News Flashes from Tourist Attractions & Parks Magazine

Barron Games International’s Air Ride –
A Two Player Air Hockey Table In Stock and Shipping Now

A sleeker version of Barron Games’ current two-player redemption air hockey table has arrived. Air Ride is perfect for smaller locations or height restrictions.  It has a sleek updated design with scoring directly on the playfield and blue LED lights along the puck release as well as chasing blue LED lights along the playfield.

Other features include: No overhead bar/scoreboard; Timer and scoring located on the playfield; Aluminum body; Poly-carbonate scratch-free playfield; Side sound sensors; Chasing LED lights along playfield; 10 pucks, four rubber gripped mallets, and spray polish; and Redemption optional. The dimensions are 87 inches by 46 inches by 31 inches and the weight is 330 pounds.

For more information about Air Ride, visit Barron online or email or call the company.  The company will be showing the game at Amusement Expo 2013 at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nev., March 20-22. Stop by and visit Booth # 300 for more information and show special pricing.

Special Tourist Attractions & Parks Newsletter Feature

Improving Cash Handling Procedures at Leisure Entertainment Facilities

Cash may no longer be king, but it will always have a place at leisure entertainment facilities of all kinds. This makes implementing best cash and coin handling practices a must, no matter the operations’ size.

For starters, facilities that utilize changers and/or token dispensing machines should take care to install the units in highly visible areas, where guests are less likely to attempt to tamper with them, advised Wayne Snihur, executive vice president and general manager of American Changer/Hoffman Mint. Managers and other staff members should be instructed to keep a close eye on the units to provide an additional layer of security. One bowling center operator learned this the hard way; it was only after a bill changer was relocated from the back of the arcade to the front — in full view of the front desk/shoe rental counter — that repeated vandalism attempts ceased to occur.

In many instances, automating the entire cash processing scenario proves highly effective. Consider the example of Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tenn. Revenue (cash and internal currency, called “Dolly Dollars”) from about 240 different areas, including food outlets, entertainment venues, and gift shops, is brought to the park’s processing center twice daily; cash from ATMs located throughout the grounds is also reconciled there. Until recently, cash was processed using three to four stand-alone workstations with single-pocket currency scanners. Separate workstations handled coin and “Dolly Dollars.” Currency that was counted and manually bricked at the separate stations was collected and assembled for deposit at the bank.

“With separate stations, operators had to process currency in multiple passes,” explained Debi Gott, account audit supervisor. “Even though currency was sometimes separated by denomination, each batch had to be separated out to face the bills in the same direction and count them, and then processed again with like-kind bills.” Processing batches of currency from the various profit centers took hours, with several additional hours needed to pool and verify all batches to render them ready for deposit.

By contrast, Gott said, an advanced currency sorter (from Cummins-Allison Corp.) runs mixed batches of currency at a speed of 1,000 notes per minute, separating denominations to different collection points and facing each note in the same direction. Each note is scanned for authenticity and counted by denomination as it enters the system, then counted again as it reaches its final destination so as to verify batch count. Notes that appear to be counterfeit or unfit for circulation are “off-sorted” so that an operator can examine them while the batch is being processed. The machine also provides detailed reports by batch and total, and can download the information directly into the theme park’s software. Batch information from the machine is combined on a spreadsheet with coins and Dolly Dollars. All in all, Gott stated, the machine has halved the time needed to process cash receipts at night.

Setting forth internal controls and internal policies/procedures is equally important in proper cash handling.  In August of 2010, the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City, New York suffered the theft of $55,173 in admissions receipts by a single employee who, alone and unsupervised, had controlled numerous aspects of the facility’s cash management process. This had included maintaining custody of cash collections, depositing the cash in the bank, and preparing the daily cash receipts voucher (CRV); the latter were and still are recorded in the museum’s ticketing system at the point where cash is collected. No one in a supervisory or review capacity ascertained that these tasks had been properly completed daily.

After the incident occurred, a decision was made to divide cash-handling responsibilities and, for enhanced security and control, to assign responsibility for maintaining the custody of cash and making daily bank deposits/generating CRVs to two different departments. The operations department now handles the former and the finance department, the latter. Under a new procedures “umbrella,” operations department staff are charged with securing cash received each day by depositing it in the museum’s safe after closing time, documenting that all daily cash receipts have been counted, and verifying the cash count to the cash admission sales amount per a payment summary report generated by the ticketing system. The CFO is responsible for picking up cash from the safe daily and preparing deposit slips, comparing deposit slips to the admission report and ticketing system, reviewing voided transactions using a new report from the ticketing system, and making daily bank deposits. Meanwhile, members of the finance department staff ensure that cash is indeed deposited into the bank, prepare the CRVs, and ensure CRV accuracy/completion.