RFID....the future?

I have just returned from a trip to WDW in Orlando and was impressed.

To highlight some of the new technology:

1) RFID entry

- Guests enter park by placing admission card next to a reader, paired with finger print.

-2) RFID based wait time

-One guest is given an RFID equipped card, scanned at the entrance to a line, and then wait the duration of the line. At the platform, a ride host scans the card. Wait time accuracy = incredible.

3) RFID pictures, meals, etc.

-After riding, your admission ticket (or season pass I'd assume) can be touched to upload the on-ride photo to an account. From there, you can view & select whichever you wish to purchase. Also, payment can be done with a linked credit card.

4) RFID Fast Pass

-Yes, I know Disney has this down to a science. But certainly attainable with other parks. Scan RFID card to the ride entrance, given a return time, scan to enter the line upon return.

These technologies appear to be the future of amusment parks. The question is, how attainable is this technology in a park like Cedar Point, and what can Cedar Fair add to this technology?

Personally, I think they invested too heavily in one technology. At SeaWorld Parks, we started using barcodes for things that you can display on an app from your phone. It doesn't require issuing any kind of physical media (like a MagicBand or plastic ticket), and at least for retail situations, doesn't require any new equipment.

But it does require a Luddite like me to have a smart phone...which I do not want.

WDW gets the advantage of only dealing with known equipment rather than having annoyed guests complaining about how the app doesn't work with this version of that OS on their smartphone of unknown age.

The reason my school still has computer labs when pretty much all the students have their own devices: we provide a working system with a known software configuration on it and don't have to deal with their personal equipment that has lord knows what crap installed.

Peak Resorts (Boston Mills, Brandywine and Alpine Valley in Cleveland) are using RFID enabled season passes this year with scanners at the lifts. If they have the technology then it is certainly obtainable to a company the size of Cedar Fair.

Agreed with the smartphone debacle. Even though a large percentage of guests probably own them, the little kids probably do not (which is a large portion of attendance I'm sure). You must accomodate to them while providing an entry system well-developed enough to prevent fraud. The Magic Band, in my opinion, is genius on both a profitability and usability standpoint. I saw children shorter than the scanner posts sticking their wrist up to the reader and scanning their band. On top of that, Disney sells add on charms (for a fairly hefty price) that can be attached to said Magic Band. Saw many people with those. Genius.

The amazing thing was the wait time tracking. It answers such a simple question: why have a ride host at the front "guess" the wait time, when you can have a guest actually wait in the line and report the time back to the front? Did I mention this is all computerized for accuracy and requires ZERO effort by the guest himself?

Royal Caribbean is starting to slowly roll this kind of tech out to their passengers. Not sure I'm a fan yet but I suppose it is all in the implimentation.

Availability isn't the issue with the tech... does Cedar Fair need it? FastLane is low-tech on purpose and works. Pass related retail discounts work via the integration of the pass system and the POS.

Disney is a totally different beast. They're trying to carefully balance attraction capacity, track spending, get you in the rooms, etc. They have a bigger data acquisition goal and an insanely broad product offering. Remember that they can track your movement around the park. MagicBands also still have a ton of issues. Hotel desks fail to associate folio accounts to them. It's on the users to have user accounts online. The POS terminals not recognizing bands at all is an enormous problem (my guess is that they're too small or not sensitive enough). And clearly, they never did any real-world tests to see how many people they could move through a Fastpass line with people checking in, twice, for each attraction.

At the end of the day, Cedar Fair doesn't have a use case for using RFID. This is even more true for the parks that have a high day-ticket to pass ratio.

