Case Study: How StrikeZone filled more lanes and sold more parties with PosterBooking

The Client

StrikeZone opened in Glasgow in 2014 and has grown into one of the busier family entertainment venues in the city, combining 16 bowling lanes with a sizeable arcade, a laser tag room and a bar and diner serving pizza, burgers and milkshakes. The venue is especially busy with birthday parties and group bookings on weekends, alongside steady weekday trade from families, students and corporate team events.

StrikeZone employs around 35 staff across front of house, the party desk, the kitchen and bar, and the arcade floor, with numbers rising to closer to 50 during school holidays and the Christmas party season. The venue's general manager, Callum Reid, has worked there since it opened and has overseen several rounds of refurbishment and expansion, including the addition of a dedicated party desk area in 2021.

Because so much of StrikeZone's revenue depends on upselling, food and drink add-ons, party packages, extended lane time and arcade credit top-ups, communicating offers clearly at the point of decision has always mattered more than it might at a typical retail venue.

Life Before PosterBooking

Before PosterBooking, StrikeZone's signage was a patchwork of printed menus, handwritten boards and a single ageing media player connected to one screen above the main entrance. The reception desk kept a stack of laminated A4 sheets listing lane prices, shoe hire costs and arcade credit bundles, which staff flipped through or handed to customers when asked. These sheets were reprinted and re-laminated every time a price changed, roughly every two months, at a cost of around £40 per batch once laminating pouches and printer ink were factored in.

The party desk relied on a thick laminated folder of party packages, complete with handwritten notes in the margins whenever a package was temporarily unavailable or a new add-on, like a laser tag combo, was introduced. Staff often found themselves verbally talking parents through five or six different party tiers because the folder's print was small and the combinations were genuinely complex. On a busy Saturday with multiple parties booking at once, this could add 10 to 15 minutes to each booking conversation.

Above the bar and diner, a single commercial screen displayed food and drink offers, but updating it meant someone physically walking to the back office, finding the correct USB stick (there were, at one point, three different sticks in circulation, and at least one went missing for several weeks), editing a PowerPoint-style slide deck on the office computer, saving it to the stick, walking back out to the screen, and plugging it in to update the loop. This process took a minimum of 25 minutes per update and frequently longer if the file had been edited incorrectly or the screen needed rebooting to pick up the new content.

Handwritten A-boards were also wheeled out at the entrance to promote weekend bowling deals and school holiday arcade offers, written in chalk pen and prone to smudging when customers' kids inevitably touched them while queueing. These were rewritten roughly three times a month.

Callum estimated that across reception, the party desk and the bar screen, staff spent around 6 hours a week on printing, laminating, folder maintenance and USB-based screen updates, with an additional spike around Christmas and school holidays when offers changed weekly instead of monthly. Monthly costs for laminating, printing and A-board materials ran to roughly £150, not including staff time.

There was also a consistency problem: because the party folder and the bar screen were updated independently by different people, pricing occasionally didn't match between what the party desk quoted and what played on screen, leading to a handful of awkward conversations with customers who had seen one price at the bar screen and were then quoted differently at the party desk.

The Solution

Callum began looking for a digital signage platform after a particularly chaotic half-term week where the bar screen's USB stick went missing entirely, leaving the screen stuck looping an offer that had expired weeks earlier. He wanted something that let any authorised staff member update content from a phone or laptop without needing physical access to a USB stick or the back office computer.

PosterBooking's cloud dashboard fit the requirement directly. With several screens needed across the venue, well under the 10-screen free threshold, StrikeZone could trial the entire platform at no cost, building playlists for lane pricing, party packages, arcade offers and food and drink deals, then scheduling them to rotate or change automatically depending on the day and time.

Where They Implemented It

StrikeZone installed six screens across the venue, each serving a distinct purpose.

Above the main reception desk, a screen now displays lane pricing, shoe hire costs and current arcade credit bundle offers, replacing the laminated sheets that staff used to hand out.

Directly above the lanes themselves, two large screens show live scoring integration alongside rotating promotional content: upcoming cosmic bowling nights, league sign-up details and seasonal offers, visible to bowlers between frames.

At the dedicated party desk, a screen was mounted facing the small sofa area where parents sit to book, replacing the thick laminated folder. It cycles through each party package tier with pricing, inclusions and add-on options like laser tag combos, letting staff talk customers through the screen rather than flipping pages.

In the bar and diner area, the original single screen was joined by a second, with one dedicated to the food and drink menu and daily specials, and the other rotating happy hour times, kids' meal deals and combo offers.

A sixth screen sits near the arcade entrance, promoting credit top-up bundles, redemption prize highlights and any arcade-specific competitions running that month.

