This post came out of a talk Lisa and I gave at a recent No Spoilers gathering. There, we walked through our experience of entering the Devon Tourism Awards. A few people asked us to write it up. Specifically focusing on the application process and what the feedback taught us. So here it is, an honest account of the journey. What we got wrong, what we improved, and why we think more escape room owners should give it a go.
A Bit of Context: How Prodigy Escapes Got Started
When I first came across escape rooms it was back in 2017. My genuine reaction was, “Why would I go into a room to find an awkward way to get out of it?” That scepticism eventually turned into Prodigy Escapes and Experiences. Built on three principles that still sit at the heart of everything we do:
- Everyone wins. Guests come for entertainment, not a test. We work with every group to make sure they get the support they need to succeed. It’s not about removing the challenge but about providing the group an opportunity to work together.
- Nobody is left out. Accessibility has always mattered to us, and we want every guest, regardless of physical restrictions, to have a full experience.
- Create memories. After losing our parents, we wanted to build a place where families could make moments they look back on fondly.
Those values were always there. But entering the awards forced us to look at our business through someone else’s eyes, and that changed us in ways we did not fully anticipate.
Why the Devon Tourism Awards Are Worth Considering
Before getting into our story, it is worth explaining what makes the Devon Tourism Awards a credible and genuinely useful process rather than just a popularity contest.
Services for Tourism organises the awards and holds the Outstanding accreditation from the Awards Trust Mark. This is the highest level available from the Independent Awards Standards Council. That accreditation exists to recognise awards programmes that operate with transparency and ethical standards, and it means the process you are entering has been independently validated.
Beyond that, the Devon Tourism Awards sit within the VisitEngland and VisitBritain framework. VisitEngland automatically enters winners in select categories into the national VisitEngland Awards for Excellence, which means a strong performance locally can open doors on a national stage. For a small escape room business in Exeter, that pathway matters.
The judging process itself begins with a written desk judging round. Judges assess your submission across a consistent framework. This covers your business website and social media, your online review presence, and four written questions on your top qualities, recent improvements, measurable results, and future plans. Judges score each section against clear criteria. This means the outcome reflects the substance of what you do and how well you communicate it, not how many votes you can drum up.
If you progress past the desk stage, an in-person judge visits your business. In some categories this is pre-announced, in others it is a mystery visit. Either way they are assessing categories including booking and pre-arrival communication, welcome and service, your external and internal spaces, the core experience itself, cleanliness, accessibility and inclusive tourism, and your approach to sustainability. Every visit follows the same framework, so you are being judged consistently against the same standard as every other entrant.
That consistency is what makes the feedback genuinely useful. It is a benchmarking tool for any escape room business, even if you never make it to the final.
Year One: Learning to See Our Escape Room Business From the Outside
Our first entry did not get us to the final stage. That was disappointing at the time. But it turned out to be one of the most useful things that happened to us early on.
The desk judging feedback was specific and fair. We had buried our accessibility and sustainability information inside blog posts rather than giving them dedicated pages. Our review responses were warm but not doing enough to build genuine personal connection with guests. The judges asked us for more action shots on the website. Showing people actually inside the rooms rather than just the spaces themselves.
One of the things that struck me reading that feedback was how many of the things the judges flagged were things we already cared about and, in some cases, had already done something about. We just had not presented them clearly or talked about them in our application. The gem map in our reception area, where guests pin where they have travelled from, had been there from the early days. But we had never thought to mention it because it was just always there. The awards process taught us that the things which feel ordinary because you see them every day are often exactly the things worth talking about.
Year Two: The Banana Milkshake Family
The second year brought a pre-announced in-person judge visit. She came with her family under the team name Banana Milkshake, three generations including her daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren, all playing together. What meant a great deal to us was the feedback that all three generations were able to shine throughout the experience, each finding their moment to contribute. That is precisely what we set out to create from the beginning.
An invitation to the awards ceremony came through, and at £90 per person it is extremely reasonable. Some industry events we have been invited to charged several times that. We came away that evening with the Gold Winner award for New Tourism Business of the Year.
The written feedback from that year reflected real progress on the things we had been told to work on. Judges described our accessibility information as easy to find and well illustrated with imagery on the website. Judges praised the consistency of our brand storytelling across website and social media. But there were still things to address, sustainability needing its own standalone page, some tidying of the website navigation, and a push to consider professional marketing support rather than doing everything ourselves.
