ORLANDO — Leaders of the nation’s escape room industry admitted at a trade conference Thursday that the locked-door puzzles customers pay $32 a head to solve were never the hard part, and that the real challenge begins weeks earlier in a group chat titled “Escape Room??”

“We build the rooms to give people something to feel good about,” said Dolores Whitcombe-Anand, chief executive of the National Association of Themed Confinement Operators. “Our average team solves the room in 52 minutes. Our average team also took 11 weeks to pick a date. We know which one is the puzzle.”

According to industry data presented at the conference, the typical booking passes through seven stages: an enthusiastic proposal, three thumbs-up reactions, a poll nobody votes in, a message reading “Saturdays are rough for me tbh,” a silent stretch lasting several weeks, a resurrection of the thread by a coworker named Brent, and a final date that is canceled the night before.

Researchers say the Saturday problem has no known solution. “We’ve modeled it extensively,” said Dr. Marcus Teague-Oyelaran, senior fellow in applied calendar entropy at the Institute for Recurring Obligations in Dayton. “Four adults each have a niece’s recital, a ‘maybe’ wedding, or a vague plan to ‘get stuff done.’ The odds that all four are free on the same day are roughly those of finding a left-handed unicorn.”

Operators say they have quietly adapted. Several facilities now hold the same Saturday 2 p.m. slot open for months, anticipating that a group will eventually arrive, exhausted and slightly resentful, having finally won the scheduling war.

“You can always tell the ones who’ve been through it,” said Priya Lindqvist-Boateng, a game master at Deadbolt & Daughters in Tulsa. “They walk in like veterans. One guy hugged the door. Another wept at the sight of a padlock, because it was just a padlock, and it would open if he found the number.”

The industry’s admission has prompted some customers to ask whether the rooms are even necessary. Several rooms now offer a “Scheduling Edition,” in which teams are locked inside with their phones and must agree on a date for a future outing before being released. Operators report that the average completion time is four hours and nine minutes, and that three groups remain inside from the previous quarter.

“We build the rooms to give people something to feel good about.”

Not everyone is satisfied with the reveal. Gary Pellham-Voss, a regional sales manager from Akron who has organized four team outings and attended none, called the news “validating, but also a lot.”

“I’ve been blaming myself for years,” Pellham-Voss said. “Turns out it was structural. I’m going to put that in the group chat.”

At press time, the chat had received one thumbs-up, and Brent had replied, “Wait, which Saturday?”