b'2021 CONVENTION PREVIEWnBY BEN QUIGGLE dates, trends and how the system has fared over the past year. LSIs Symposium to Offer Educational,The events keynote speaker will be Jesse Cole, owner of the minor league baseball team The Savannah Bananas. He was recently pro-filed by ESPN. EntertainmentOptionswiththeHis key tagline is whatever is normal, do the exact opposite, and Behnke said Cole will be speaking on that thought during the sym-Theme, Smore Than Just Camping posium. It is about creating an experience, she explained. He is going to be spending some time with our franchisees and providing them with Heading back to the Northern Kentucky Conventionan experience that we hope will then pass on to what they do at theirRob SchutterCenter in Covington, Ky., this year, Milford, Ohio-basedparks. Leisure Systems Inc. (LSI) is set to welcome Yogi BearsEducational sessions at the symposium will focus on customer service and staffing, Jellystone Park Camp-Resort franchisees back to an in- said Behnke. person Symposium.Those seem to be hot issues for our park owners at the moment, she highlighted. An annual event, the Yogi Bears Jellystone Park Sym- We have had many of our park owners who are extremely short-staffed and that in posium & Trade Show will be held Nov. 7-10.turn leads to poor customer service. We really want to make sure that we are teaching Registrations are coming in strong, noted Marleythem how to deal with customer service issues when they are short-staffed and still Behnke, LSIs director of franchisee education. Our franchisees were disappointedcreating that great customer experience. last year when we had to cancel.Outside of customer service and staffing, were going to have sessions focused on The symposium will be operating a slightly condensed schedule in 2021 to give ven- marketing and other key topics, Behnke added. Daredevil Consulting is going to be dors and franchisees more time to travel to other shows that are happening aroundcoming and doing three different sessions on dynamic pricing, different revenue op-the same time. Instead of running Sunday through Thursday, the symposium will endportunities, as well as managing, motivating and getting the best out of your frontline on Wednesday.staff. There are just a lot of trade shows and we wanted to make sure that we made theRegistration on the vendor side is going smoothly, according to Behnke, with 90-best use of our franchisees time while we have them, so we condensed it and maxi- 120 vendors expected to take part in the symposiums expo. mized each day to the fullest, said Behnke.We have enough space for 150 vendors if we get a ton of interest, she noted. We To kick off the symposium, LSIs CEO and president Rob Schutter will highlight up- have some vendors who are just waiting to confirm due to some of the COVID issues that have sprung up again. There are deadlines, however, to register as a vendor at the event. LSI has eliminated the auction for 2021s symposium, according to Behnke. We have done one almost every year and this year we are not, solely because our inventory is so low, she explained. Its a good problem to have. Our retail team has knocked it out of the park this year. Our parks have done exceedingly well with our store merchandise, and we just legitimately dont have the items to auction for them. We will be doing some other things internally, as far as 50-50 raffles, our candy bar horse races and some fun events like that to raise money for our recreation commit-tee, Behnke added. There will also be some unique entertainment options for attendees that revolve around the theme of this years symposium, Smore Than Just Camping. Behnke noted that a few new vendors were going to be offering attendees the chance to use their equipment and explore some of the entertaining options park owners can offer to their campers. It isnt very often that park owners actually get to enjoy the amenities they offer at their parks because they buy them for their campers, she explained. This gives them a night to do something like that. One vendor is going to be bringing Silent Disco, which is essentially a dance party where the participant puts on headphones that indicate through color which type of music channel they are listening to. You might have a country channel, a rock channel or a pop channel, Behnke said. Each participant then dances according to the music they are listening to. It is an experience we would encourage our owners to think about offering at their parks, Behnke added. She did note that there were other activities outside of the dancing that are planned. Attendees dont have to worry about dancing if they dont want to, Behnke noted. Because of the move back to Coving-tonandtheshortenedsymposium, Behnke did say that there were not going to be any off-site excursions in 2021. What about the COVID factor?Behnke said that LSI has been think-ing about what its backup plan would look like if the conference was shut down due to COVID-related issues. Our goal is certainly to make sure that the environment is safe for every-body. That will be the first concern., she explained. If Kentucky was to shut down or eliminate gatherings and Ohio was not eliminating them, we would hope-fully then transfer into Ohio. We have our consultant vetting out some additional venues that could host us. That is our backup plan at the moment. We cer-tainly want to make sure we can do right by our franchisees depending on what that is. Whether its safety for them or being able to just put in safety precau-tions like extra sanitizer, sanitizing the rooms and all of those kinds of things. To learn more about the Yogi Bears JellystoneParkSymposium&Trade Showheadtohttps://website.event-power.com/21LSYS-ANNUAL/ WCM20 November 2021Woodalls Campground Magazine'