Skip The Queue is back for Season 7 and we’re announcing some big changes! Get ready for new hosts, a fresh new look, weekly content and find out where you can catch us live at events to be part of the action.

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is Paul Marden  and Andy Povey.

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website SkiptheQueue.fm.

Show references: 

Paul Marden 

The CEO of Rubber Cheese, Paul pairs two decades of digital expertise with a love of creative problem solving, making him the go-to guy for turning tricky tech into seamless guest journeys, all delivered with his trademark energy and wit.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/pmarden/

Andy Povey 

The Co-CEO of Crowd Convert, Andy brings sharp insights, deep industry knowledge and notorious anecdotes from decades in attractions.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andypovey/
 

Transcriptions: 

Paul Marden: Welcome to Skip the Queue, the podcast about the world's best visitor attractions and the people that work in them. I'm Paul Marden. Along with my co-hosts, Andy Povey and Sinead Kimberley, I spend my days working with ambitious attractions like theme parks, museums, galleries, and science centres to help them to attract more guests. In today's episode, Andy and I talk about what's coming up for Skip the Queue as we enter Season 7.

Paul Marden: Seven seasons, hey? Good lord. How very exciting. We've had our summer holidays. We've had our little break, but there's no rest for the wicked, is there?

Andy Povey: Absolutely not. You say it's a busman's holiday, really, isn't it?  Working in our industry.

Paul Marden: I think it is, isn't it? Life has changed quite a lot for us recently, hasn't it? In the last few months, with the advent of Crowd Convert and Merac coming back to life again, we've been out on the road going everywhere, haven't we?

Andy Povey: Absolutely everywhere. And I promise I'm not going to bitch about electric cars and charging.

Andy Povey: That's the only thing I've found that annoys me more than a poor online ticketing experience.

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. So we have both been visiting lots of clients. It's been very exciting. But we've also both had our summer holidays. Which attraction is memorable for you from your recent holiday?

Andy Povey: Do you know, there's so many. We took our girls to the longest named tourist attraction in the world, I think. Warner Brothers Studio Tour London, the making of Harry Potter. On their 11th birthday. Oh, how was that? We had a beautiful experience. They have this really smart trick there where if they note your birthday, they give you a badge that says, 'It's my birthday.'

Andy Povey: It's modelled on the birthday cake that Hagrid gave Harry. So it's all completely in keeping and in theme. So my daughters were walking around with these and every member of staff we saw that saw the badge wished them happy birthday. The first member of staff that did it absolutely blew my girls' minds. They hadn't associated it with the badge that they were wearing and they thought that they were the most special people on the face of the earth.

Andy Povey: Absolutely superb. And the experience itself is wonderful. So that was probably the most memorable. I did something else very recently that was a little bit unusual. So I'm a man in my 50s. I was a teenager, probably not even a teenager, a kid when Grease came out. And all my mates and all my friends raved about it, and I didn't go and see it. And I've been very proud of the fact that I've never seen Grease.

Andy Povey: Until last weekend. When we went to the Secret Cinema showing of Grease in Battersea Park, wow, wow, what an experience. Live actors, live scenes with the film running in the background, the fairground sitting outside the auditorium, where the final set, if you've watched Grease ever, where they're in the fairground, went out there.

Andy Povey: Such a fantastic experience. Really does make me wonder why we don't have more of our larger parks doing that kind of stuff in partnership with Secret Cinema. It would make you stay for the evening and really extend your day. Absolutely superb experience. So, if you get the opportunity to go and see it, please do.

Paul Marden: How very cool.

Andy Povey: Tell them Andy sent you, which will mean absolutely nothing.  How about you?

Paul Marden: We recently went to Scotland. We spent a day, which was really not enough, in Edinburgh. And actually, as you're talking about the Harry Potter experience, we did a little Harry Potter thing because there is a graveyard, Greyfriars Bobby's graveyard.

Paul Marden: It was the inspiration for many of the names in Harry Potter. And this graveyard was, I mean, it was chock full of every nationality of tourist you could possibly imagine, plus the three of us wandering around all trying to find Harry Potter themed gravestones. Yeah, so we found Tom Riddle's tombstone. We saw a McGonagall. Yeah, it was just, that was quite magical. But the thing that sticks in my head is we also visited the Real Mary King's Close. And when you walk along the Royal Mile, falling off the side of the Royal Mile are all of these tenement closes that three of them were capped over a couple of hundred years ago and completely forgotten about. Continuum attractions have turned them into an attraction that you can wander around. You get a guided tour of this time capsule of what life was like in a tenement block. In Edinburgh, it was rated last year as the best tourist attraction in Britain, according to TripAdvisor.

Paul Marden: And it really, really was magical. It was such a fun visit. We were guided around by a tour guide in costume and in character the whole way around. And at the end of it, she introduced herself as coming from Philadelphia.

Paul Marden: She was really really great guide, and I just loved it. I've seen them in the Rubber Cheese Survey for the last four years, and thought, 'What a funny name for an attraction? I wonder what that is?' And so, when I saw it, I had to go. I loved every minute of it, and it was brilliant.

Andy Povey: I agree, it's a fantastic place. Did you see J. K. Rowling's handprints just around the corner?

Paul Marden: No.

Andy Povey: In the courtyard next to the entrance?

Paul Marden: No, I didn't.

Andy Povey: See, I think they were trying to do something like the Hollywood Walk of Fame, where there are famous people's handprints. I should have told you before. Is there something to go back for?

Paul Marden: Oh, we'll definitely be going back. There was so much there in Edinburgh that we didn't get to see. You just couldn't do it in a day.

Paul Marden: But so much fun. So much fun.

Paul Marden: So we are into season seven. And just like the last few seasons, we've got lots of ideas, brimming with ideas, few changes. And we thought we would tease them for you here in this short non-episode, just to tell you about some of the things that are coming up. And yeah, shall we?

Paul Marden: We'll talk about the first thing that you came up with, which was the move to weekly content.

Andy Povey:  You're blaming me for this?

Paul Marden: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Andy Povey: I mean, the objective was to double the listenership of the podcast. And so you did that by doubling my work. And it seemed like it would be really, really easy to do that if we doubled the episodes.

Andy Povey: So, yeah, we're going weekly. I'm sure we're going to have plenty to fill it. Because you look at all of the interesting stories we come across, the people that we talk to, the things that we want to talk about, and we end up editing and cutting things. So I'm convinced that we're going to have loads of really exciting things to talk about. We're also going to introduce a couple of different themes. So do you want to talk about the Millennium-funded projects?

Paul Marden: Yes, so this is carrying on the theme that I started back at the back end of Season 6. When I spoke to another Edinburgh attraction, Dynamic Earth. They were a good example of a Millennium project that was obviously kicked off 25 years ago. And we had a lovely conversation about what has been the challenges, what