In late 2024. Glasgow police were called to an event in the city after several complaints were made about an event in the city, billed as a ‘celebration of chocolate in all its delightful forms’. Some families spent hundreds of pounds on tickets, only to fins that the ‘experience’ was merely a sparsely decorated warehouse with a bouncy castle, cheap plastic props and unscripted actors. This prompted an outraged backlash on a multitude of social media platforms. Subsequently, the organising event company ‘House of Illuminati’ are under investigation but have refused to issue full refunds as of early March 2024. The full Independent article on the topic is viewable below.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/willy-wonka-experience-glasgow-refunds-b2511906.html
Points to consider:
Is it fair to have an open market for organising events and attractions without regulation? Is this particular incident fraud and illegal?
Is quality control important in relation to visitor attractions management? If so, then how can quality be ensured?
Will this cause issues for the Wonka brand and have an impact on the wider attractions industry?
How does social media impact the reporting of incidents such as these?
The Attraction 
I believe it is not fair to have an open market when organising large scale immersive events such as the Willy Wonka experience and there should be regulations in place to ensure quality control and value for money is met before these attractions are allowed to open. However, one thing these event organisers have excelled at is their marketing – similarly to Fyre Festival the organisers marketed their event effectively through social media leading to boom in ticket sales. The marketing promises did their job, the tickets were sold and the expectations were set high but they failed to deliver the promises, therefore this shows the importance of not getting marketing and sales disconnected from event operations and delivery (Roberts, 2024). In other terms, in the world of events it’s better to under promise and over deliver, rather than over promise and under deliver… otherwise be prepared to face the harsh reality of social media!
The recent scandal also highlights the dangers of AI within marketing as all the content, even down to the actors scripts and characters were AI generated. However, I believe you cannot fully blame AI for this poorly executed event as technology doesn’t create scams, scammers create the scams. In terms of the Willy Wonker experience, AI technology fell into the hands of people who used it irresponsibly to fraud families out of money.
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In order to open an immersive event like House of Illuminati, the events should have a quality assurance certificate to ensure the customers are getting the equal quality to how much they are paying. To market this event they has used AI, which it is obvious that this will demonstrate a completely different appearance as they aim for the event. Regardless, the events was very poorly decorated and failed to meet the standard they advertised. Overnight the disastrous event turned into a global sensation and the most popular story in a majority of news channels.
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