CP Pass as debit card?

That's typical for Ashland. They likely have the tech, but not the people to run things. They like to hire friends, people who aren't qualified, and worse, alumni. ;)

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who sees the need for culture change. It actually is changing in other ways right now, but I fear it's not for the better.

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Jeff - Webmaster - GTTP - My Blog
Blogs, photo albums - CampusFish
What time does the water show start?

Hence one of the many reasons I no longer attend Ashland.

A wireless network can be just as hard to break into as a wired network nowadays, with the right technology. Plus I don't see faded signals bad if they set up multiple signal boosters. They definitly have plenty of mount points. They could blend in easily. I have known a couple places to mix wireless and wired. CP might have to take this option. Especially to be able to use the system in the Breakers Express and Radisson or even in the commons housing area.
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- Chris -

Man, I was tired yesterday. I spelled "Once" as "Wants". Me needy my sleepy.

In any event, it always amazed me that Mr. Kinzel was always thrilled about the next new advance in ride technology but when it comes to IT he has no appreciation for it.

I wish I could go into some detail about some of the things I experienced when I was there but I don't want to go down that path. I will say that I pushed for a couple of years to get a PC in my department and we finally did get one. As we started doing memos and reports (ie using graphs and the like) we got all this great feedback like we were the best thing since sliced bread. In reality, we were just using simple tools that most 10 year olds could use.

Mr. Kinzel is the same way about infrastructure. It isn't sexy enough for him I guess. But, infrastructure is as important to the park (if not more important) than any new ride.

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"You can dream, create, design and build the most wonderful place in the world...but it requires people to make the dreams a reality."

He may not see the ROI path. If it doesn't obviously generate more guest attendance/spending, it's not worth investing in.

For charge-to-resort, however, the case seems pretty obvious (the "casino chip effect").

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It's not war, famine, or pestilence; it's only downtime.

The idea of using debit cards simply to add convenience for the customer doesn't make much financial sense, although it may encourage more spending. The major benefit of a system like this -- and hence the return on investment -- is being able to track and analyze every transaction created, and use that to more effectively market their goods and services. Simply put, if Cedar Point can correlate what you purchase to key demographics you provide such as age, gender, etc., they'll be better able to predict what merchandise will be attractive to various audiences. This is one of the key concepts of database marketing.

For instance, let's say "Joe", a season-pass holder, buys the following items: CP pins, a few t-shirts, Cedar Pointopoly, and dinners at Midway Market. With all of these transactions stored, CP can do several things; first, they can see if there's a group of males Joe's age who buy pins, shirts, board games, and MM food, and if so, target such groups with customized promotions for those or similar items (the promotions could be as simple as mailed coupons). If Cedar Point wants to get really outrageous, however, there's been an explosive growth recently in variable data printing (similar to form letters, but much more complex); providing the cost was justified, they could send out personalized getaway guides to customers on record offering promotions based on their preferences.

Of course, to collect, manage, and mine all this data is an enormous undertaking, and the costs easily can break into the millions. Nonetheless, customized and one-to-one marketing is often seen as a very smart way to attract and retain customers, and increase their lifetime value -- the ends could very well justify the expense. And why stop at season pass holders? Offer regular customers the option of buying debit cards for their family as soon as they order tickets at the gate, and collect data on them! Privacy issues aside (don't want to be tracked? don't use the card!), this seems to be a great way for customers to get better deals, and for Cedar Point to better understand their customers.

-Jeff (er, Skydiving Jeff -- thanks, Kar-uh :) )

Brian, you are falling victim to his way of thinking. There may not be anything sexy about maintaning water line, sewer lines, etc but if disruption of utility service causes you to have problems in your park or hotels then it most certainly IS going to affect the bottom line.

If you have to give discounts to hotel guests because they couldn't take hot showers then it affects the bottom line. If it takes a staff person 2 hours to type a memo using an antiquated word processing program when 15 minutes on Word would suffice then it affects the bottom line.

The thing is you have to have vision beyond the next pretty ride to understand the value in IT, preventive maintenance, etc.

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"You can dream, create, design and build the most wonderful place in the world...but it requires people to make the dreams a reality."

If they ever utilize this type of debit system, which I see happening several years down the road if it does happen, I would expect them to also install the line time boards at the same time so that they could kill two birds with one stone. They could also wire up their hot shots booths to the internet at the same time so that you could swipe your new season pass/room key, and have your on-ride picture sent to your email account.

These are all things that are already in the IT department of amusement parks, but does any one park have all three features offered? Are there any other IT related systems offered in other parks besides these three?

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Everything that has a beginning has an end.

The Matrix Revolutions

Disney has been promoting the "My Pal Mickey" which has a chip inside that responds to remote signals throughout the park. Walking by Space Mountain it might give facts about the ride. Walking by a food stand it might tell you what is on the menu.

