The last of 3 stories about my April trip to Graceland.
We didn’t do the tour until Saturday after the conference was over. I was waiting on the back patio of the hotel while my wife was finishing up her last session. I talked to a man from Carbondale, Illinois who had gotten married at the Chapel at Graceland the day before. He was a big Elvis fan and it was his idea to do the wedding there. It sounds like they have a nice area on the grounds to conduct weddings and they give the newlyweds and their party a special tour. I had never met anyone that had been married at Graceland or at least no one that told me about it. Later when we did the tour, we ran into another couple that had gotten married on Friday at Graceland. When I mentioned meeting the other couple, they said they were the only two couples that were married that day at Graceland. This second couple was younger and the bride was the one who was the Elvis fan. They were doing the tour with both sets of parents and they were all in from Pennsylvania.
Elvis Presley’s Memphis
The new visitor’s center takes the Elvis experience in a new direction. I don’t intend for this to be a review of every detail of the changes to the Graceland tour but I think there are interesting differences at least at this point. The ticketing area for the tours appears to be larger and the restrooms are smaller. There is a cafeteria style restaurant in this building, a gift shop and staging areas where they show people a film before going to the staging area for the tour of the mansion. This was very similar to the ticketing area in the old building with the addition of food.
In the old visitor’s center, there were gift shops interspersed with the various exhibit halls. Practically every one of these would have you go through the attraction then exit through the gift shop that was most closely associated with the attraction. For example, there was a car related gift shop next to the car museum. You didn’t have to visit the car museum to visit the car gift shop. That is all different at least for right now. Your ticket is scanned to get into the area with all the attractions like the museum with the jumpsuits and gold records, the cars or the archives area. The archives were my favorite for no other reason than the fact that they had an old TV that Elvis had shot. The gift shops were in the exhibit areas usually set off to one side. I’m not sure if they will leave it this way but it seems to be harder to get to more gifts, more opportunities to spend money without doing the tour. They did have two gift shops outside of this ticketed area along with a BBQ restaurant and ice cream shop. I’m sure they will find ways to maximize opportunities for people to spend money. One of the ladies working in one of the gift shops mentioned that they don’t have music playing in their store yet. Another sign that they are still settling into the new space.
Speaking of money, the costs of the tours appears to have increased significantly. The most expensive tour runs around $150 per person but comes with a real tour guide, access to exclusive areas on the tour, all day access to return to all the attractions and a meal. The VIP tour runs almost $100 and eliminates the tour guide, but still gets you access to special exhibits, all day access and front of the line access to the tour bus. We went with the package that got us into all the attractions at the new visitor’s center, the mansion and the airplanes.
The exhibits in the new visitor’s center are all improvements over the old ones. The area with the gold records and jumpsuits expands on anything that they had previously. I’m not sure if they have all the gold records and awards transferred yet. I would recommend waiting to visit the new facility until they have an opportunity to settle in. They were still running wires and putting up signs in some of the exhibit halls.
Another area that impressed me was a theater. The room was bigger that a normal movie theater. It had portable chairs instead of theater seats and the chairs were only in about half of the room. This facility had a box office in the entryway and looked like it was big enough that it could be used for a variety of different types of activities. I could see this being a place where some of the activities they had in temporary buildings on the grounds would take place now.
The only thing that didn’t seem to be working was a Fairgrounds exhibit. They had a variety of games set up like ones you would find on a carnival midway. When we were there, no one was tending most of the games and it appeared that the people working this exhibit didn’t know exactly what they were supposed to do. Like a carnival, I think these were pay to play games and win prizes but no one walking through this area seemed to be interested in that. I think it’s worth them trying but I could see the exhibit not lasting long. Hopefully it was just a placeholder for other ideas that would have taken too long to get up and running.
