Morecambe super-bowl
The kids were keen to go ten-pin bowling so we phoned Morecambe super-bowl and reserved a lane for an hour for £20 including shoe hire.
It was a mixed experience.
The lighting above the pins wasn’t working on our lane, but we bowled on. It soon became clear that the automatic scoring wasn’t working properly either, as it was frequently recording more pins downed than had actually been hit.
At one point, the scoring system decided that Mrs Penditure had bowled two balls when she had only bowled one, and we decided we’d had enough. We brought this to the attention of an “operative”. She said that all she could do was to reset our game, but if the problem persisted we could move to another lane.
The light above the pins was now working, and the scoring seemed to work OK for a while, but then it started to go haywire again. We complained again, but the person we had originally spoken to was no longer available.
The lady who attended our lane said that all she could do was to change the score for us – and indeed it turned out that we could edit the score from our own console. But the scoring errors continued, and it was impractical to edit the score every time, so we just bowled on.
It was still good fun, but the time we spent sorting out the problems took a big chunk out of our playing time, and we were only able to complete one game within our hour. On checking the website after getting home, I saw that we could have paid “by the game” for £14.80, saving more than a quarter.
Now I suppose I could write a letter of complaint and chase it up. But wouldn’t it be better if the staff were sufficiently empowered and motivated that they could just do whatever is needed to make sure that the customers have a good time out?
I’ve been ten-pin bowling elsewhere before, and the equipment worked perfectly every time. I hope this was just a one-off.