they are still free tickets.

Also as others said, if people get the tickets for a low price they might be more likely to pay for food, games, photos and other items.
 
jon81uk said:
Nope, the tickets wouldn't bring revenue to AT if they were used by the person who actually applied for them. Doesn't matter if they are sold on eBay or just used by the applicant, they are still free tickets.

Also as others said, if people get the tickets for a low price they might be more likely to pay for food, games, photos and other items.
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Yes, as if they were not for sale on eBay these people would have more like brought official tickets from Towers
 
It would be interesting to know how many people use The Sun tickets. I know many people that either sell tickets, or (like myself) don't use them or forget about them, as the date you get isn't always ideal.

The Sun 50% hotel offer also runs alongside the tickets, so I imagine this is also another perk for Towers.

We know this works for them as, well, they still run it each year!
 
I get them every year, and use them every year.
Without fail.
Always one of the best days of the year, sometimes stop over, Express parking, small queuejump ticket, special picnic under the trees.
Must be twenty years now, anyone know the actual year it started?
 
rob666 said:
I get them every year, and use them every year.
Without fail.
Always one of the best days of the year, sometimes stop over, Express parking, small queuejump ticket, special picnic under the trees.
Must be twenty years now, anyone know the actual year it started?
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They've have definitely been going since 1994/1995, although the format in which readers send them off an receive a date has only been introduced in the past decade. I remember when your first glimpse at what was new came with a Sun pullout.
 
Plastic Person said:
They've have definitely been going since 1994/1995, although the format in which readers send them off an receive a date has only been introduced in the past decade. I remember when your first glimpse at what was new came with a Sun pullout.
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Before that even. I remember collecting tokens an selotaping them to the paper and that was the entry ticket. Would have been around 1986/7
#SoOld :(
 
It's called a contra-deal.

People will buy the newspaper to get free tickets (win for the newspaper), and likewise Towers get's massive exposure. It also has a word of mouth benefit - people talk about it, generating more interest.

It was the same thing when collecting tokens from cereal boxes, or from crisp packets, pop bottles etc etc.

The loss to the park is very minimal. For starters, the marketing department will have a good idea of how many people are likely to use free tickets, not everyone will apply, not everyone who gets them will go. Also, if the price of a ticket is £25 (just for example) but they don't go "well it's 10,000 free tickets x £25" - no, the £25 ticket allows a hefty margin of profit. Towers will know on an average day what the cost per guest is, it could be £5 say. So they will work it out as 10,000 free tickets x£5 which would be £50,000 in advertising.

They have a marketing budget, so it's all accounted for in one way or another.

Also, the amount of free tickets given away compared the volume of annual visitors is likely quite small.

Another similar situation - the reason everyone goes nuts for the 2-for-1 vouchers is purely down to perceived value, but it's a gimmick. Towers just simply double the ticket price and advertise that as the "gate price", which no one in their right mind would pay for. But it creates desirable vouchers, which again allows them to do contra-deals with other companies. WH Smith's was always a good place to get 2-for-1's.

Lastly, I very much doubt income from entry tickets amount to much compared to how much a guest will spend on the park. The food & beverage alone has massive margins.
 
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