It will eventually connect with cameras throughout the park that will take candid pictures of you as you are enjoying your vacation.

When you get home the park will email those pictures to you, allowing you to buy a photo album of your visit without having had to carry a camera.

I'm told the technology will eventually be used in the homes. If Mickey is sitting in your living room when an ABC show comes on the air Mickey might come alive and tell you to tune in to watch one of the shows. He might also come alive when a Disney commercial comes on to offer you a discount on your next vacation.

Big Brother is a Mouse.

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"You can dream, create, design and build the most wonderful place in the world...but it requires people to make the dreams a reality."

The problem with the "My Pal Mickey" and the PDA's for the adults they are using is this.

It has been marketed an "enhancement" to your experience but recent data has been uncovered that they (Disney) have in fact been using to track people. Is it sneaky?? kind of..

The "My Pal" program hasn't taken off like they were hoping, granted it's not because of issues like tracking, the GP has no clue about what is going on. Is it a great marketing tool? Yes.. It can help answer the question of "Everyone is walking past A and stopping at B. Can we improve A?"

As for the IT of parks such as Disney, yes it's above others, but has more than it's fair share of problems too. Did you know it's poosible to get 13 fast passes all at once if you know what rides are on the same nodes and which ones are not?

As for a wireless system. I'd stay clear of it for a while after this years DefCon. 2 wireless cards and less than $200 in parts and you have a 256-bit encrypted wireless sniffer that not only fits in a backpack, but also transmits it's findings using PGP for later use.. Not too bad for a couple 17 year olds.

I just don't trust wireless.. not yet..
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June 11th, 2001 - Gemini 100
VertiGo Rides - 82
*** This post was edited by Red Garter Rob 12/5/2003 3:46:35 PM ***

Chief: I didn't say I agreed with it, and in fact I don't. Just trying to guess at why current management is so unwilling to improve the IT infrastructure around the resort.

There are lots of examples: the paper-based hotel charging records in use now, the lack of a centralized ride-wait board, the annual wait-a-thon to get passes processed, the hassle of using your CP pass at some other Cedar Fair property...the list goes on and on.

Edit: I wonder how much staff time is wasted dealing with those receipts-in-triplicate generated when you use your resorts card to charge something to your account. On at least one trip, a charge never made it on to my bill, wasting even more time getting it added on correctly. And that's the *best* thing that can happen. How many of those slips get lost or mis-filed, resulting in lost revenue?

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It's not war, famine, or pestilence; it's only downtime.
*** This post was edited by Brian Noble 12/5/2003 4:17:58 PM ***

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Avalanche Sam said:
I decided to make a second post instead of an edit because this deserves to stand on its own:

The one problem with this type of system would be that new phone or network lines would need to be installed in areas that might not have them. If there is an ethernet network at the Point already, this would be easy. If not, the costs would be tremendous because wiring the park would not be cheap, and new phone lines to use for authentication of points would also be very expensive.

-Sam

EDIT: Typos
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Avalanche Run - My first Roller Coaster.
Magnum XL-200 - The BEST Roller Coaster!
*** This post was edited by Avalanche Sam 12/3/2003 5:06:40 PM ***

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You'd be surprised how many phone lines there are in the park... It wouldn't be that hard to do with the lines, BUT the cost of installing card readers on the vending machines would be freakishly expensive, but at vendors it would be a GREAT idea... especially (from what someone else said) for children... Putting like $40 to 80 for like 3 or 4 kids for a day and just letting them roam would have been awesome when we were kids, and would make the kiddies feel special by having their own credit card! (shut up you know you wanted a credit card when you were a kiddie!)

Brian Noble said:
We are re-wiring the college of engineering at Michigan. The labor costs for this kind of a job are very very high. That may be due to the ridiculous labor costs at the University generally, but even so. It seems simple to string a bunch of wire through a conduit, but I don't think it is.

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It's not war, famine, or pestilence; it's only downtime.

No the real problem is getting it over girders, lighting, through walls, etc. so you have the shortest cord possible (the more thousands of feet you have of cord, the more problems you have) also there's a problem if using CAT cable is that it has very short (compared w/ the park size) length limits... something like 1000 ft if I remember from work... Anything much over that and CAT doesn't work unless they make a piece of hardware to boost it (but from what my boss said they don't have anything that works WELL as of right now...), and fiber is INSANE expensive. If they will go with anything, it most likely will not be Wi-Fi. Although cool technology, like someone else said, it is by NO means perfected to the point where credit transactions should be going in and out, and there's no way to really 'firewall' it effectively. Anything YOUR base transmits, everybody else gets in about a 150 - 450 foot radius of the source...

Now for the card readers at each vender, especially the ones that are not open nearly 1/4 - 1/2 of the year (this past year the Hot Potato place, etc.) is just wasted money.

