FatCats has a rich history in family entertainment. Since their beginning, they have combined the experiences of bowling and arcades with food and beverage, bringing people together to have unforgettable experiences.

Now operating eight cinema entertainment centres across Idaho, Utah, and Arizona, FatCats aims “to delight and connect people, one film, one game, one experience at a time”.

Cory Hernandez, Director of Operations, explained that in a world growing increasingly lonely, FatCats aims to provide places where guests of all ages can escape that loneliness together.

“At FatCats, we take this idea very seriously, of delighting and connecting people.”

Digital Enablement provided the ideal solution

With guest experience at the forefront of their business, FatCats sought to redefine their digital experiences. “We wanted a solution on app and web that was robust, reliable, secure,” Cory said, “and we wanted to have a partner we felt could provide support. A partner we could be confident in.”

Over the past three years, Vista and FatCats worked closely in their journey to Vista Cloud to achieve the right solution for their needs. With Vista Cloud’s Digital Enablement solution, Lumos, covering web, mobile apps, and kiosks, FatCats solved a number of problems and concerns they previously faced: stability, user experience, and innovative development.

The confidence of scalability and resilience

“Our [previous] web solution had traffic problems,” Cory said. When a blockbuster launched, FatCats struggled to keep their website live and delivering ticketing for their guests. Website uptime, especially during the launch of major blockbusters, is a key business contributor for exhibitors during the biggest moments of the year.

With their new website, mobile app, and kiosks powered by Lumos, FatCats now enjoy the robust scalability of Vista Cloud’s Core Confidence. Proactive and automatic scaling provides increased capacity during times of peak activity to ensure FatCats stay live and able to sell tickets during these vital periods. “Now, our downtime is practically zero.”

User-centricity

One of FatCats strategies whenever they look at tech solutions is to ask two questions: “is it easy for the guests?” and “is it easy for our team members?”

Lumos has enabled FatCats’ guests to enjoy a seamless best-in-class experience across their platforms. “Guests expect to have a seamless experience whether they are interacting with a website, an app, or a kiosk, and with Lumos they’re able to get that,” Cory said.

“The Lumos CMS is incredibly user friendly,” he continued. FatCats operate with a small team; they don’t have the resources for dedicated web development teams, and so the ability for their users to make changes and interact with the CMS of their website is highly important to them. With an intuitive experience for both their guests and team members, the FatCats team are able to make the most of their digital channels with ease.

Continuous innovation

With the resources available to FatCats, one of the qualities they specifically searched for in a web solution was the opportunity to expand their feature capabilities in the future without devoting extraneous time and resources on internal development.

“With Lumos, that was one of the things we’ve been able to solve,” Cory said. “We’ve been able to add some feature sets without having to spend a ton of money on development.”

Ongoing innovation is a core component of Vista Cloud. With the new Vista Roadmap, exhibitors like FatCats can see Vista’s newly released and ongoing developments, features, and releases across all of Vista Cloud.

“I have the Roadmap bookmarked as one of my favourites because I check it so often!” Cory added. “We are really excited about a lot of the features coming to the F&B world, and elements like enabling guests with self-service refunds across multiple payment types is something that’s really exciting for us.”

FatCats’ Cloud journey was driven by a collaborative approach, with Vista’s support and partnership being instrumental to their successful transition to Digital Enablement. “It’s been a three-year project, and Vista has been there really every step of the way,” said Cory. “It feels like there is a partnership and Vista wants us to succeed just as much as we want to succeed.”