Laura Watson

Experience expert

With 20 years working in visitor attractions, theme parks and tourism companies, and now working as a consultant to support clients, Laura’s passion is in delivering an exceptional customer experience.

Through a deep and thorough understanding of what makes someone love an experience, she have been responsible for delivering events at some of the most successful and world-renowned experiential brands in the UK.

As Visitor Experience Director for Warner Bros. Studio Tour London – The Making of Harry Potter, Laura was an integral part of the senior team that was responsible for the concept, design and development of the start-up attraction. This included the red carpet launch and Royal inauguration, as well as designing and implementing the visitor experience strategy, which resulted in a new benchmark in customer satisfaction amongst peers, achieving the best TripAdvisor scores ever to be seen.

Laura’s breadth of experience not only includes working with large-scale, multi-million projects (including Warwick Castle and Madame Tussauds) but also smaller heritage projects and companies such as MK gallery and Chatham Historic Dockyard. In addition to her work with clients, she is also on the Board of Trustees for the ‘Institute of Imagination’; a children’s charity who design and deliver creative learning programs, products, and platforms across the arts, sciences and digital technologies.

Expertise

  • Show production + development

  • Management team support + mentoring

  • Visitor experience strategy

  • Project development, management + budget handling

  • Support of ticketing, customer service + admission strategy

  • Creative secondary spend development

  • Development of on brand, immersive commercial experience

  • New openings

  • Staff development + training

Favourite shop

My favourite type of shop is a book shop! Primarily as I love books and so does my son. I love to get lost amongst the shelves and the smell of books is a total relaxation trigger for me.

I particularly like book shops that are immersive; ones with caves or trains built out of book or just comfortable chairs where you can lose yourself in the stories. If you can get a coffee, well then that’s the golden ticket!

Any shop that is provocative enough to get an emotional reaction out of me will have me visiting time and time again.