Spring 2009

Amanda Truman and Peter Muttitt celebrate Lord’s Cricket Ground Tours
becoming part of the London Pass.

New guidebook

The latest version of the London Pass guidebook is your key to making the most of the capital and in particular, all the fab new attractions on offer.

For example, you don’t have to be a member of the Barmy Army to relish a trip to the spiritual headquarters of Cricket, none other than Lord’s Cricket Ground itself where a behind the scenes tour even includes the world famous ‘Ashes’ themselves, even if we didn’t actually win them this time round (again).

The original London Bridge may now be spanning a lake in Arizona (did they really think they were getting Tower Bridge?) but we kept the really spine chilling bit; the tombs that lay below, which are now on the London Pass. Take a trip back through history with the London Bridge Experience and meet some pretty creepy medieval characters along the way. Considerably more creepy is the second part of the tour: The London Tombs. Never will your blood have been more curdled. You could even feel like falling down.

After which, time for something for Dad, and another addition to the London Pass; the London Motor Museum. Here he can fantasise about looking cool alongside a Lincoln Continental Lowrider, dead posh next to a Louis Vuitton Cadillac Deville or a bit dodgy dressed up in a rubber suit posing with an actual Batmobile.

At 202 feet high it is the tallest free-standing stone column in the World, it celebrates the end of one of London’s greatest disasters, and it can double up as a telescope. Yes, it is The Monument – now back in the Pass after a substantial refurbishment. You can explore the Monument today - on your London Pass of course.

Yes there’s no doubt that London is an amazing place, and lots of its extraordinary happenings have been put together in another of the Guide’s new entries; The London Legends Walking Tour. Check out the exact spot where The Beatles were threatened with arrest, a Prince was killed by cricket, where TV was born, where Jimmy Hendricks played for the last time, and where Titanic passengers (wished they had never) bought their tickets.

Product Manager Amanda Truman is charmed by Henry VIII
at Hampton Court Palace.

HENRY VIII 500TH ANNIVERSARY

Your London Passport to the world of Henry VIII

It’s a problem isn’t it girls. Apart from Harry, there’s just so few eligible royals around these days. What’s a gal to do?

Well, if she was packing her Pass she could pop down to Hampton Court Palace and get married to Henry VIII – and get to keep her head.

It’s all part of a great celebration at Hampton Court Palace this summer where the whole Palace will be made ready for the wedding banquet. But lucky old London Pass holders can follow the whole of Henry’s story, starting off at his boyhood home, Eltham Palace, having a look at the ‘Henry VIII – Dressed to Kill’ exhibition at the Tower of London (where he accidentally lost two wives), taking a trip on the river - pretend you are just moving to your next palace - and ending up at Windsor Castle, where the old boy is buried (when he’s not getting re-married at Hampton of course). They are all on the Pass, and all in the new Guide Book.

PETER MUTTITT

A happy event.

Meet Peter Muttitt, Leisure Pass Group’s new Corporate Sales Manager. He’s a jovial guy and, coming as he does from a background of sales roles in other industries such as office products and accountancy, he really rather likes the razzmatazz of travel biz.

“Working in the travel industry is an amazing new adventure and I am blown away at how friendly everyone is – I think I’m going to like it here!”, he says.

Well of course we all know it won’t take him long to realise just how awful everyone in our business is, but it would be a shame to cut short his honeymoon period.

In fact if you’d like to keep Peter’s rose tinted spectacles in place why not give him a ring on 020 7580 8060 or email: peter@leisurepassgroup.com, tell him one of your best travel industry jokes or even better: buy something from him.

Let him quote you happy and we might keep a smile on his face until Christmas…

LPOS

A world of LPOSibilities.

Today, in Stockholm, New York and Philadelphia, they are chasing a lot fewer bits of paper and spending considerably more time growing sales. How? With LPOS of course.

In a nutshell LPOS is a complete smart card management system that takes care of stock levels, sales reporting, attraction management, customer usage, cost analysis, and profitability. The result is a very much smarter city card – and it doesn’t have to be just London.

For LPOS is now the power behind two US cards covering New York and Philadelphia, and has just celebrated its first anniversary powering the Stockholm Card.

We asked Stockholm Visitors Board Project Manager Sabine Dubreuil how things have changed for her. She said: “Before we installed LPOS we had several different systems to administer the Stockholm Card – it was quite a manual process and very time-consuming. With LPOS everything is managed through the one simple system. We always know exactly where all of our cards are, and can track profitability by sales channel, agent, even down to the individual pass holder. The cost control this gives us enables us to run special promotions and be more flexible with our agents. Our fulfilment process is much smoother – and there are no more mistakes! This has allowed us to concentrate our efforts on growing the sales of the pass rather than chasing bits of paper”.

We couldn’t have put it better ourselves – but watch this space because we will helping another major European city later this year….

PARIS PASS DEVELOPMENTS

A pocketful of Parisian possibilities.

Paris is looking at it’s best. The lovers are wandering the streets hand in hand, the blossom is out –and so is the brand new Paris Pass Guide book. Well nearly.

Actually we are going to keep all those lovers and others agog with expectation until June for the launch of our first Paris Pass Guide. Just like its London cousin it will be packed with information about all the attractions on the Pass.

Yes, each one of its 118 pocketable pages will be bursting with the low down on how get the best from the French capital, not to mention how to make terrific savings by using the Pass to see as much as possible of the City of Lights.

Visitors from Spanish and German speaking countries have their own language versions, and of course it is in English too.

The book has been written. The presses stand ready to print. The countdown to a new era of the Paris Pass has begun!

VISIT LONDON DRAW

A little earlier in the year the London Pass got together with Visit London to run a free prize draw for visitors to London who bought their London Passes via the visitlondon.com website in March.

With such a London focus the price had to be a genuine Fortnum and Mason wicker hamper packed full of traditional English goodies (see above).

In fact the lucky recipient of the treasure trove of traditional teatime fancies was none other than Mr Christian Sabchez from South America who will be picking up his Hamper when he visits London in May.

And the best of luck to him because we are delighted to say that the competition was a roaring success (in a quiet English way of course).

Clearly it was the great value offered by the London Pass which boosted business, but the luxurious prize certainly didn’t hamper our efforts to make it such a success.

Customer Survey

A fabulous 94%! Yes, that’s how many customers would recommend a London Pass to their friends according to our latest survey. And you can’t get much better than that. Well, you can, but it’s statistically impossible to please all the people all the time.

But we must be doing something right because no less than 26% of customers took part in the survey, which is an amazingly high number, as is the 93% of respondents who rated their London Pass experience as: ‘good, very good or excellent’, with convenience and (crucially in these crunchy times) value for money coming out as top reasons for buying it.

When all is said and done we can probably be most proud of the fact that 82% of respondents said that having the Pass meant that they visited more attractions, 81% said they saw more of London than they would have done otherwise and 78% discovered attractions they never knew were there.

If you think of our capital as a can, then the London Pass is the opener.