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Industry Insider


from 'are we executing?' to 'are we executing the right things?' You're setting the direction, not just the pace. And you're accountable for the story to the accesso team, to our clients, to the investors, to the entire industry. What the COO role gave me, which I think is truly valuable, is that I


arrived in this CEO position knowing where we are, understanding what's working and what isn't, and helping to put in place the foundations for what comes next. The three strategic priorities I'm now driving are accesso Intelligence, our payments strategy, and the integration work across our product estate, those weren't hatched in the first weeks of a new CEO tenure. They were planted and started to take shape during my time as COO.


MB: How has the first half of 2026 been for accesso? LC: It's been a significant period. A few things stand out. The CEO transition itself is obviously a big change. Steve Brown passing


the baton after 25 years of building this company is not a small thing. It was carefully planned, and I think the way it’s been handled reflects well on the kind of organisation accesso is. The launch of accesso Intelligence has been a genuine milestone.


We acquired Dexibit earlier this year specifically because they had built something it would have taken us years to replicate, a cross-venue intelligence network with real industry context, not just raw data. The 2026 Voice of the Visitor report, which we published this year, is the first public expression of what that capability can do. Millions of visitor reviews, hundreds of attractions, a decade of data. The findings are genuinely illuminating and in some cases, uncomfortable for the industry to sit with. And underneath all of that, the integration work and the payments strategy


have been progressing. These don't always make headlines, but they matter enormously to the operators we work with.


MB: Is there an overall mission guiding your efforts this year? LC: I'd put it this way: the business of fun is in one of the most consequential moments in its history, and accesso's job is to make sure the operators we work with are equipped for what that moment demands and for what comes next. That sounds broad, so let me make it specific. Our Voice of the Visitor


data tells us that visitor expectations have permanently reset upward, while sentiment has recalibrated downward. The gap between what guests expect and what many operators are currently delivering is wider than the industry has fully absorbed. At the same time, the AI era is arriving. It’s here. Right now. The decisions attractions operators make about their technology infrastructure in the next 18 months will determine whether they're positioned to lead the next decade or catch up to it. The mission, if you want to call it that, is for accesso to be the partner that


helps operators make those decisions well with better intelligence, simpler infrastructure, and a platform that's built for where this industry is genuinely going, not where it's been.


MB: Is AI starting to play a significant role in your products? LC: The honest answer is: yes, but I'd push back on the framing slightly. The question I find more useful than 'is AI in your products' is 'what problems does AI actually solve for the operators you work with?' Because AI that doesn't answer that question is just a feature on a slide. For us, AI shows up in three distinct ways, and I think about all three


continuously . The first is intelligence helping operators make better decisions about


their business faster. accesso Intelligence is doing this now: forecasting, benchmarking, conversational insight, data automation. The goal is eliminating the spreadsheet as the default decision-making tool for an


SUMMER 2026


industry that runs on critical-moment infrastructure. The second is what I'd call the agentic question: which decisions can


eventually run with a human in the loop, or even autonomously under human supervision? Dynamic pricing that adjusts overnight. Staffing recommendations that trigger before a manager asks. Campaign offers that fire based on pre-purchase patterns. The point isn't to remove people from operations. It's to free them from the work machines do well, so they can focus on what only people can do with judgment, creativity, and making the guest memories that turn a transaction into an experience. The third is the one that I think the industry hasn't fully grappled with yet.


Edgar Dunn projects that AI agents will account for 37% of UK ticket sales by 2028. That's a near-term operational reality. The entire ecommerce layer we've built was designed for a human being making a decision on a screen. That assumption is changing fast. Operators need infrastructure that's ready for a world where an AI agent, not a guest, is completing the transaction. We're building for that. And I want to make one point that I think gets lost in the AI conversation:


the operational backbone matters more in this era, not less. As decisions become more automated and the pace of operations accelerates, the reliability of the underlying platform becomes the load-bearing wall. AI makes the infrastructure more critical and operators need reliable infrastructure.


MB: Any predictions for big changes in your sector over the next few years? LC: Yes, I have a few. I think visitor expectations are going to continue diverging from operator capability in ways that will force genuine investment decisions. Our data shows that the gap between the best and worst-rated attractions in the world isn't staff friendliness, those scores are virtually identical. The difference is operational and technological. Operators who haven't absorbed that finding are going to feel it more acutely as guests become less forgiving. You can't out-smile a bad system. I think the AI agent story is going to move faster than most people expect.


The infrastructure for AI-assisted booking is being built now by the platforms guests already use for travel, entertainment, and commerce. The attractions industry needs to be ready to transact with those agents, not just be visible to them. That's an infrastructure question as much as a marketing one. I also think the economics of the industry are going to drive consolidation


both on the operator side and the technology side. Cost of living pressure, margin compression, the need to invest in technology at a moment when budgets are tight that combination favours operators with scale and technology partners with depth. The days of stitching together point solutions from a dozen vendors are numbered.


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