Destination Christmas at M&D's Scotland's Theme Park
Destination Christmas is a multi-event Christmas experience held at M&D’s Scotland’s Theme Park in Strathclyde Country Park attracting over 65,000 visitors over six weeks.
The event features four distinct attractions with additional features including Believe in Santa, Santa’s Magical Circus, M&D’s on Ice and Festive Rides, along with Sparkles Singing Train Ride and Krazy Congo’s Christmas Parties.
The event ran on selected days from 26 November 2023 and included hosting school and group visits.
Santa’s Magical Circus was a 45 minute daily show with up to four performances a day. M&D’s On Ice was a full scale outdoor ice-rink alongside a Bavarian Bar.
Believe in Santa was an inclusive family experience that included a story telling performance, a visit to Santa in his Grotto that was designed and built inhouse and featured more than 20 different spectacular festive scenes where every child received a gift from Santa. Visitors were also invited to enjoy a ride on an indoor Italian Carousel and adults enjoyed a tea or coffee and a Christmas treat.
Sparkle the Elf welcomed everyone all aboard Santa’s Magical Land Train and a ticket included hot chocolate and marshmallows to toast. A number of festive rides were also operational.
Delivering a multi events programme required extensive pre-planning ensuring staff training, rotas, health and safety, sales and marketing, ticketing operations and many other disciplines were all in place before doors could safely open.
At the pre-planning management meetings reports were collated for each activity, detailing the creative messaging and general marketing, review of customer feedback surveys, visitor numbers, revenues and observations. These reports form a debrief in January when new creative targets and KPIs are agreed for the following year.
Additional training was provided to seasonal staff to ensure their competence in customer care and also in support of the dedicated ASN sessions that were held at Santa’s Magical Circus and M&D’s on Ice throughout the duration of the event. Pre-opening staff and key members are invited to preview all the events and a Q&A session hosted to ensure everyone is familiar with the attractions and knowledgeable when interacting with visitors.
Once the event opened weekly meetings were held with all stakeholders and team leaders to address any issues, share customer feedback and identify areas of improvement enabling us to keep on track with KPIs and ensuring we delivered a quality experience.
Given the large volume of visitors, sustainability was a key priority implementing regular recycling and site clearing. An e-ticket system was created to reduce waste. Each year the decorations and infrastructure items are carefully packed away ensuring that we have a great base to start with each year and more items are added. The Christmas Grotto is re-imagined each year using existing animatronics and figures and new scenes created. Similarly, the back drops in the Theatre are reused.
Sales and marketing activity was launched in October and included an exclusive media preview evening that attracted journalists and influencers from throughout Scotland, supporting awareness of the events.
When planning for each event we were very conscious of price points and tried to create events that were keenly priced for the family market. This made a family Christmas day out affordable for all families and provided lots of options to choose to participate in one or two events depending on their circumstances. This was greatly received and recognised in our customer surveys which reported great value for money.
Throughout the experience we arranged for donated food items to be collected in support of the Mobile Food Bank
An online survey was delivered for Santa’s Magical Circus and M&D’s On Ice, Sparkles Train Ride, Krazy Congo’s Christmas Party which concluded –
• 80% thought the online booking experience was excellent, followed by 15% who said it was very good.
• 60% reported that the events offered excellent value for money and a further 26% said it was very good.
• 70% said the helpfulness of the skating team and marshalls was excellent with 19% providing a very good scoring.
• 70% of respondents said that they would definitely recommend to a friend and a further 20% said they would be likely to recommend to a friend.
We also hosted various discounted Christmas performances for community groups including the charity Blameless, which provided a Christmas day out for families who would not have been able to come. This accounted for 800 tickets. In addition, a further 500 tickets were gifted to smaller charities.