Building a More Consistent Guest Experience Across Sky Zone
How leadership development and a shared standards guide supported Sky Zone’s broader effort to improve guest satisfaction
With a network of company-owned and franchised parks, Sky Zone faces a challenge common to growing multi-location brands: creating a consistent guest experience while allowing individual parks to respond to local operating realities.
Sky Zone partnered with Liebman Leisure Group to help General and District Managers examine the complete guest journey, strengthen the way guest experience expectations were translated into park operations, and establish a more consistent language for service across the organization.
The approach
The engagement was approached in three connected parts: delivering a virtual guest experience leadership series, developing Sky Zone’s official guest experience standards guide, and facilitating multiple in-person sessions for franchise owners at Sky Zone’s annual franchise conference, SkyCon. Together, these components brought the guest experience strategy to leaders through ongoing development, a shared operational resource, and interactive application.
The virtual guest experience leadership series was held over 13 weeks in Q1 and Q2 for Sky Zone’s General and District Managers. The series included managing guests’ expectations, practical ways to exceed expectations, empowering frontline staff with tools for service recovery, and using guest feedback to drive continual growth.
The sessions encouraged leaders to look beyond isolated service interactions and consider how expectations are established, delivered, and evaluated throughout the entire guest journey. Managers were given practical concepts they could apply within their parks while also identifying barriers that required broader organizational support.
The series also informed the creation of the Sky Zone Guest Experience Standards Guide. The guide organized the work around three stages:
Expectation: What guests believe will happen before and during their visit
Experience: What guests encounter throughout the park
Evaluation: How guests interpret, remember, and share the experience afterward
These concepts were reinforced through multiple presentations at SkyCon, giving park leaders additional opportunities to discuss the standards, share examples, and consider how they could be applied locally.
Part of a broader company effort
The leadership series and standards guide formed a central part of Sky Zone’s broader effort to strengthen the guest experience across its parks. By equipping General and District Managers with a shared framework, practical tools, and clear service expectations, the work helped connect Sky Zone’s strategy to the leadership behaviors and daily execution needed to bring it to life.
This work was reinforced by complementary initiatives, including a company contest, increased performance reporting, and greater accountability across the organization. Together, these efforts created sustained attention around the guest experience, with the leadership series and standards guide providing an important strategic foundation and practical direction that helped park leaders translate that focus into action.
The results
Comparing Sky Zone’s Q1 and the subsequent reporting period, satisfaction improved in several areas closely connected to park execution:
Wait time and check-in satisfaction increased by 11.9%
Cleanliness satisfaction increased by 11.7%
Staff and service satisfaction increased by 4.9%
Staff and service also increased from 10% to 12.5% of categorized comments, representing the largest shift in comment share among the categories analyzed. Because those comments remained strongly positive in sentiment, the increase suggests that team-member interactions became a more visible and meaningful part of how guests experienced and described their visits.
Partnership perspective
Across the virtual leadership series, development of the guest experience standards guide and in-person sessions at SkyCon, Liebman Leisure Group helped Sky Zone establish a more consistent foundation for strengthening the guest experience. The partnership combined strategic guidance with practical application, giving leaders both a shared understanding of the desired experience and tools they could use to influence execution within their parks.
“Josh brought a thoughtful, practical and highly polished approach to our guest experience work. He helped us create greater alignment around what the Sky Zone guest experience should look and feel like, while giving our leaders practical tools they could apply in their parks. His work served as a crucial part of our broader effort to strengthen guest satisfaction across the organization.”
Steve Dupuy, Director of Training and Development
The takeaway
Sky Zone’s results demonstrate what can happen when leadership development, operational accountability, and clear experience standards support the same objective. The engagement also reinforced an important principle: training is most valuable when leaders can translate it into daily coaching, decisions, and frontline behavior.
For multi-location organizations, a shared guest experience framework can create alignment without requiring every park to operate identically. The opportunity is to define the outcomes that must remain consistent, equip local leaders to deliver them, and maintain the reinforcement needed to sustain them.