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Winter Wander runs 14 scenes across a half-mile trail in Charlottesville and pulls about 50,000 people a season. So the team tried extending it, keeping the lights on through the end of January to squeeze more out of a month that needed help.
"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."
That's Kevin Thurman, Director of Special Events at Boar's Head. They killed it. Winter Wander now closes the weekend after New Year's.
But here's the part worth stealing. Shutting it down handed January back as open inventory, and January was still a need month so they had to do some digging, get creative, and come up with some fresh ideas they hadn't tried yet.
So they went looking for something else, landed on a murder mystery dinner, and sold it out in 11 days.
That is the whole problem with most attractions calendars in one story. One or two months carry the year. The other ten are where the margin actually gets made or lost, and almost nobody programs them with the same seriousness.
For July's Make More Money webinar, we put two operators on a call who have spent years working on exactly that.
Kevin runs special events at a 175-room AAA Four Diamond resort owned by the University of Virginia Foundation, programming against resort guests, a 5,000-member sports club, and the Central Virginia community all at once. Chris Morehead is Director of Business Development at Newfields in Indianapolis, a 152-acre cultural campus where Winter Lights brings 150,000 people outdoors in the dead of an Indiana winter.
One has a revenue number to hit. The other has a mission statement at the center of every decision. They showed up with nearly the same playbook.
Kevin tried moving his winning January format to Labor Day weekend with an 80s theme. It sold two-thirds of tickets and took heavy marketing spend to get there. Labor Day now runs a drone show with free admission and a $40 parking pass, and it works.
Chris spent his first year at Newfields on a concept car exhibition built to catch the Indy 500 crowd. It did not connect. What connected was smaller and stranger: Newfields has a 530-seat theater, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway does not, so Newfields hosts the racing film premieres. Those screenings turned into private event bookings from race families and companies.
"If you're hitting it out of the park every single time, I challenge you to say you're not actually pushing hard enough."
Both of them treat a dead program as a cleared date plus a much better brief. The discipline is changing one thing at a time so you can actually read the result.
Newfields prices across value, non-peak, and peak days, then layers dynamic pricing so the number ticks up as inventory sells down. Buy early and get the best price. Show up day-of and pay for the privilege. Both customers are served, neither is annoyed.
Boar's Head went the same direction from the other end, widening from three value nights to seven this year while pushing premium harder at the same time.
Access sits inside that model rather than beside it. Newfields keeps 5 to 10 percent of all visitation free or discounted, every program, every year, through Indiana's Access Pass and free distribution via community partners. Boar's Head runs a Big Brothers Big Sisters night where the big buys a ticket and the little gets in free.
This was the sharpest number of the hour. Boar's Head sells a Winter Wander Plus ticket that skips the entry window and throws in a drink and a light-up necklace.
"Even if attendance was ever down year over year, that ticket has been growing exponentially. Those people are still willing to pay for that type of experience."
They built the logic into the show itself. One scene puts 700 light sticks around a pond choreographed to music, and inside it sit two VIP reservations with heated furniture, a fire pit for s'mores, and a bottle of wine. Newfields runs the equivalent on the second floor of its historic mansion, private bartender and champagne, watching the lights from somewhere warm.
Chris has watched a code meant for a list of 150 people leak onto deal blogs and rack up thousands of redemptions. Their codes carry hard caps now.
"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."
Kevin gets good results from 48-hour flash sales on soft nights but refuses to be predictable about them. His preferred move protects the headline price: one ticket at full price, everyone else on the code at half off.
The full conversation runs just under an hour, including audience questions on distressed inventory and distribution partners.