By Lee Cowie, CEO, accesso Technology Group 

There are moments in an industry’s history that define everything that follows. The companies that recognise them early, and move with conviction, shape the decade ahead. This is one of those moments.

What this industry gives you, and I didn’t fully appreciate it until I was deep inside Merlin and responsible for the technology that tens of millions of guests interact with every year, is relatability. My kids can point at a theme park, an aquarium, a museum, and say: my Dad helps make that happen. Beyond everything we strive for in our careers, moments like that matter most.

I joined accesso as Chief Operating Officer fifteen months ago. I step into the CEO role today with an unshakeable belief in the opportunities ahead.

Over the past 25 years, the team at accesso has built the technology backbone of the global business of fun. More than 1,100 venues across 31 countries run with us. Ticketing, queuing, point of sale, payments, distribution, membership, guest experience. The operational infrastructure that makes a day out work at scale, reliably, day after day, across attractions, ski, entertainment, hospitality and cultural institutions. Steve Brown, who founded the accesso business and led it through its most formative years, leaves behind a legacy that is genuinely rare.

What I step into is an ecosystem with real scale, a business model whose top line is tied to the outcomes it delivers for customers, and a team that knows this industry from the inside.

Building on the foundation Steve has put in place, I arrive with a clear view of the direction this company needs to take next.

I’ve spent my time inside accesso so far working alongside the team to plant the seeds for that future. Three moves matter most. The acquisition of Dexibit and the launch of accesso Intelligence to establish the industry’s intelligence layer. A payments strategy that collapses the frustrating old model of operators and visitors paying two sets of fees into one, embedded across everything we do. And working with the team to bring the pieces together, so that every product we have built over a quarter century feels simple and intuitive to our customers, delivering the sophistication the industry needs with the simplicity time stressed customers demand. I arrive in this role ready to execute.

Which brings me to this moment.

I’ve worked across enough industries to recognise an inflection point when I’m standing in one. Financial services at Aviva, when the dot com era arrived and every insurer was racing to reinvent itself online. Broadcast at Ericsson, where streaming dismantled the scheduled grid and appointment viewing gave way to on demand in a handful of years. Hospitality at Nando’s, where digital ordering and delivery platforms rewired the relationship between operator and guest. And now attractions, which I have been inside through the COVID reset and which AI is reshaping again. Four industries, four inflection points. The pattern was the same each time: the companies that kept investing through the disruption came out defining the era that followed.

The business of fun is in one of those moments now. Cost of living pressure has met permanently elevated expectations, and every visit is a considered decision rather than a habit. On top of that, the AI era has arrived. The industry sits at the intersection of the kind of critical-moment infrastructure that broadcast taught us to build well, and the discretionary spend that hospitality has learnt never to take for granted.

As an industry, we have done hard things to get here. COVID changed the relationship with visitors overnight through capacity limits, timed entry and virtual queuing. Systems that had been on roadmaps for years became urgent in weeks. What I took from living through it at Merlin is that the companies that emerge strongest from disruption are the ones that kept investing through it.

Each era built on the last. But each era left something on the table, not through failure but focus. You can’t do everything at once. Data, and now AI, kept getting deferred because it could.

It can’t anymore.

Here’s what the data is telling us about where the industry stands right now. accesso Intelligence’s 2026 Voice of the Visitor report analysed millions of visitor reviews across hundreds of attractions globally over a full decade. The finding that most surprised me, and that I think most operators have not yet fully absorbed, is this: the industry has not recovered from COVID. It recalibrated downward. Positive visitor sentiment slipped to 58%. Negative remarks climbed to 25%. Disappointment is running at its highest level since the pandemic.

Operators who are still measuring themselves against 2019 are chasing a ceiling they may not reach. And this year, the headwinds are real and simultaneous. Geopolitical instability. Oil prices squeezing travel markets. Inflation eroding both visitor budgets and operator margins. Currency volatility making international visitation harder to predict or plan for. This is the market we are playing in, and it is exactly the market that rewards what accesso does best. Tough conditions make sharper businesses. They make the difference between an intelligent decision and a guess matter more, not less.

That context matters for everything that follows. The AI era is not arriving into a comfortable, stable market. It is arriving into one where expectations have permanently shifted, economics are reshaping every value calculation, and the gap between excellence and simply sufficient is widening.

The industry needs intelligence. Not in the form of more data, but the judgment that good data enables. It needs it more urgently than at any point in its history. It also needs that intelligence to run on infrastructure that works, on transactions that don’t punish the visitor for choosing to spend with us, and on systems that finally feel like one connected experience rather than a collection of bolted-together tools. None of those things can wait.

One finding from our report captures the stakes precisely. When we compared the highest rated attractions in the world against the lowest, we found that staff friendliness mentions were virtually identical between the two groups. The difference between the best and the worst is not warmer service. We cannot out-smile real challenges. Visitors need their venues to have better systems, better transaction infrastructure, better communication to support the incredible experiences they offer. In other words: the fingerprint of excellence is operational and technological, not just human.

That is what the AI era can deliver. That is why this moment is different.

The AI era in the business of fun is not one question. It is three, and I think about all of them.

The intelligence question. How do operators make better decisions with speed and confidence, grounded in data they can trust? Across functions such as pricing, staffing, capacity, programming, most operators are still making critical decisions from spreadsheets, gut feel and fragmented systems that do not talk to each other. The ski operator who knows a weather system two states away changes next week’s bookings. The museum director who needs to understand not just how many visitors came, but which exhibition held them longest and why. The festival operator who sells out in hours and then has to manage a million micro decisions about access, movement and spend across three days. The question is whether the strategic and operational intelligence is meeting the moment.

