Queueing Could be Banished Forever

Many of the larger parks such as Legoland Windsor and Flamingo Land currently offer a premium “Virtual Queuing” system of some sort, allowing guests to minimise the time spent in a physical queue, but instead having their mobile phone or other device queue for them.

One of the industry’s leading suppliers of such systems is Lo-Q who have their product in over 20 theme parks across the world, including Legoland Windsor. It holds a virtual place in a queue for visitors while they do something else – or, if they pay extra – jump to the front without waiting. The UK-based company had sales of £29.1m in 2012, and double-digit rises in sales in the past three years.

It’s reported that on average guests spend around £4 per hours in shops, stores, restaurants and other pay-to-play attractions. Getting guests out of queue lines completely would mean more time to spend money around the park. This however creates a new problem: where do all these people go? There just isn’t enough space in a theme park. Rides such as Oblivion, Nemesis & Th13teen at Alton Towers all have throughput of over 1000 guests per hour and on busy days, these attractions can have 2 hour queues. That’s a lot of people stood in lines.

There would have to be significant adaptation to any existing park, or perhaps this is only a concept suitable for a greenfield site. Who knows, maybe queueing, at least in the traditional sense, may eventually become a thing of the past.