Custom booking form fields are extra questions you add beyond name, email and phone: group size, a birthday, a team name, a promo code, a note for the game master. Add the ones that change what you do before the visit, and move everything else to a message sent after payment. Every field you add costs you some completed bookings, so each one has to earn its place.
This guide is written for escape room owners and venue managers. It covers how many fields a form can carry, which custom fields pay for themselves, which ones belong in a follow-up, and how to set it all up.
TL;DR
- Keep the form to roughly 7 to 8 fields. Checkout research puts the ideal there and the average form at nearly 15.
- A custom field is worth it only if it changes what you do before the visit: player count, a minor in the group, an access need, a gift voucher code.
- Collect dietary needs, marketing preferences, party details and waivers after payment, by email or SMS, not on the booking form.
- Mark only the essentials as required, and use dropdowns, checkboxes and defaults instead of free text.
- If you text customers, capture consent in a clear, separate checkbox.
Table of Contents
- Why every extra field has a price
- The fields almost every escape room needs
- Custom fields worth adding
- Fields that belong after the booking
- Choosing the right field type
- Custom fields and text messages: get consent right
- Where the form lives matters too
- How to audit your current form in 30 minutes
- Our perspective: ask less, and ask later
- Build the form once, and let the system do the rest
- FAQ
- Sources
Why every extra field has a price
A booking form is not an intake survey. It is the last step between a person who wants to play and a confirmed slot, and that person is often on a phone, with friends waiting for an answer in a group chat.
The numbers are consistent across sources. The osNOVA guide cited above reports that each additional field reduces conversion by roughly 3% to 12%. It also reports that an operator with 200 booking starts a month who adds six unnecessary steps could lose around 281 bookings a year. A separate analysis of booking friction gives a narrower range: 3 to 7% for each field beyond name and email.
These are industry figures from booking research in general, not measurements from escape rooms or from our platform, so treat them as a direction, not a forecast. The direction is clear, though. Fewer fields, more completed bookings.
Here is what that looks like with escape room numbers. Say 300 people a month reach your payment step with a 60 $ average booking. If a form with six needless fields costs you even 10% of those people, that is 30 bookings and 1,800 $ a month you never see, and you will not see it in any report because the customer simply left.
The fields almost every escape room needs
Start with the fields your booking cannot exist without.
| Field | Type | Why it is on the form |
|---|---|---|
| Game / room | Selection | Which room, and its player limits |
| Date and time slot | Calendar | The booking itself |
| Number of players | Dropdown limited to the room’s min and max | Drives price and capacity |
| Lead booker name | Short text | Who to greet at the door |
| Confirmation and reminders | ||
| Mobile number | Phone | SMS reminders and last-minute changes |
| Payment or deposit | Payment element | Holds the slot |
That is seven, close to the ideal. Notice that the player count is a dropdown tied to the room, not a free text box. A customer cannot book eight players into a six-player room, and you never have to fix it by hand.
If you take payments online, let a payment provider handle the card details rather than building your own card fields. Our escape room payment processing page explains how Stripe, Square and PayPal connect.
Custom fields worth adding
A custom field earns its place when the answer changes an action on your side, and when you cannot get it more cheaply later. These five usually pass.
Promo or gift voucher code
A single optional field, collapsed by default so it does not look like a hurdle. Customers holding a voucher will look for it. Everyone else never notices it.
Minors in the group
If you have age rules, a single yes/no question (“Is anyone under 16 in your group?”) lets you flag the booking for a guardian waiver and the right staffing. Keep it as a checkbox, not an age for every player.
Team name
Optional, short, and good for engagement. It can appear on your leaderboard, your photo board and your greeting. Make it optional or you will get “asdf”.
Accessibility or access needs
An optional text field, labelled in a friendly way, such as “Anything we should know to make the visit comfortable?” Players with mobility needs benefit, and you can prepare the room or route before they arrive.
Occasion
A dropdown (birthday, team building, date night, none) helps you prepare a welcome, a sign or a photo prop. It also tells you which marketing channels bring in which audiences. Keep “none” as the default so it never blocks a booking.
Fields that belong after the booking
The osNOVA guide makes a practical point: operators often demand data such as dietary needs or marketing preferences up front, when an automated post-booking email can collect it. That applies strongly to escape rooms, because a customer who has paid is far more willing to answer questions than one who has not.
Move these off the form:
- Full names of every player. Needed for the waiver, but not for the booking. Send each player a waiver link after payment.
- Mailing address. Almost never needed for an in-person experience.
- Dietary or food requests. Only relevant if you run a party room with catering, and then only for those bookings.
- “How did you hear about us?” Ask it in the confirmation email or on a quick survey after the game. A one-tap dropdown works.
- Marketing opt-in beyond a simple checkbox. One unticked box is enough.
- Account creation. Forcing a password before payment is among the friction points the osNOVA guide lists. Let people book as guests.
