The new balance

Dear James,

Thank-you for your email regarding your visit to the Empire High Wycombe, which has been passed to me as General Manager of the site. I was very disappointed to hear of the experience you had.

Saturday evening, as I am sure you are aware was extremely busy, with Avatar, in fact, more popular on Saturday than any previous day since it’s opening in December. It was very clear from your comments that the number of staff working was not sufficient for this level of business, and this was further impacted by sickness.

Clearly this does not excuse the poor service on offer. I can state that everyone working at that time was doing their best to try to get everyone into the screen as quickly as possible, however, I take on board your comments that more effective communication would certainly have aided us.

I am not sure if you are a regular visitor to the cinema, but if you are, I hope you will agree that the issues you experienced on Saturday evening are not commonplace at the cinema.

If you would kindly reply to this email with details of your postal address, I would be happy to send you out some guest tickets so that you may visit the cinema again. I am confident that your next visit will be a much more enjoyable one, but would welcome any further comments you may have.


Yours sincerely



Paul Damms

General Manager

I attended Empire High Wycombe today to find the place in complete chaos. Queues snaked slowly around the foyer, confused customers tried to find someone to answer their questions, staff were scarce. There appeared to be no effective management at all; no one taking responsibility.

The box office was shut this very busy Saturday night, presumably to keep costs down. There was a lot of unhappy conversation between customers. I suspect you will lose a great many.

These seemed to be the issues:

- too few staff, none of them in control

- no clear information about where booked tickets could be picked up - many did not realise that all desks could print tickets, not just the machines.

- only three machines, one of which developed a card-reader fault and would not print any more tickets.

- only one person checking tickets for the Avatar showing, and taking a long time about it.

- no announcement from staff to explain that the feature would be delayed to give everyone a chance to get in, so there was some concern that people would miss the beginning, and those that were already inside and seated were subjected to the advertising twice.

My irritation would have been salved somewhat if I had not paid an additional card handling fee for booking in advance in the first place. Where is the logic in that? You must also be paying for box office card purchases. Why pass this on separately to the customer?

I'm influential amongst my friends. Unless you can make amends in a satisfactory way, I won't attend an Empire again, and I'll discourage people I know from taking the risk. The excellent feature experience was marred by chaos, disorganisation and bad pre-planning by Empire. There is no excuse for being a victim of your own popularity when you have all the visitor data that you do. Today's jaunt was a disappointment.

Thanks for your time.
J.