Dubai Wants to Export Something Terrifying

By Sean Goldsmith

Cave Entertainment wants to franchise UAE horror attractions. Making customers scream is only useful if another operator can make the economics work too.

Cave Entertainment has spent years making people pay to be terrified across the UAE. Now it wants franchise partners, which means teaching somebody else how to make customers scream and somehow make money from it.

Dubai has franchises for almost everything. Burgers, gyms, salons, coffee shops and enough restaurant brands to ensure nobody should ever go hungry.

Now you can apparently franchise terror.

Cave Entertainment is the UAE company behind horror and immersive attractions including Black Out, Horror Hotel, Haunted Mansion and Supernatural Haunted House. Its concepts operate across Dubai and Abu Dhabi, including at Global Village, Wafi City and the Zayed Festival, and the company is now looking for franchise and growth partners.

I rather like the idea that somewhere there could soon be a franchise manual explaining exactly where an employee should stand in the dark before frightening the life out of a paying customer.

It sounds ridiculous, but that is also what makes Cave an interesting franchise business. A restaurant can tell a franchisee how long to cook a burger. Cave has to teach one how to reproduce fear consistently enough that customers keep paying for it.

The Staff Are Being Paid to Terrify You

Cave's attractions depend on sets, lighting, sound, puzzles, guest movement and live actors. That means the person hiding around the corner can be every bit as important as the expensive scenery surrounding them.

Get the timing right and customers leave laughing, screaming and telling their friends. Get it wrong and you have a group of adults wandering around a dark building wondering why they paid for it.

That makes franchising the concept harder than it first appears. Sets can be copied, costumes specified and equipment bought, but getting different employees in different locations to deliver a convincing experience every night is considerably harder.

Cave says its franchise support includes operating guidelines, staff training, experience-flow systems, launch planning and ongoing creative development. In this business, those aren't dull head-office procedures. They determine whether the attraction is actually any good.

There’s One Big Problem With Scaring Someone Twice

A brilliant scare has an annoying habit of working best when you don't know it is coming. Once customers know what is behind the door, putting the same actor in the same place becomes considerably less effective.

Cave has some protection against that because it operates several concepts and formats rather than relying on one haunted attraction. Black Out combines horror with escape-room puzzles in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, while Horror Hotel operates at Global Village and Supernatural Haunted House uses professional actors at Wafi City.

The company also says ongoing creative development forms part of its franchise support. That makes sense because keeping the experience fresh is likely to be part of the cost of keeping customers interested.

Dubai has another enormous advantage: tourists. Yesterday's visitor may know where the monster is hiding, but today's tourist from London, Mumbai or Johannesburg has never met him.

A franchisee in a city with fewer visitors may have a harder job. They need to understand how frequently the attraction must change, how much those changes cost and what persuades local customers to return once they have already survived it.

Why Should the Gulf Keep Buying Everyone Else’s Franchises?

There is another reason I like Cave.

For years, the familiar Gulf franchise story has involved an American or European company finding a Middle Eastern partner. The overseas brand supplies the concept, while somebody in Dubai, Riyadh, Doha or Abu Dhabi supplies the capital and local knowledge.

Cave is trying to send the idea the other way.

This is a UAE-developed company attempting to package concepts and operating knowledge built in the Emirates and put them into the hands of partners elsewhere. Cave announced new franchise opportunities in January, saying it wants to expand across the GCC.

We should be seeing more of that.

The Gulf has spent decades importing franchises and learning how to operate international brands in demanding retail, hospitality and leisure markets. There is no good reason for all that experience to result in the region permanently paying franchise fees to businesses created somewhere else.

Cave still has to prove its concepts can travel. What frightens a customer in Dubai may need changing elsewhere, while attitudes towards horror, physical interaction and entertainment vary between markets. That is exactly the sort of problem a serious franchisor needs to solve before a franchisee spends money opening the doors.

The Really Frightening Bit Is What It Costs

Before anybody gets carried away with the idea of owning a haunted house, there are some considerably less entertaining questions to answer.

Cave does not currently publish enough detailed investment and unit-performance information for us to judge what an individual franchise might cost or earn. Any serious prospective partner should therefore want to know how much an attraction costs to open, how many customers can move through it every hour, how many employees are needed and what happens to attendance once the excitement of opening wears off.

They should also establish what it costs to keep changing the experience. An attraction requiring new sets, effects, actors or storylines could need regular investment simply to persuade existing customers to return.

Those numbers are considerably more important than the screams.

Cave has already demonstrated that people in the UAE will pay to be frightened across several different formats and locations. Franchising now asks whether another operator can reproduce the experience, control the costs and keep customers coming through the door without Cave's original team running the show.

If it can, the UAE may have created a wonderfully strange franchise export. And frankly, I'll take that over another imported burger chain.

What We Can Learn From This

Cave Entertainment shows why experience franchises have to control what employees do as carefully as the physical concept around them. Prospective partners should establish customer capacity, staffing requirements, repeat visits and the cost of regularly changing an attraction before becoming distracted by how good the concept looks. Cave also represents something the Gulf should be producing more often: locally developed businesses capable of being franchised beyond their home market. If Middle Eastern franchising continues to mature, more of the franchise fees should eventually be travelling back into the region.