Knowing the age and gender of your purchasers is one of the fastest ways to sharpen your marketing. Here is what the data shows, and how to use it.
The person paying isn't always the person you picture. Ask an operator to describe their customer and you usually hear about who turns up. Families with young children. Couples on a day out. Groups of friends.
That's your visitor. Your purchaser is one specific person inside that group: the one who chose the date, pulled out their phone and paid.
Every advert you run and every email you send is aimed at that person. When you know who they are, your marketing gets sharper immediately, because you're writing to somebody real instead of an average.
We looked at more than 3 million ticket purchases across 700+ visitor attractions to see who is doing the buying.
In this blog, we explore who buys tickets to visitor attractions, how this varies by business type and age, how gift buying shifts the profile in December, and where the data comes from. We’ll also look at what these insights mean for your business.
Additionally, for 94% of the businesses on Beyonk, they have a majority-female purchaser base, and a third sit above 80% female.
For most attractions, this is worth factoring directly into paid advertising strategy. Attractions that tailor their targeting and ad creative toward this majority-female audience are likely to see stronger returns than those relying on generic, broad-based targeting.
Here's the share of purchasers who are women, sector by sector.
Children's play and soft play top the list at 82% of purchasers being women, with pick your own at 81% and farm attractions at 79%. Anything built around a family day out sits in the high seventies or above.
Animal attractions and gardens both land around 70%. Historic houses and heritage come in at 62%, which is lower than a lot of heritage operators might expect.
Watersports at 62% and breweries, distilleries and vineyards at 58% are the lowest in our data, and even those have more women buying than men.
Individual businesses stretch much further than the sector averages suggest. An airsoft club in our data has 8% female purchasers and a mountain bike centre 18%. A soft play centre sits above 90%. Your sector tells you roughly where to start looking - but it will vary.
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Top tip: Treat the sector average as your starting hypothesis and then check it. In children's play, every business we looked at had a majority-female purchaser base, so the pattern is safe to lean on. In outdoor activities the range runs from 8% to 86%, so your own number is the only one worth trusting.
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