True Brit
Martin Barratt shares insight on the UK industry and his goals as incoming chief executive of BALPPA
by Juliana Gilling
“I’M SO EXCITED TO BE GETTING THE JOB. I have to pinch myself sometimes when I’m visiting attractions—and people around me are happy and having a good time—to remember that it’s actually work,” says Martin Barratt, who takes over as BALPPA’s new chief executive next year, succeeding Colin Dawson.
It’s a far cry from Barratt’s first gig as a 12-year-old: tearing tickets for Pets’ Corner at Woburn Abbey. Nearly 40 years later his résumé reads like a Who’s Who of European parks and attractions, including stints at Europa- Park and Efteling, and management roles at Chessington World of Adventures and Alton Towers. In the mid-1990s he joined the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds, UK, as operations director before spearheading a factory tour for Wedgwood.
He moved to Merlin Entertainments Group in 1999, where he handled contracts and consultancy and directed operations for the Dungeons and parks. After a management buyout in 2004, Barratt pursued independent consultancy work advising on projects from Dubai to Legoland Windsor, Gardaland, and Historic Scotland. He is also a director at Vision XS.
FUNWORLD caught up with Barratt soon after the July 1 announcement that he will be taking over as chief executive May 1, 2010.
How is 2009 shaping up for you?
I’m having a great year. The consultancy work I’ve been doing over the past five years is all about helping businesses get more value out of what they do, either by saving money, or by making more, and that’s exactly the right angle in this economic environment.
 Attractions are still operating, to some extent, under old business models. Family tickets are a good case in point. If I ask operators, “Why have you got a family ticket?” most will say, “Families ask for them when they come.” Yet there’s nothing to say that if they didn’t have a family ticket, those people wouldn’t come anyway.
One of the attractions I’ve advised, BeWILDerwood, is all about families. So having a family ticket is like saying “You’ve attracted your primary market and you’re giving them back money they didn’t even expect to get.” With BeWILDerwood, they stopped selling [discounted] one-day family tickets and countered negative comments by pointing out, “Well, we have an annual family ticket.” They’ve now increased annual pass sales enormously, which means they also have people returning as well.
Your career has mirrored the trajectory of the UK attractions industry. What changes have you seen?
One is that the government decided it should build its own attractions as direct competition to the existing commercial operators, and that’s had a huge impact on the market. Because they’re not viable, the sites are subsidized by local government and local people, but they’re competing with commercial attractions. I can’t think of any other industry where the government would set out to systematically provide extra competition on unfair grounds; it’s ludicrous. I’m very interested in working with BALPPA to try and control that.
The other big issue is we don’t have a level playing field in Europe. Most of our European competitors have much lower prices for entry because they have better VAT rates—5 or 6 percent. I’m certain that if we were to get the government to lower the VAT rate, the extra business we would create by being more competitive would more than compensate them for the taxes they would lose.
Colin’s been pushing our causes strongly and getting great results, and I want to build on his success. I’d like to see BALPPA members and nonmembers exchanging information, particularly where they’re not competing. There’s a real opportunity to improve standards across the industry by sharing information and benchmarking.
Where is the UK market’s weakest point?
The lack of understanding among our customers about what is a good attraction and what is a bad one. We’re letting our customers down by not educating them enough about what they should be looking for in terms of quality and safety. BALPPA—and Adrian Mahon especially—is working to standardize health and safety certification and documentation within the industry, but we’re getting opposition from some fairground operators who want standards to be lower than we do. That’s very divisive.
People have a right when they go to an attraction to have competent operators looking after them in the right way, and we need to define who those operators are. The BALPPA insignia has the potential to be a guarantee of quality.
How are businesses handling the economic downturn?
At the moment, most operators are having a better time than last year. 2008 was appalling—it was an early Easter, and the rain affected people badly. In industry surveys, people are saying, “We’re 10 to 20 percent up on last year.” So companies are feeling good, but they ought to be cautious because the real effects of the downturn haven’t hit yet.
People haven’t got as much money as they had, and if the pound gets stronger, we could see less inbound tourism and people going abroad again. Things could change quickly. Attractions should be thinking that the end of the year may not be as good as the start, and [they should think about] having some contingency.
For attractions that are doing well, it’s important to invest wisely in the future, which means researching their markets. Consumers are not always looking for innovation; they’re looking for increases in quality and reasons to revisit.
Consolidation has reshaped the parks industry in Europe. How will the recession change investors’ plans?
In the present climate, valuations of businesses have gone down. I think a lot of venture capitalists will wait until the multipliers on EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) give them the exit they were after. There will be an upturn after this recession, and when that happens some people will be tempted to float.
Juliana Gilling is a specialist attractions journalist. E-mail: julianagilling@gmail.com.
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