Lock Me Again: The Influence of Escape Room Experiences on Visitors’ Loyalty Intentions

Abstract

Real-life escape rooms are relatively new entertainment facilities that quickly turned into popular tourist attractions. However, the escape room market has slowed down due to the overflow of the market with standard escape rooms that fail to create unique visitors’ experiences. Thus, new experience design strategies with a focus both on stimulating return visits and on attracting new visitors are becoming a critical challenge for escape room providers. Our study aims to assess the impact of escape room experiences on visitors’ satisfaction and loyalty intentions. We base our study on the escape room visitors’ online survey followed by structural equation modeling (SEM) including confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) of the collected data. We measure visitors’ experiences using a set of metrics combined into two dimensions: immersion and participation. We also include in the survey questions aimed to measure the novelty of the experience, visitors’ satisfaction, and two loyalty intentions: intention to revisit and intention to recommend. Our findings reveal that the level of immersion directly affects intentions to revisit and to recommend. The perceived novelty of the experience significantly positively affects both loyalty intentions with the mediation role of satisfaction. These results show the importance of creating immersive and novel experiences that bring escape rooms closer to immersive theater.KeywordsEscape roomsVisitor experiencesLoyalty intentionsImmersionParticipationNovelty perceptionJEL ClassificationM31L83Z33