4 smart ways theme parks are encouraging visitors to use mobile devices

Use of mobile devices is becoming more and more widespread, and it is slowly penetrating the amusement park industry as well. Though, the industry has not really capitalized on this opportunity as people believe that using a phone while you are inside a park will defeat the whole purpose of visiting a theme park.

However, over a period of time, this perception has changed and theme parks are slowly incorporating ways to engage visitors through apps for personal devices as well as common devices.

Few amusement parks have strategically incorporated use of smartphones and tablets for providing infotainment and enhance visitor experience through self-service inquiry and feedback stations.

Here is a list of what some parks are doing to encourage the use of tablets and mobile devices inside the park:

Personal Smartphones/Tablets:

• • Mobile App: Visitors can enjoy a complete guide to the park on mobile devices. They can use the app to find out the various fun rides in the park, points of interest with detailed descriptions and photos among other things. The app also contains an interactive GPS-enabled map to help visitors navigate their way through the park and avoid getting lost.
  • Mobile queuing program: This feature provides queuing options to a limited number of people. With this feature, visitors can use a tablet or mobile phone to book a ride and then instead of waiting, they can go and have something to eat and when the wait time is down to a few minutes for their ride, the app alerts them and they can go back and join the queue.

Common Devices:

• • Feedback apps: Many amusement parks have introduced apps where visitors can rate a ride or an eating joint inside the park as soon as they are done with the visit. These apps are a great way by which restaurants and parks get instant reaction to their services.
    Feedback apps create a forum and encourage visitors to submit their ideas, issues or suggestions both negative and positive. This would help the management of the park to gauge which ideas are really useful and can be implemented and which of them are isolated ones. The statistical feature of this app helps park owners respond to issues and ideas and provide assistance to increase the online rating of the park.
  • Augmented reality experience: To make the guests connect to the various rides and attractions in a better way, many parks have come up with features where visitors can engage themselves with rides through apps to build the anticipation for the ride even before they try it.

Issues and Challenges:

The above use cases are very beneficial and contribute a lot to customer experience. However, deploying common tablets for visitors in theme parks would bring up a whole lot of challenges such as:

• Tablets being misused
• Device security
• Tracking
• Ensuring device uptime

Managing a large number of deployed devices across parks also becomes a huge challenge.

Solution:

Device misuse and tampering of settings can be solved using device lockdown solutions like SureLock. Organizations the world over widely use SureLock from 42Gears for their device lockdown requirements. SureLock offers a robust lockdown of devices with wide arrays of customization and maintenance features. It also integrates well with Mobile Device Management Solutions like SureMDM.

Mobile Device Management tool like SureMDM can be very helpful in securing the deployed devices, tracking and locating devices and updating device remotely ensuring instant uptime.

Many of 42Gears customers have used combination of SureLock and SureMDM for similar business setup and requirements.

To know more about the challenges related to mobile device lockdown and management in the park and amusement industry, contact us at sales@42gears.com.