Craig’s Cruisers, a chain of four family entertainment centers based in Grand Rapids, Mich., is perfecting the art of ignoring conventional wisdom when it comes to hosting birthday parties. Instead of offering a variety of birthday party options to fit different budgets, the flagship park recently switched to a one-plan-fits-all mentality. And staff decided it would be better off hosting fewer parties every day.

All of this might make sense if Craig’s Cruisers was struggling to book birthday parties. But in fact, it has plenty of birthday business. The system wasn’t broken, but Craig’s Cruisers fixed it anyway, says Brooke Messing, director of marketing and public relations.

“We used to do a pretty typical birthday party,” she says. “We had three options: you could have food and tokens, up to food and tokens and activities, and pretty much everything that is in the park.” Prices ranged from $8.95 a child to $12.95 a child, with an eight-child minimum.

The party packages were popular. The Grand Rapids location averaged 60 to 75 birthday parties a week and might cram in 30 parties or more on a busy Saturday, Messing says. “We had tremendous success,” she says. “But we sat back and thought, ‘This is the kid’s birthday, and we want them to have the best experience possible and leave here knowing that they had a wonderful day.’”

So the owners started investigating and went to several seminars on hosting spectacular and efficient birthday parties. Then they came back and began reinventing their party package.

“It used to be they would arrive and we would show them to the room and the mom coordinated things,” Messing says. “Now, every party has a dedicated host or hostess, and it is that person’s job to run the party and take charge of the kids and schedule their laser tag game and their go-kart rides and all that. It was stressful for the mom to have to order the pizza and get to laser tag on time and pack up the kid’s presents and get out of the room at the right time.

“Now the host walks the kids around and keeps an eye on the schedule and says, ‘Okay, in five minutes your laser tag game is coming; let’s go get the equipment on.’ And the mom has a much more stress-free time and enjoys the event,” she says.

Two or three days prior to the party, Messing explains, the assigned host will call the birthday child and discuss the child’s interests, likes, and dislikes. From that conversation, the host will mold the party’s activities to suit the child “If Pin the Tail on the Donkey is their favorite game, that’s what we create for them to play, or crafts, or making paper airplanes and having an airplane-throwing contest. We have a book of different games and crafts that the host or hostess can go through and choose from, depending on what they learned from the birthday child,” Messing says.

With the changes, Craig’s Cruisers raised its price to $14.95 per child and set a 10-child minimum. Although the reinvented birthday parties cost $2 more per child, many families are still happy to pay for their child’s special day. “Before, you always had to buy the cake and the balloons separately. It could end up more than $14.95. Now, you get the birthday cake, balloon bouquet, activities, soft drinks, and place settings, and you get everything for one price,” Messing says. Afterwards, the child is mailed a bag of goodies and a thank you card from Cruiser, the FEC’s mascot.

After redesigning the birthday package, Messing says that test runs were performed to compare customer satisfaction for the new party package with customer satisfaction for the traditional package. “[All the families] had the same opinion. ‘It’s slightly more, but you get much more for the money,’” Messing says.

Periodically, Craig’s Cruisers offered both the new and old packages to customers to bridge the transition. However, with the success and increased popularity of the new party packages, the company opted to switch entirely over to the new format in the middle of this past summer.

“They say that when you make a change in birthday parties like we made, your numbers will go down and then increase, and we saw that,” Messing says. “We’ve discovered that our customer service is much better and the quality of the product is increased. We still have about the same number of people, but we have fewer parties, so we are able to focus more on each party and the birthday child and make each kid feel special.”
—Frank Elliott