Photos of Zoo Lights at the Houston Zoo taken on December 18, 2024 by Kerry Toorcana. Edited using Lightroom Classic and Photoshop.
Zoo Lights Reigns Supreme Among Houston Holiday Light Attractions
Last year I took a trip out to the Houston Zoo in 2024 to see Zoo Lights which is their holiday attraction and compare it to the one at Moody Gardens. We arrived with a final consensus where we determined that the Houston Zoo offering provided a far superior viewing experience. We arrived at this conclusion because Zoo Lights provided an abundance of sights and experiences that never felt old or repeated as you made your way along the walking path. However, there was no comparable experience to ICE LAND which remains unrivaled and would be that is difficult as well as incredibly expensive to duplicate by any other competitor in the Houston DMA.
The ICE LAND attraction features an indoor tent cooled to 9 degrees and features carvings by sculptors from the Chinese city of Harbin. The Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival is a yearly event that has only gained in prominence and popularity across the world. ICE LAND also has a walk able path although it is much shorter, thus taking much less time to complete. Overall, the experience is similar to an art gallery where you can witness it more along the lines as a marvel of ice sculpting. Additionally, the viewing experience will always be unique each year because the carvings melt and are destroyed once the holiday season is over. I will post photos of ICE LAND to provide a companion to this blog post at some future date hopefully soon.
These holiday attractions must always have a unique selling proposition that separates it from other competitors. Some compete on price, others on the experience they provide, or something that provides entertainment within a certain limited geographic area and so on. Other competitors in this space include the Houston Botanic Garden, Space Center Houston, and POST Houston which each feature their own holiday lights event. Each of these locations enhance the holiday theme by making it nature-focused as is the case with the Botanic Gardens, a stellar journey with Space Center, or a cosmopolitan view with the backdrop of the Houston city skyline at POST Houston.
This piece may just focus on Houston attractions, but the same competitive lessons are being played out in each city during the holiday season. As more competitors enter into the field, each attraction needs to differentiate what they can offer from the next guy. This is just business in general whether you might operate a coffee shop, produce screen-printing for t-shirts, or even offer a cleaning service.
There are different aspects to how you run your business where you can create your own competitive advantages. This may be a combination of variables from your customer service skills, responsiveness, cleanliness, and lastly on price. If you are competing on price, you are either doing volume business which makes you immune to sacrificing quality, or you execute a barebones, no-frills strategy for customers who want an immediate solution without the need for “extras.” But you will find yourself within a crowded field if you try to compete on price so my advice is to avoid that trap.
But going back to the initial reason as to why I was there at Zoo Lights, it was field marketing research. Seeing how a competitor produces and executes their attraction can provide lots of insight and even ideas for ways that you can improve your own.
What we found from this research is that our attraction was lacking because it felt dated and antiquated. The lights trail didn’t really offer any major spectacular effect although if you were a first-time visitor it would be enjoyable. It doesn’t promote itself well for a follow-up visit. But ICE LAND remains the anchor that draws visitors which also helps support the rest of the holiday experience. You just hope that it would be enough to justify the cost at the end. Considering the financial turmoil and uncertainty that has plagued 2025 so far, it’s going to be a difficult proposition to meet for multi-million dollar expense.