I hope this next year is a great year in attendance, because I *really* want to see, and absolutely LOVE it when I have a full queue line. I wanna see the food stands all open and working for once. I only saw Hot Potato open like three times (albeit I wasn't looking for it, but it just seemed like it was always closed)

You would think before getting this technology they would get better fast foods... like everybody's said on here, the only food they have that's half original is the cheese on a stick. They still have the pepper jack on a stick, don't they??

Edit: I can't spell/wanted to add something :)
*** This post was edited by Ben Englund 12/6/2003 6:39:54 PM ***

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cedarit said:
The idea of using debit cards simply to add convenience for the customer doesn't make much financial sense, although it may encourage more spending.

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Uh, that's a total contradiction. It doesn't make sense but it does make sense?

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Simply put, if Cedar Point can correlate what you purchase to key demographics you provide such as age, gender, etc., they'll be better able to predict what merchandise will be attractive to various audiences.

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Nonsense. You're still just a number to them. Universal doesn't know anything about me other than my credit card number and address. They don't know if I have a penis or clear 70k a year, or if I'm white, black, gay, straight, white collar, blue collar, whatever. Tops Friendly Market doesn't know anything about me, other than the fact that I like Pop Tarts.

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Jeff - Webmaster - GTTP - My Blog
Blogs, photo albums - CampusFish
What time does the water show start?

Admittedly, that wording was bad. My intent was to state, what little can be gained in consumer spending doesn't necessarily justify moving to a debit card system for that sole purpose of adding convenience.

As for your statement that "you're still just a number to them," well of course you are. Customers at Amazon.com receive personalized offers and discounts based on their past purchases and other information they've provided, but in the end they're just another row in a database. The perception to the customer -- the added value of being provided with offers useful to him/her -- is what's important though.

There's a classic data mining example of a supermarket chain that discovered that a statistically significant percentage of men who bought beer also bought diapers. Illogical as that may sound, they restructured their product layout -- moving the diapers closer to the beer -- and sales increased. The power of data mining is being able to discover such unexpected occurrences that normal research methods wouldn't otherwise find. To do this, you need customer data.

What information a company chooses to collect about its customers reflects what they feel are key things that will influence their buying habits (while hopefully being careful to not ask for information that would be perceived as violating one's privacy, such as religion, race, and income in a lot of cases). Still, even with a minimal amount of information -- Cedar Point certainly has your zip code -- they can make informed decisions about you. Many companies that collect zip code information purchase aggregate data that links those zip codes to other factors such as median incomes, population ethnicities, and other census data. Hypothetically, if you live in an area that's determined to be relatively wealthy, Cedar Point may want to send you offers and mailings for their higher-end resort properties, whereas they wouldn't necessarily do so for a community that's relatively poor. It's a very simple example, but it represents a better use of marketing resources and statistically offers a higher percentage of success.

Simply put, the more you know about your customer, the better you can predict what their buying habits are.

No one was ever debating that. What I was questioning is how it's relevant to the bottom line, and frankly data mining the customer isn't the focus, it's getting them to spend money, which most of us agree is what happens when you have this card arrangement.

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Jeff - Webmaster - GTTP - My Blog
Blogs, photo albums - CampusFish
What time does the water show start?

I completely agree with Jeff. The most money I ever spent at Disney was when I stayed at the Resort for a couple of days and charged EVERYTHING to my room card.

I was stunned when I saw the final bill b/c I really didn't have a good idea of how much I was spending. Same thing happened on my honeymoon when I could charge the pool drinks to my room. I was paying that bill off at my 5 year anniversary!

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"You can dream, create, design and build the most wonderful place in the world...but it requires people to make the dreams a reality."

As difficult as it could be to run wires all over CP, there is always the option of WiFi. You could locate repeaters and antenna's around the park. It would save the park from having to tear up a lot of concrete and you could have one antenna take care of a number of buildings that are close together. The antenna's could even be located on trees if they have to be. As long as the data is encrypted well I wouldn't think that there would be any problems with someone getting information about people, plus it would be your season pass and not a legit form of ID or credit card. The only problem I really see with this would be if they didn't use real powerfull antennas or repeaters the shops could loose signal in adverse weather, although it would probably have to be some pretty hardcore rain to do that.

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AKA...Somewhatchewy, Joseph the White.
Practice Safe Hex, and avoid computer viruses today!

Come on. We're talking about a park that builds roller coasters. You'd think they'd be able to handle laying some fiber optic wire throughout the park.

I think the real issue, which many people have pointed out, is that Cedar Point tends to have a rather archaic and antiquated way of doing many things, and that's not likely to change overnight.

I just have a question. how would cedar point let you charge up the card? also, would the pass cost more?

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It's alot more expensive to lay the fiber around everything that is already there than you realize.. trust me on this one..

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June 11th, 2001 - Gemini 100
VertiGo Rides - 82