A private equity-backed indoor entertainment center engaged RML to strengthen revenue capture ahead of continued expansion and franchising, after pricing failed to keep pace with rising costs and local market dynamics. RML transformed a uniform pricing model into a scalable, customer-backed pricing architecture, with recommendations projected to deliver +12% revenue growth, beating the 10% target, while keeping attrition below 5%.
The Situation
A premium experience with pricing that hadn’t kept pace
The private equity-backed indoor entertainment center had built a differentiated, premium family experience across 44 locations and was preparing to open another 16 locations by year-end. With approximately $100 million in revenue and further expansion and franchising under consideration, leadership was focused on building a more scalable commercial model capable of supporting the next stage of growth.
Historically, growth had been driven by new locations, customer experience, and demand generation, while pricing remained largely consistent across markets. As the footprint expanded into markets with different income levels, competitive intensity, and demand patterns, leadership recognized that a uniform pricing model would become increasingly difficult to sustain.
General admission remained the core traffic driver, while parties offered higher-value bookings and additional food, beverage, and group-spend opportunities. With a 10% top-line growth target, the client needed a more deliberate pricing strategy that could capture greater value, protect demand, and scale across future locations.
The Challenge
A pricing model misaligned with customer value
Prices remained mostly flat since 2023 as the business prioritized demand protection. Meanwhile, food, labor, and operating costs continued to rise, putting pressure on margins at a time when stronger cash flow was needed to fund the next phase of growth.
At the same time, a largely uniform pricing model did not reflect meaningful differences in market strength, competitive intensity, or customer willingness to pay across locations. As a result, leadership lacked a clear view of where pricing was protecting demand versus where it was leaving revenue and margin on the table.
The party business compounded the challenge. Party rooms represented fixed capacity that the business carried regardless of utilization, yet weekday slots were chronically underbooked. The revenue drag was visible, but the root cause was not – it was unclear whether underperformance reflected a pricing problem, a package design problem, a food bundling problem, or simply a customer awareness gap.
Figure 1: Competitive benchmarking by location
Portfolio locations fell into three distinct pricing situations: Prime Markets, Battlefields, and Growth Engines, each requiring a different approach. A single uniform price point was never going to work across all three, as shown here for a representative subset of the client’s ~44-location portfolio.
The RML Approach
Diagnose, quantify, and rebuild, in that order
Revenue Management Labs organized the engagement across three interdependent phases. Each phase was designed to feed the next, ensuring that any pricing change was grounded in real customer and market data before it was ever rolled out.
PHASE 1
Diagnose the current state
Assess current performance, customer segments, competitive pricing, and market dynamics.
PHASE 2
Quantify customer value
Use discrete choice research to determine what customers were actually willing to pay for.
PHASE 3
Redesign & stress-test
Rebuild the pricing architecture and stress-test it through financial modeling before rollout.
Phase 1: Find where value was being left on the table
RML began by assessing the existing pricing model across general admission and birthday parties. The team reviewed transaction data, customer segments, competitive pricing, and local market characteristics to understand how customer behavior and commercial performance varied across the footprint.
The analysis revealed that the current architecture was not fully aligned with how customers used the experience. Nearly half of general admission customers purchased the shortest-duration pass despite research indicating a strong preference for longer visits, while party demand and spend varied materially by guest count and day of week.
The diagnostic also highlighted underused weekday party capacity, meaningful differences in competitive intensity across markets, and opportunities to increase food and beverage attachment. Together, these findings identified where pricing was protecting volume and where it was leaving revenue and margin on the table.
Figure 2: Customer preference share by venue attribute
Facility safety and price together accounted for more than half of what drove customer preference, far outweighing amenity-level details like on-site dining, loyalty rewards, and membership options.
Phase 2: Determine willingness to pay
RML conducted consumer research to identify the attributes that mattered most and quantify customer trade-offs across price, visit duration, day of week, party size, and food bundling. Facility safety and price emerged as the most important considerations, while longer visits, weekend access, larger party formats, and bundled food and beverages created additional opportunities to increase customer value.
For adult admission, the research identified a viable pricing range between $16.00 and $25.69, with an optimal price point of $20.56 (Figure 3). These thresholds gave the team a defensible foundation for pricing decisions—balancing revenue capture with demand risk and replacing intuition with evidence.
Phase 3: Rebuild the architecture and stress-test before rollout
These findings, anchored around a $20.56 optimal price point, shaped a redesigned architecture across both revenue streams. General admission moved to market-tiered pricing, day-of-week differentiation, and revised pass durations anchored around the visit experience customers valued most.
Party pricing was restructured around day of week, group size, and food bundling tiers, converting a flat offer into a tiered structure designed to capture customer value and address chronic weekday underutilization.
The recommendations were stress-tested through financial modeling to estimate revenue upside, demand sensitivity, and volume risk before implementation, turning a one-time pricing exercise into a repeatable framework.
Figure 3: Willingness-to-Pay (WTP) Analysis
The result
+12% projected revenue growth from a customer-driven pricing architecture
The redesigned pricing architecture was projected to deliver 12% overall revenue growth, exceeding client’s 10% top-line target. General admission recommendations contributed an estimated 9% revenue uplift, while the redesigned party structure generated approximately 21% growth, with expected customer attrition remaining below 5%.
Beyond the immediate financial impact, the engagement gave the client a repeatable pricing model grounded in customer value, market conditions, and demand patterns. The new architecture created a scalable foundation for optimizing existing locations, supporting future openings, and enabling more consistent pricing decisions across the expanding footprint.
The projected 12% revenue uplift came from redesigning the pricing architecture around how customers valued the experience, not from pushing a uniform pricing lever harder.
Other case study examples include New Premium Price Position Drives Revenue Growth and Bid Price Optimization for an Industrial Manufacturer.
