2026 Industry Report: The Guest Experience Gap
Guest expectations are rising faster than the systems supporting them.
Across the food and entertainment industry, venues are investing in new experiences, new formats, and new technology—but the guest journey itself is increasingly fragmented. Booking platforms don’t connect to check-in systems. Kiosks fail when lines get long. Mobile ordering stalls. Staff are forced to step in and manually fix problems technology was supposed to solve.
To understand what guests actually experience, Frogslayer conducted a field study of more than 50 entertainment venues across Texas markets. Our team visited locations as real guests—booking online, waiting in lines, ordering food, navigating check-in, and interacting with staff—while documenting every point where the experience broke down.
The result is The Guest Experience Gap, a research report that reveals the systemic failures shaping guest experiences today and what operators can do to fix them.
Conducted in collaboration with Dr. Bradley S. Wesner of Texas A&M University, the research combines frontline observations, usability analysis, and technical evaluation to uncover where friction originates—and why it repeats across venues.
What You’ll Learn
This report breaks down the most consequential patterns we observed across the industry, including:
- The Top 10 problems killing guest experience and revenue
- Where friction clusters across the 6-stage guest journey
- Why disconnected systems create operational breakdowns
- How these issues manifest across different venue types
- The highest-leverage opportunities to modernize guest experience systems
For operators, the message is clear: experience is the product in food and entertainment—and experience depends on systems that actually work together.
This research offers a clear, evidence-based view of where the industry stands today—and where the greatest opportunities for transformation lie.
Want a physical copy of this report? Email tori.maddux@frogslayer.com and we’ll ship you one.
