New Park apps

Knotts got a new app update, and it looks a lot better and more useful than the existing Cedar Fair apps.
Fun Pix section is included along with a lot of other goodies.

Hopefully this makes it chain wide and makes the apps worth using.

Season pass can be scanned in app.

Wait times in app too

If Cedar Point does get an app update, which is likely, its nice that they would add wait times because the only thing i used the app for last year was checking fast line prices on certain dates. any improvements are welcome

Kings Island had this app last year. Worked pretty nice. Seemed to use GPS location for targeted discounts, such as funnel cakes and on-ride photos. What I'm not sure of is where the wait times come from. Seemed to be quite inaccurate when I was there in September.

Wait times are all currently high estimates. Until they install a system that counts dispatch interval and number of guests in line, they will continue to be inaccurate.

Because of the off-season, I would expect an updated app every single year. Adding wait times seems like a logical next step since it was tested last season at Kings Island. However, it's not a guarantee. Kings Island has also had large interactive touchscreen maps throughout the park for more than a year and those have yet to appear anywhere else (as far as I know).

Most of the bigger rides have an approximate wait time sign at the entrance that the ride hosts are responsible for. As an engineering student, the way I would add wait times is to integrate some form of simple wireless buttons they could press when they change the wait time sign. I am not sure of the networking logistics but it seems like it could send a signal to a server somewhere via wifi and then update the app.

Or they can just give the ride ops some type of tablet computer that runs an admin app for the wait times. Simpler than designing some type of custom hardware.

Park Operations office has a large screen inside the office that lets the workers know which rides are running and which rides are down (mechanical/weather).

With that said, I think every time the wait time sign at the entrance of the queue is changed, a ride op will call the Park Operations extension to let them know what the wait time is. Then park operations will change the wait time (or status of rides operating) via the board inside the office which will be connected to the app.

I downloaded the Knotts app just to see what we can maybe look forward to. It's a cool app, features include ride wait times, car finder, season pass perks, and funpix. Plus it lets you see your season pass info, how many visits you have had, your picture (if you care to see it lol), and it also has a QR code attached for scanning. This is exactly what we need.

Automating the process of wait time data is not nearly as simple as people think it is.

I wouldn't say it's very complicated either. :)

Fast Lane users can have too much impact on a posted wait time. If there are few FL users, obviously, the regular line will be much faster than if there is a steady flow of FL users.

The problem is more people related than it is technical.

In regards to wait times and where they come from, as a ride op at Cedar Point, I can confirm that we simply call Park Ops every 30 minutes and tell them the current wait time.

Just interested how you guys determine the current wait time: Do you count the number of minutes it takes a particular group to get onto the train, just guess the length of the line, or what?

It's all based on which sections of queues are filled up.

Huh. That makes sense.

Jeff,

How complicated would it be to implement a process like they have at WDW where random (I'm assuming) folks are given a card as they enter the line and then the card is collected somewhere near boarding? Is this used by Disney just to determine wait times at the ride/attraction itself or can it be used for some kind of real-time publishing of wait times? I'm asking this having no deeper knowledge of the process than being asked to carry the card through the line. lol

Or what if they used the location of your smartphone to determine the average wait time?

Disney has a lot of custom software in place, and they do use the RFID cards on guests in the queues to measure actual wait times. Mind you, that isn't necessarily what bubbles up to guests via the signs and the apps, because (the way I understand it) Disney does manipulate the times to direct guests toward other attractions. They generate a ton of data and do interesting things with it in real time.

The Orlando theme parks all have "stuff" to track it all, and they have for years. Exposing that to guests in a broad way varied in effort because the systems weren't intended for broad consumer use. As best I can tell, that's some of the reasons that Disney's overall NGE project ballooned in cost so much. Systems that at most were being touched by a few dozen people were suddenly being beat on by the public at large, and that also creates a ton of security implications that weren't previously relevant.

If CP just calls in numbers, and someone puts those into some software running somewhere, that's probably low-friction integration. Not having a huge legacy would work to their advantage.

As for using cell phones... well, there are a lot of privacy implications to that, but yes, it's possible in several ways. If you watch technology news, you may have already seen how this can be done.