Ping Pong Parlours
Turning empty retail space into pop up playing venues.
The Ping Pong Parlour project allows shopping centres to turn empty units into a vibrant and exciting leisure activity within the centre, providing members of the public with an informal setting to enjoy table tennis with others.
Ping Pong Parlours can help meet your goals and targets: encouraging thousands of people to get active; targeting specific groups such as the elderly or women and girls; connecting communities and helping the socially isolated.
Parlours can act as a gateway into sport and physical activity, with opportunities for people to join table tennis clubs and leagues, or to continue to play at a social level through our network of table tennis tables across the country.
Ping Pong Parlours are a really simple, easy way to help you meet your goals and targets. They can help you to:
- Increase physical activity levels
- Improve people’s physical and mental health
- Change people’ s behaviour and attitude towards sport and physical activity
- Target a mass audience
- Target specific under-represented groups
- Develop social connections between a range of groups
- Combat social isolation
Ping Pong Parlours enhance the shopping centre visitor experience and are something which on-line retailers cannot compete with!
With shopping centre management constantly seeking ways to bring more visitors into their centres, the Parlour project is a really easy sell. It creates great PR, mitigates the negative connotation of having an empty shop unit and is at very little cost to the centres themselves.
Benefits include:
- Business rates relief; as a not-for-profit organisation, we can help landlords gain up to 80% rates relief on their units
Customer engagement; customers love Parlours and the free leisure activity provided by the centre. - Animate an empty space; transforming an empty retail unit by adding a fun, free asset for the whole community to enjoy – whilst showcasing the unit and potential footfall to prospective tenants.
- Media & PR opportunities; gain positive PR throughout the local community.
We’ve discovered a lot about the value of Ping Pong Parlours, including their impact on physical activity levels, who takes part and future participation in sport and physical activity:
- 76% of Parlour visitors are inactive
- 54% of Parlour visitors are female
- 12% of Parlour visitors are aged 50+
- 20% of Parlour visitors have a disability
- 75% of visitors return to a Parlour, with 28% returning once a week
- 49% of visitors increased their physical activity levels since their visit
- of those who were ‘inactive’, 69% are classed as ‘active’ since their visit
The main reason was to have an extra bit of service in the shopping centre, we’ve had so much positive feedback through social media, through the website, and it’s good people recognise the extra bit of service, it just adds a bit more value to the centre.
CENTRE MANAGER
The Ping Pong Parlour project allowed us to keep adding reasons for people to come to Castle Mall. It created a real feel-good factor in the centre, we didn’t expect it to be so busy. The satisfaction for customers is immense.
CENTRE MANAGER