Visitor attractions of all kinds, from museums to theme parks and zoos to planetariums, have traditionally known very little about the customers who come through their doors.

Understanding visitors’ motivations, needs, wants and responses has only been possible through the use of market research which few could afford or afford often enough, so it’s mainly been a case of build it and they will come.

The growth of membership schemes has helped some attractions to better understand who their customers are and to develop deeper and more meaningful engagement with them, but few attractions have taken this golden opportunity and made anything of it – even those with membership schemes do very little with them in terms of customer engagement – so for the most part, the attractions industry is poor at knowing and interacting with its customers/visitors.

A few years back, I argued attractions should follow the same model as the theatre and sports markets and move to advance ticketing. We had a mixed post bag on that topic, with some arguing it would spoilt the spontaneous nature of an attractions visit, or that the investment in technology wasn’t justified.

The trend towards advance ticketing is now growing and on page 94, we debate the issue and look at some examples of how the implementation of advance ticketing is helping businesses to improve their financial position through more reliable ticket sales and their marketing reach and customer engagement through better customer data.

As a customer, I’ve repeatedly been frustrated to find attractions doing a poor job of customer engagement through tech and believe we need an industry-wide push on this front.

As a basic check list, customers should be able to easily buy timed and non-timed tickets online. They should also be able to join membership schemes with valid and useful benefits and then to have a great customer journey in relation to that scheme, with regular and sincere contact from the attraction, special offers and other types of benefits.

They should also be able to buy gift certificates which meet their needs in terms of the types of packages on offer and which are delivered in a timely fashion. The technology is available – cheaply – to enable this and it’s time we grasped the nettle and implemented it.

The world is increasingly affluent: the World Bank announced this month that the number of people living in extreme poverty will fall to under 10 per cent in 2015, and as previously poor nations urbanise, there will be an increasing appetite to do things rather than have things. Attractions are in completely the right place to deliver on this need.

You can make a healthy revenue stream from gifting, from memberships and from online sales and if you’re geared up to do this, we’d love to hear about it, so we can share it as best practice with other readers. And if you’re not, then it’s really time to take action. Your customers expect and need it and it can do nothing but benefit all concerned.

Liz Terry, editor. Twitter: @elizterry