This is the work accesso Intelligence is doing. Forecasting, benchmarking, conversational insight, democratised data experience, data automation and the elimination of spreadsheets as operators’ default tool. We acquired Dexibit because they had built something that would have taken us years to replicate: a cross vendor intelligence network with genuine industry context, not just data. The goal is operators arriving at their Monday morning with a point of view rather than a pile of numbers.

The agentic question. Intelligence leads somewhere. The logical end of good insight, consistently delivered, is that some decisions can be executed with a human in the loop and some can be executed 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 is not to remove people from operations. It is to free them from the work that machines do well, so they can focus on the work that only people can do: judgment, creativity, relationships, and the moments that turn a transaction into an experience. The question is not whether or when agentic operations come to our industry. We intend to be the infrastructure they run on.

But infrastructure has to be connected. An agent cannot act across systems that do not speak to each other. This is why one of the most important things happening at accesso right now is the integration work across our product estate. We have spent 25 years assembling best in breed capabilities through build and acquisition. Each one remains individually strong. The next chapter is making the sum greater than the parts, so that our customers experience accesso as one connected ecosystem, and so that the agents of tomorrow can act across the whole surface of an operation, not just a slice of it.

The visitor at the prompt line question. Edgar Dunn projects that AI agents will account for 37% of UK ticket sales by 2028. That is not a distant forecast. It is a near term operational reality, and the infrastructure needs to be in place now. The entire ecommerce layer of today was designed for a human being making a decision on a screen. Choosing a date, selecting tickets, adding extras, checking out. That assumption is changing fast. Deloitte found that nearly a quarter of travellers were already using AI tools to plan their visits by late 2025, three times the rate of just three years earlier, and before fully integrated booking experiences were even widely available. Our own data at accesso Intelligence shows AI driven traffic to visitor attraction websites grew threefold last year.

An AI agent that does not just refer but books is not theoretical, even as Silicon Valley is discovering how complex that challenge is. It is the next point on a curve that is already moving. Does our personalisation still work when the visitor is not the one making the decision? Does the guest experience we have designed for human psychology still apply? These are the big questions we are already building answers for.

And when that agent reaches checkout, the transaction infrastructure underneath has to disappear. Visitors and operators should not pay for the seam between our systems and someone else’s, and in a world where every friction gets exposed at machine speed, they will not tolerate it. That is why we have been embedding integrated payments across our products, collapsing multiple vendor relationships into one. One operator relationship. One reconciliation. One set of economics. This is our direction of travel for payments in every product we offer.

The companies asking these questions now will be better positioned than those who ask them later.

I raise these not to be unsettling, but because I think honest leaders name the hard questions rather than paper over them. This AI era requires both conviction and humility.

None of this replaces the operational foundation. Operators still need to sell a ticket, scan a pass, manage a queue, process a payment, run a gate, hand over a key, admit a guest to an exhibit, check a lift ticket on a mountain. Those systems have to work at volume, under pressure, without failure, and connect cleanly into an agentic future, on the busiest Saturday of the year when everything is on the line. accesso has built infrastructure that operators trust with exactly those moments, prepared for what the future demands.

AI makes it more intelligent, not less necessary. If anything, as decisions get more automated and the pace of operations accelerates, the reliability of the underlying platform matters more, not less. That is a point I want the industry to hear clearly. In the AI era, the operational backbone is not the boring bit. It is the load bearing bit.

Here is why we lead.

I have sat on both the operator and the vendor sides. I know what it means to build technology for operators at scale, not just use it. That dual fluency matters more now than it ever has.

Across accesso, we have something that can’t be vibe coded. A workforce of 600+ steeped in the business of fun. Many are operators who became builders. People who have run ticketing desks, managed queues, opened venues at dawn, closed resorts in a snowstorm, handled box office rushes, ushered exhibits, cleaned and reset and reopened, made decisions in the middle of a busy Saturday with incomplete information and a guest complaint on hold. The rest of us have spent our careers learning this industry from the inside, building alongside them. This is not a coincidence. It’s our culture.

We understand the 10am rush not because we modelled it, but because we’ve lived it and managed it. Across visitor attractions, ski, live entertainment, hospitality and cultural institutions.

That understanding is the context layer that makes accesso Intelligence meaningful rather than generic. It is what makes our payments infrastructure match how operators run their businesses. It is what makes our backbone hold up when it matters. Any company can point a large language model at data. Only we know what the context means, across roles, domains, systems, attributes. How experiences create awe. Which queue length triggers a negative cascade. Which pricing decision finely balances revenue with experience. Which weather pattern closes a run. Which opening day flow makes or breaks a season. We know these things because our people have spent their careers learning them.

What is coming is an era that will reshape how our venues are run, how guests experience them, how technology serves them, and how accesso creates value. Faster than the ecommerce era, as consequential as the mobile era, and with a pace of change that rivals what we saw during COVID. The difference is that this time we can see it coming, and we can build for it deliberately.

I am not anxious about this. We are ready for it.

This is the moment we have been building for.

About Lee Cowie

Lee Cowie is CEO of accesso Technology Group, the leading technology partner to the global business of fun. He brings more than two decades of technology leadership across some of the world’s most operationally demanding businesses.

He was previously CTO at Merlin Entertainments, the world’s second largest attractions operator. And, he led Group Technology at Nando’s, overseeing systems across more than 1,200 locations in 30 countries. Earlier in his career, he worked at Ericsson in the broadcast division, building the infrastructure behind how the world watched television, and began his career at Aviva during the dot com era, where financial services were being reinvented online in real time.

He holds an MBA from Henley Business School and a BSc from Imperial College London.