The pattern: ask on the form only what you need to hold the slot, then ask everything else in a message that arrives while the customer is still excited. Our guide to booking form design for escape rooms covers six checks that also cut no-shows.
Choosing the right field type
The type of field matters as much as the question.
- Dropdowns and radio buttons for anything with a short list of answers. They are faster on a phone than typing, and your data stays clean.
- Checkboxes for yes/no questions and consent.
- Short text only for names, team names and codes.
- Long text as a single optional “Notes” box. One is enough. Multiple free-text boxes invite abandonment.
- Number fields with limits for player counts, so the form enforces your room rules.
- Conditional fields that appear only when relevant. If “anyone under 16?” is no, nothing else shows.
A few habits make a form feel short even when it is not:
- Put the field label above the box, not inside it, so it does not disappear when someone starts typing.
- Use correct mobile keyboards for phone and email.
- Mark optional fields as optional, and make required ones few.
- Show errors next to the field, in plain words.
- Keep everything on one screen if you can, with the price visible throughout.
Custom fields and text messages: get consent right
If your phone field exists to send reminders, consent is part of the design. In the United States, marketing texts sent with automated technology generally need prior express written consent under the TCPA and FCC rules. Transactional reminders about a booking are treated differently from promotions, but the safe habit is to use a clear, separate, unticked checkbox that says what you will send and how often, and to keep a record of it.
This is general information, not legal advice. If you plan to run promotional texting, ask a US attorney who handles telecom or consumer protection law to review your wording.
If you use reminders to cut no-shows, see how automated SMS reminders for escape room bookings work.
Where the form lives matters too
A short, well-built form still loses customers if it sits behind a clumsy page. Embed it where your customers already are. A white-label booking widget puts the form on your own site in your own branding, and an online booking calendar shows live availability so people pick a slot before they see a single field.
Other venue types face the same trade-off. Operators of haunted houses, tour and activity businesses and immersive experiences all need a few extra questions, such as group type, entry time or deposit, and the same rule applies: only what the operation needs.
How to audit your current form in 30 minutes
- Open the form on your phone, as a customer would. Count the fields and the screens.
- List every field and write next to it what you do with the answer. If the answer is “nothing” or “someone might want it”, cut it.
- Mark each remaining field as required, optional or move-to-follow-up.
- Replace free text with dropdowns wherever you can predict the answers.
- Move the follow-up fields into your confirmation email or the reminder message.
- Test a booking end to end, including the confirmation, with a friend who has never used it.
- Compare completion rates for a few weeks before and after. Your own data beats any benchmark.
Our perspective: ask less, and ask later
We built Riddlio for escape rooms only, and the pattern we see is that owners treat the booking form as the one chance to learn everything about a customer. It is not. It is the chance to secure a slot, and everything else can follow.
Escape rooms have needs that general appointment tools do not: player limits per room, multi-room games, waivers for every participant, and sometimes hardware at the door. That is why we think a form should lean on the booking system’s own rules, such as capacity, pricing and room limits, rather than asking customers to type what the system already knows.
We also think the best use of a custom field is the one that lets you do something specific before arrival. If a question does not lead to a task for your team, it is a survey question, and it can wait for the confirmation message. Flat, predictable pricing with no booking commission also means you never have to squeeze extra revenue out of the form itself.
— Iosif Beraru
Build the form once, and let the system do the rest
Riddlio combines booking, payments, waivers, email and SMS reminders, and analytics for escape room venues, so the follow-up questions can go out automatically after the booking instead of cluttering the form. Plans start at $29 per month for Starter, with Pro at $79 per month and Unlimited at $199 per month. Enterprise has no published price. See the pricing page or look at the escape room booking system to see how it fits your venue.
FAQ
How many custom fields should a booking form have?
Aim for around 7 to 8 fields in total, counting the standard ones. Research on booking abandonment treats that as the ideal, and each extra field can cost roughly 3% to 12% of conversions. Add a custom field only when you act on the answer before the visit.
Should custom fields be required or optional?
Require only what you cannot run the booking without: room, time, player count, contact details and payment. Everything else, such as team name, occasion or access needs, should be optional with a sensible default. A required field that people fill with junk is worse than an empty one.
When should I collect waivers and extra details from players?
After payment. Send the lead booker a message with a waiver link to share with the group, and ask for any extra details there. A paid customer is far more likely to complete these steps than a visitor who has not yet committed.
Can I ask for a phone number to send SMS reminders?
Yes, but add a separate, clear consent checkbox that says what you will text. In the US, promotional texts generally require prior express written consent. Check your wording with a qualified attorney before you start any marketing texts.
Sources
- What Every Extra Booking Form Step Costs, osNOVA
- How Booking Friction Kills Conversion: 8 Drop-Offs, NoShowCalc
- How to Get Legal Consent for SMS Marketing, TermsFeed