Visitor Attraction Success and Failure

This chapter begins with a normative analysis of pricing policy and how attraction ownership influences the way prices may be set according to whether the attraction is in the commercial or not-for-profit charitable and public sectors. Thus ownership affects judgements about success and failure: Success is considered first against a set of project criteria with examples of organisational features that may bring this about. What then follows is an analysis of different degrees of failure from completed projects that do not meet their targets and so need subsidy,to projects that are abandoned. An issue here is optimism bias on the part of the attraction sponsors,resulting in failure to identify warning signals about events that are going wrong. The chapter concludes that there is no ‘magic formula’ because of the pervading uncertainty that exists throughout the creative industries,but it is possible to identify some common features that impact on success or failure.