A couple of people have asked questions recently related to how many escape rooms the UK can sustain. Truth be told, I don’t really know the answer but I was interested enough to try to pull together a few statistics from other countries. I grabbed them from anywhere I could get them easily – sometimes just taking them direct from a report and sometimes finding a list and adding them up by hand.
The numbers are inevitably approximate – I may have made minor errors when counting, the lists aren’t necessary complete and games appear and disappear on an almost daily basis in most of these regions. I do believe the numbers are about right.
The table below is ordered by number of rooms per million population to give you a feel for how densely filled the markets are. Obviously a lot of factors affect these numbers – planning laws, when the first game appeared, labour costs, tourist numbers etc. Read into the data what you will…
Country | Population (m) | Rooms (/m pop) | Source (rooms) |
NL | 17 | 612 (36) | Escape Talk |
Poland | 38 | 986 (26) | Lock Me |
Luxembourg | 0.57 | 11 (19) | Escape Talk |
USA | 323 | 6000 (18.6) | Facebook thread – David Spira estimate. |
UK | 65 | 855 (13.2) | Exit Games |
Singapore | 5.6 | 68 (12.1) | TripAdvisor and primary research |
France | 67 | 811 (12.1) | Wescape |
Belgium | 11 | 120 (11) | Escape Talk |
Australia | 24 | 195 (8.1) | Escape Room Hunters |
Austria | 8.7 | 65 (7.5) | Lukas Rauscher from Crime Runners |
Populations based on Wikipedia’s best guess.
If you’ve got any other statistics that I can add then let me know via comments below. I won’t add them indefinitely but if I get more stats over the next couple of weeks then I’m happy to drop them in.