Theme Parks: Keeping Visitors Safe and Entertained

Over 300 million Americans visit amusement and theme parks every year. In the bid to ensure that all visitors enjoy a memorable park experience, parks need various equipment. Most of these equipment are heavy and have been known to pose one or two safety concerns. Now, when you combine these heavy rides and machinery with the fact that a large percentage of amusement park visitors are kids and teenagers—people who are likely to get carried away and forget to be careful, the safety concerns become even more prominent.

Recent numbers indicate that parks have been falling behind in their duty to keep their visitors safe even as they enjoy the rip-roaring fun. According to a report by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, over 30,000 amusement park injuries were reported in 2016 alone (via CNN, 2017). Fortunately, for the parks and their visitors, new technologies have emerged that make it possible for theme park managers to keep track of all visitors, identify when an area is getting overcrowded, and better manage every visitor’s safety and park experience.

Here are the technologies and how they work:

Enhancing visitor experience and keeping your park clean

People go to theme parks to have fun. The problem is: many other people have the same intentions, making the parks almost always overcrowded. Hundreds of visitors vie for the most popular attractions at the same time, and people end up spending more time on queues than they spend having fun. Additionally, all visitors have to share facilities and common areas, e.g., the toilet, food court, and baby care rooms. Within minutes, these places get messed up and visitors have to endure unhygienic situations. All these combine to make the park experience not as enjoyable as they thought it would be.

With visitor analytics solutions; however, park managers can better manage the crowd and ensure that all visitors have a good time. With queue management, they can monitor wait lines in real time, moving newcomers to less-crowded attractions and avoiding bottlenecks. After some time, people may be moved around, ensuring that no one feels left out. People counting also allows park workers to keep count of how many people have used certain facilities. After, say, every 15 people, cleaners may be sent it to clean the space and maintain high hygiene standards. All these actions are automated and the visitors would scarcely be aware of them; all they will notice is that they did not spend any time in queues, and all common areas remained clean and uncluttered.

Creating and optimizing crisis management protocols

With hundreds of visitors (a lot of them, children) milling around, there is surely to be one crisis or another to manage; visitors getting lost, missing and so on. For this reason, theme parks employ a lot of workers to keep an eye on their visitors. Given the injury rate above, however, it is clear that this practice is not very effective. This may be because of the sheer size of most theme parks, or how hard it must be for one person to watch 10, 15 people at the same time.

Heatmap technology gives park workers an overview of the park, giving them the real time occupancy of each area and where all visitors are at all times. As a result, missing people can be located within minutes.  Conversely, when an attraction is getting dangerously overcrowded, park workers can step in and maintain order. Historical data from visitor analytics and heat map technologies can also be used to come up with crisis management protocols to forestall crisis of any kind.

Making security more efficient

By actively monitoring every part of a theme park, it becomes easier to come up with security protocols and enforce them. Managers can ensure that no visitors enter without the necessary passes, and heat map data can be used to track visitors and keep them from restricted areas. To further ensure safety, all attractions may be given a maximum number of allowed users, and people counting devices can be used to ensure that the regulation is adhered to.

Conclusion

With these novel solutions, theme parks are better able to provide all visitors with a seamless and enjoyable experience. Park visitors do n0t have to stand in queues, use unsanitary facilities, or fight with other visitors before enjoying a ride or playing a game. For the park, these solutions simplify the crowd management process. Managers can deploy staff whenever the need arises; ensuring efficiency, and issues are resolved before they become crises. Collated data from the devices are used to optimize park design, keeping 2 busy attractions away from one another, and to create security protocols that ensure everyone’s safety.

V-Count provides people counting, queue management, and heat map technology to amusement and theme parks, and our services are available in over 100 countries around the globe. In addition to providing them with these visitor analytics technologies, we also help our clients collect visitor data and safeguard them in the cloud.

That is not all; v-count uses cloud-based AI and machine learning tools to analyze the collected data, allowing us to provide our clients with simplified reports based on analyzed data. The reports may then be used to optimize park activities, devise new security protocols, and create new marketing campaigns.

Please contact us today, or give us a call at +1 866 549 9360, to start your free trial.