Year Three: The Mystery Visit
In the third year, we entered a different category, Active and Learning Experience of the Year, and experienced a mystery visit for the first time. We had no idea a judge had come until they announced themselves at the end. The visit happened in August 2025 and covered everything from the initial email enquiry through to the experience itself.
Going in, we were genuinely just hoping for a bronze. We knew from the previous year that being invited to the ceremony meant at least a bronze, so we arrived at the awards night feeling grateful to be there and not expecting anything more. When they announced the Gold in the Active and Learning Experience category, we were thrilled, particularly given the competition in that category included our friends at Raceworld Go Karting in Exeter. On top of that, The ceremony also awarded Ella the Unsung Hero award on the night, which was a proud moment for everyone at Prodigy.
The areas for improvement that year centred on how we presented accessibility information on the website, the home page animation making text harder to read for some visitors, and small physical touches like adding a hearing loop in reception or some colour at the entrance. Specific, actionable, and useful as always.
How the Awards Feedback Improved Our Escape Room Business
Two things stand out above everything else when I think about the concrete impact of going through this process.
The first is how we respond to reviews. Early feedback pointed out that our responses, while friendly, were not doing enough to build personal relationships with guests. We started responding to every review using the customer’s name or referencing something specific from their visit, a birthday, a team name, a moment that stood out. Looking at our review volumes over time, the growth accelerated noticeably once we made that shift. We opened in mid 2022 with a handful of reviews on each platform. By the time of our third award entry, we had over 500 on both TripAdvisor and Google. Mostly at five stars, with Prodigy sitting at number one in the local activities category on TripAdvisor. Reviews are not just reputation management. They are relationship-building, and treating them that way made a real difference.
The second is accessibility. This had always been a core value for us. We sought guidance from an occupational therapist when installing handrails in our toilet and hallways. We worked to ensure all our rooms are wheelchair accessible, and we provide ear defenders, reading glasses, larger print and help sheets as standard. But we had never structured all of that information clearly in one place on the website. Once we built a dedicated accessibility page, something shifted. We started receiving bookings from guests who told us they had chosen Prodigy specifically because of how clearly we had presented the accessibility information. The awards process did not create that commitment, it had always been there, but it pushed us to communicate it in a way that actually reached the people who needed to hear it.
Practical Tips for Escape Room Businesses Entering Tourism Awards
Read the judging criteria carefully before you write anything. The framework is consistent and published, so there is no reason to guess what judges are looking for. Structure your answers to make it easy for them to find the evidence.
Number your points. More than one judge across our submissions commented positively on numbered lists because they make distinct pieces of evidence easier to identify. A wall of prose, however heartfelt, is harder to score.
Quantify your results where you can. Early on we had limited data to draw on, having only opened in mid 2022. Over time we started tracking review volumes, ranking positions and other measurable indicators month by month. Having that data available when writing submissions made our answers considerably stronger.
Give key information its own space on your website before you submit. Accessibility and sustainability content sitting inside blog posts or buried in hard to navigate pages will count against you. Judges assess your website as part of the process. If important information is difficult to find for them, it is difficult to find for your customers too.
Think about what you already do that you have stopped noticing. Some of the most valuable things we talked about in our applications were things we had been doing from the start but had never articulated because they felt normal to us. The awards process is a good prompt to look at your own escape room business with fresh eyes.
And go to the ceremony. Whether you win or not, being in a room full of Devon tourism businesses, hearing what others are doing and how they talk about their work, is worth the evening on its own.
Why This Matters for the Escape Room Industry as a Whole
The escape room industry has a retention challenge that is worth being honest about. Experiences are by their nature best enjoyed fresh, which means getting guests to return means building new rooms, and even then the proportion of players who come back multiple times tends to be small. With around twenty escape room venues within a kilometre of Exeter city centre alone, the question of how we grow the audience together matters as much as how any individual venue performs.
If entering tourism awards helps us all raise our standards, respond more thoughtfully to guests, and communicate more clearly about what we offer and why it matters, then the industry as a whole benefits. New players become returning players. Returning players become advocates. Advocates bring people who have never tried an escape room and did not think it was for them.
I was one of those people once. I am glad someone changed my mind. The least we can all do is make sure we are presenting our best selves to the next person who is on the fence.
If you are an escape room owner who has been thinking about entering a regional tourism award and wondering whether it is worth the effort, I hope this gives you a clearer picture of what you might get out of it. Not just the potential for a trophy, though the Gold ones do look rather good on the shelf, but the structured external perspective on your escape room business that is genuinely hard to get any other way.