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Most attractions have one or two months that carry the year. A holiday light show, a peak season, a signature festival. The rest of the calendar is where the margin gets made or can break.
For July's Make More Money webinar, we brought together two operators who have spent years turning quiet months into revenue. Kevin Thurman is Director of Special Events at Boar's Head Resort in Charlottesville, a 175-room AAA Four Diamond property owned by the University of Virginia Foundation, where he runs Winter Wander, a 14-scene outdoor light show that draws about 50,000 people a year. Chris Morehead is Director of Business Development at Newfields in Indianapolis, a 152-acre cultural campus whose Winter Lights program brings roughly 150,000 people outdoors in the dead of an Indiana winter.
One is a for-profit resort with a GOP number to hit. The other is a 501(c)(3) with a mission statement at the center of every decision. They arrived at nearly identical playbooks. Here are five things worth stealing.
"We had 200 people coming out a night at most, on Friday nights in late January, and we're like, yep, we're losing money on this, it's not driving hotel rooms," Kevin said of Boar's Head's attempt to run Winter Wander through the end of January.
They killed it. Winter Wander now closes the weekend after New Year's. But shutting it down did something useful: it gave January back as open inventory, and January was still a need month.
So the team researched what else could work in that slot and landed on a murder mystery dinner produced with the Murder Mystery Company. The first event sold out in 11 days at just over 200 guests. Demand was clearly underpriced, so tickets moved from $90 a person to $115, and reserved VIP tables of eight got added for groups that did not want general admission seating. This coming year they are testing the same show three times in one weekend: Friday night, Saturday night, and a Sunday matinee aimed at drive-market guests from Richmond and D.C. who want the experience without the hotel stay.
The pattern matters more than the murder mystery. A failed event is not a wasted year. It is a cleared date plus a much sharper brief for what should go there instead.
Kevin tried moving that same winning January format to Labor Day weekend, with an 80s theme, on a weekend that also needed help. "We sold maybe two-thirds of the tickets, and it took a heavy marketing spend to get to that point," he said. Labor Day now runs a drone show with free admission and a $40 parking pass, which is its second year and working.
Chris has the museum-scale version of the same story. Newfields spent years trying to connect to the Indy 500, including a concept-car exhibition called Dream Cars in his first year. "We really thought it was going to connect with that race audience, and it just did not quite connect as we had hoped."
What did connect was smaller and stranger. Newfields has a 530-person theater. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway does not. So when a racing film or documentary comes out, Newfields hosts the screening. Those screenings turned into private event bookings from race families and companies, which is now a reliable line on the May calendar.
"If you're hitting it out of the park every single time, I challenge you to say you're not actually pushing hard enough," Chris said. Both operators talked about failure as a budget line rather than an embarrassment. The discipline is in changing one thing at a time so you can actually read the result.
Newfields runs value, non-peak, and peak days, then layers dynamic pricing on top so prices tick up as inventory sells down. "If you are somebody that wants that cheapest ticket and you want the best price out there, get your ticket in advance," Chris said. "But if you're someone that doesn't care and is agnostic about that, and you just want access to it on the day of, we've got an option for you, too."
Boar's Head went the same direction from the other side. Winter Wander expanded from three value nights to seven this year, deliberately widening the affordability tier, while pushing premium harder at the same time.
Access sits inside the pricing model rather than beside it. Newfields keeps 5 to 10 percent of total visitation either free or discounted across every program, including Winter Lights, through Indiana's Access Pass program ($5 admission for anyone on a public benefit) and free ticket distribution through community partners. Boar's Head works with Big Brothers Big Sisters, where the big buys a ticket and the little gets in free, and donates to six local chapters including the food bank, SPCA, and Habitat for Humanity.
"A rising tide needs to raise all ships," Kevin said. "If Boar's Head Resort is going to be good for Charlottesville, for Central Virginia, it needs to be good for all of Charlottesville and Central Virginia."
This was the sharpest number of the hour. Boar's Head sells a Winter Wander Plus ticket that skips the 30-minute entry window and includes a light-up necklace and a drink ticket. "Even if attendance was ever down year over year, that ticket has been growing exponentially," Kevin said. "Those people are still willing to pay for that type of experience."
They built the same logic into the show itself. A scene added last season put 700 five-and-a-half-foot light sticks around a pond on a tenth-of-a-mile trail, choreographed to music in a roughly 15-minute show. Inside it sit two VIP reservations: heated furniture, a fire pit for s'mores, a bottle of wine, snacks, 90 minutes fully surrounded by the scene. Christmas in July tickets had been on sale about three weeks at the time of the webinar and those add-ons were already booking.
Newfields runs the equivalent on the second floor of its historic mansion, decked out for the holidays, reachable only with the premium ticket [VERIFY ticket name]. Private bartender, champagne, and a warm view out over the light installation. Some of that premium inventory is held back even on sold-out nights.
Two very different operations, one conclusion: the guest who wants more is not price sensitive, and the tier serving them is the most durable growth line on the P&L.
Both panelists were blunt about the cost of leaning on promotions.
"You do run the risk of, if you're running promotions either through others or yourself too often, that you're training your audience to wait, and then they will now expect a discount from you," Chris said. He also offered the cautionary tale every operator should hear before building a code: Newfields has had discount codes leak onto deal blogs, producing thousands of redemptions on a code intended for a mailing list of 150 people. Their codes now carry hard redemption caps.
Kevin has had good results with 48-hour flash sales on soft mid-tier nights, but guards against becoming predictable. "The last thing we want is for people to be like, oh yeah, a week before the beer festival, you can count on a flash sale coming out." He also uses a bring-a-friend structure that protects the headline price: one ticket at full price, everyone using the code at 50 percent off. Groupon, he said candidly, came with enough problems that they will not be back this year.
Softer levers came up too: discounting up into the premium ticket rather than down out of the base ticket, and VetTix for veteran distribution on distressed inventory, which an attendee raised in the Q&A.
The through line across both operations is that a calendar is a portfolio. Kevin and Chris are running experiments, killing what does not work, protecting the dates that already perform, layering premium on top of access, and staying disciplined about discounts. What makes that possible is knowing, at any moment, what is selling and what is not.
Opendate gives attractions operators one system for exactly that. Recurring events and timed-entry ticketing, member and non-member pricing, add-ons and premium tiers, plus the marketing tools to promote all of it, in one place instead of five.
Talk to our team and see what a year-round calendar looks like when everything runs off a single source of truth.
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