If a competitor charges more than you and is still in business, their price is not what is stopping people coming to them.
That one sentence resolves most pricing arguments I have with clients, because the strategy they arrive with is almost always the same: be cheaper than the venue across town.
Cheaper is not a position. It is a promise to work harder for less, and the person you are competing with can match it any afternoon they feel like it.
Competing on price is a race to the bottom
When the only reason to choose you is cost, you have made your margin the product.
You have to sell more visits to earn the same money. You have less to spend on staff, on maintenance, on marketing, and on the things that would have made you worth choosing for a better reason. And the moment somebody undercuts you, your entire differentiator belongs to them.
Meanwhile the competitor charging $10 more per person is funding better equipment and better hiring with the difference.
People buying an experience read price as quality
This is the part that is specific to our industry.
Customers here are not just spending money, they are spending time off they do not get much of. That changes the psychology completely. Somebody with one free Friday this month is not trying to find the cheapest option, they are trying to avoid wasting the evening.
Price is one of the few signals available before they arrive, and people generally read a higher price as a better experience. So the cheapest venue in town is not just earning less per head, it is actively signalling to the customers with the most disposable income that it is the lower-quality choice.
The grocery version is Walmart against Whole Foods. Plenty of the products are comparable. People treating themselves still go to the one that feels like a treat.
This does not mean charge whatever you want
If your competitors charge $30, the answer is not $300. That is a different business with a different building.
What I mean is deliberately sitting at the upper end of the local range rather than the bottom of it. A few dollars more per person, positioned as the better option, is enough to change how you are perceived and enough to fund actually being better.
The other thing worth saying: you do not have to be the most expensive venue to stop being the cheapest. The bottom of the market is the specific place not to be.
The condition attached to all of this
If you position as the higher-quality option you have to actually be one, or at least be genuinely comparable.
Price above the market with an experience below it and you get one visit, a bad review, and no return. Meet the expectation and you get the customer who happily pays more, comes back, and tells people. Those are the regulars every venue wants and they are not price-sensitive.
So spend the difference. Put the extra margin into the room, the equipment, the staff, and the photography and website that set the expectation before anyone walks in. That is what makes the price honest, and it is the difference between positioning and just charging more.