The Implementation

StrikeZone used a mix of Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K devices and an Amazon Signage Stick for the two screens above the lanes, since those units run for extended hours daily and benefited from a device built specifically for continuous signage use. Each stick took around 2 minutes to set up: connect to the venue's WiFi, install the PosterBooking app and log into the shared account.

Callum and his assistant manager built the initial playlists over a single afternoon, using PosterBooking's templates to lay out the party packages and bar menu rather than designing graphics from scratch. Training for the wider team took about 20 minutes, covering how to check screen status in the dashboard and how to request a content change through the two managers who hold editing access, which solved the earlier consistency problem of different staff editing different files independently.

Because the venue already had commercial-grade screens mounted from a previous AV installation, the only new hardware required was the six Fire TV Stick and Signage Stick devices themselves, keeping the rollout cost low relative to a full screen replacement.

Life With PosterBooking

Day to day, StrikeZone's managers now update pricing, party packages and food offers directly from the PosterBooking dashboard, often from a phone while walking the venue floor. When a party package changes, such as adding a new laser tag bundle for the summer holidays, it is built once and pushed to the party desk screen in under a minute, with no folder to reprint and no risk of a stray handwritten note going unnoticed.

Scheduling has also changed how the venue runs its offers. Happy hour pricing now switches on and off automatically at the bar screen without anyone needing to remember to swap content manually, and the lane screens automatically show league night information only on the evenings leagues actually run, rather than needing constant manual toggling.

Staff feedback has focused heavily on the party desk. Because the screen walks customers through each package visually, booking conversations that used to take 10 to 15 minutes now typically take 5 to 7 minutes, and staff report feeling more confident quoting add-ons accurately since the screen, not memory, carries the detail.

The Results: Time and Money Saved

Moving from laminated folders, handwritten A-boards and USB-stick updates to PosterBooking's cloud dashboard delivered clear time and cost savings, along with a measurable lift in bookings and spend.

• Weekly staff time spent on printing, laminating and manual USB updates fell from around 6 hours to under 1 hour, a saving of roughly 5 hours a week
• Annualised, that is over 250 hours of staff time recovered per year, more than six working weeks
• Monthly spend on printing, laminating and A-board materials dropped from around £150 to under £15, saving roughly £135 a month, or around £1,620 a year
• Party booking conversations at the party desk shortened from 10 to 15 minutes down to 5 to 7 minutes on average, letting the desk handle more enquiries during peak Saturday booking windows
• Party package bookings rose after the new screen replaced the folder, which Callum attributes to clearer visual presentation of tiers and add-ons making upsells like laser tag combos easier to sell
• Bar and diner food and drink spend per visit increased after happy hour and combo deals began displaying automatically and consistently, removing the previous mismatch between what was quoted at different points in the venue

Callum also noted a less quantifiable but valuable benefit: the pricing mismatch complaints between the bar screen and the party desk disappeared entirely once both were managed from the same dashboard by the same two people.

Testimonial

"The USB stick going missing during half-term was honestly the final straw. Now everything, lane prices, party packages, happy hour, all updates from one dashboard in minutes. Our party desk team love it because the screen does the explaining for them, and bookings have genuinely got quicker and smoother because of it."

Callum Reid, General Manager, StrikeZone

Frequently Asked Questions

How many screens can we run before we have to pay anything?

PosterBooking is free for up to 10 screens, which covered StrikeZone's full six-screen rollout across reception, the lanes, the party desk, the bar and the arcade. A watermark appears on free screens after the first 3 months of use, but all core features remain available throughout.

What devices does PosterBooking actually run on?

PosterBooking supports Amazon Fire TV Stick, Amazon Signage Stick or Display, Android TV, Windows, Chromebox and Raspberry Pi. This flexibility let StrikeZone mix a standard Fire TV Stick 4K for most screens with an Amazon Signage Stick for the two lane screens that run continuously throughout opening hours.

Is it difficult to set up a new screen once we already have the dashboard?

No, setup takes roughly 2 minutes per screen: connect the device to WiFi, install the PosterBooking app and log in with the venue's account. StrikeZone's managers set up all six screens themselves in a single afternoon without needing outside technical support.

What happens to the screens if the venue's internet connection drops?

Each device caches its scheduled content locally, so screens keep playing even during a temporary WiFi outage, which matters for a venue where the lane screens and bar menu need to stay live throughout a busy trading day. Once the connection returns, the dashboard automatically re-syncs any pending updates.

What does it cost once a venue grows beyond 10 screens?

Additional screens beyond the free allowance cost $6.49 per screen per month from the 11th screen onward. For a growing entertainment venue adding more lanes, a second arcade zone or another site, that makes scaling the signage network straightforward to budget for without a complicated contract.

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