Locked Inn hosts ribbon cutting after joining Florence Chamber

Article/Photo Credit: Joe Perry, The Morning News

“FLORENCE, S.C. – Locked Inn hosted a ribbon cutting Thursday after recently joining the Greater Florence Chamber of Commerce.

A live adventure escape room experience like nothing else in the Pee Dee, Locked Inn is inside the Gould Business Incubator on the campus of Florence-Darlington Technical College and opened its doors in July. Lakewood Lodge was the first room and participants had to figure out how to escape from a cabin occupied by a serial killer set to return in one hour.

Players sift through clues and solve puzzles to get out, and the same format is in place for Submerged. The second room at Locked Inn puts you inside a submarine that has sunk to the sea floor and holds an hour’s worth of air.

Owned by Maureen Allen and her brother Gavin Smith, Locked Inn has proven popular with couples, groups of friends, and quite a few corporate entities.

“It’s amazing, how well it’s going,” Smith said. “And now that corporate has found out about us, they’re using this for team-building exercises.”

Allen said running Locked Inn has been “a roller coaster” that’s “really fun but really challenging.”

Submerged opened a few weeks ago, and Smith joked that he found it “way more daunting” to get it ready than he’d originally envisioned, but now that that task has been completed, he and his sister look forward to getting the word out. Lakewood Lodge will see a change in its format in a few months.

“But we want to get all we can out of it before we change it up,” he said.

Locked Inn is inside the Gould Business Incubator on the campus of Florence-Darlington Technical College, 1951 Pisgah Road, next to the Southeastern Institute of Manufacturing and Technology. For more information, check out lockedinnsc.com or call 843-413-3216.