The bands not only track the guests throughout the park, but on the entire property. Using long range rfid readers, they track you on the buses/monorail, and also in the hotels. Each hotel room has a rfid reader, generally behind the tv stand, it communicates with your bands, and the door locks. The readers not only track the guests, but the employees also. Disney knows where all employees are in the parks and different hotels. The amount of data mining is absurd. The reader were implemented with hubs connected to cable modems that are placed throughout the rooms, they implemented everything using the existing coax network. I was quite amazed with the whole system, but again, the data being mined is impressive. Not sure that you would want that much information being disclosed. They know where in the park you are, if you are on the bus/boat/monorail, how long you spend in your room, do you use the hotel pool, and basically every other thing you do while onsite. They tie all this data to your person, along with rides/purchases and can profile the population based on age/gender/race. I would guarantee in a few years you will see very targeted advertisement that is extremely effective on returns, in addition to the parks being streamlined to jam as many people as possible into them.

The bands don't communicate. The presence of RFID tags are read, but nothing talks back to them. The coverage of the readers is also not nearly as extensive as they would like, and it's not locking your door.

There comes a point in technology where I just don't see the point anymore. I don't think RFID would enhance my experience at the park and having so many things we do daily being tracked by computer anymore is getting creepy. The ID badge I used at the school I started the year at could unlock the doors but also could track me throughout the building. I can handle the park just fine with some cash in my pocket.

CedarPoint? said:

The readers not only track the guests, but the employees also. Disney knows where all employees are in the parks and different hotels.

How do they do that when the "employees" dont wear magic bands, or any other bracelets at all?

Jeff said:

Availability isn't the issue with the tech... does Cedar Fair need it? FastLane is low-tech on purpose and works. Pass related retail discounts work via the integration of the pass system and the POS.

Debateable whether or not Cedar Fair's FastLane really works. Functional, yes, but effective? Questionable.

Fraud is extremely easy considering band colors are rotated. If you were a dedicated passholder, you could certainly save the bands and rotate on a daily basis. Not to mention, resold to others. Passholders could load FastLane to their season pass for the day, or ticket holders have it embedded in their ticket (like Disney). You just aren't going to give your pass/ticket to someone. Lowers the chances of fraud.

On top of that, they have no way to measure the flow of people, crowd strength/weakness, and back to the usual discussion of wait time boards. Yes, data mining is costly, but if their true purpose for FastLane is to build profits, what would the ROI be on a system that would maximize profits?

I also feel that ride ops are not fair about the division between standby and FastLane guests. With an electronic system, it can be done systematically.

Just so many avenues for improvement from the typical bracelet. Just seems so "county fair".

No system is fraud-proof. The question isn't whether fraud occurs but rather whether it occurs with sufficient frequency to require action: is it worth it to spend millions introducing a new, tech-heavy system in order to prevent thousands lost to fraud?

Likewise, data-mining is costly. Walt Disney World, in a competitive, year-round vacation destination, with guests staying for days if not weeks, could find a lot of value in having such a wealth of information about the activities of its guests (though, from I've read here and there, it hasn't been a particularly well-executed roll-out...).

Cedar Point, a seasonal park with two gates and a handful of resorts -- is it really worthwhile to invest in such a system when the metrics can be tracked in admittedly old-fashioned ways?

Gate = park. Amusement park and water park.

All of Fastlane would have to be fraud to justify the expense of making it electronic.

I would bet Fastlane has an extremely high RTO. Although I haven't seen it used at CP, at Canada's Wonderland they did scan the Fastlane band at the ride entrance. So, obviously, it is possible to get some metrics with Fastlane.

There is fraud in everything but I would bet that in terms of overall Fast Lane sales it is an insignificant amount. I thought that not only were colors rotated but also the ride logos were also printed with different colors.

Yeesh! Park with two gates.... that's what I get for trying to post and watch Judge Judy at the same time.

Orlando Mike said:
How do they do that when the "employees" dont wear magic bands, or any other bracelets at all?

All the Disney issued costumes have RFID tags in them. Plus I would assume there are RFID chips in the company issued ID.

But there are many kinds of RFID tags, and not all of them can be read from a distance. There is a certain amount of coverage around the parks and resorts (not as much as some think, apparently), but those readers can't read the ticket media, only MagicBands. The MagicBands have batteries in them and what appears to be a fair amount of extra copper in them, presumably to act as an antenna. The read distance depends a whole lot on the radio frequency being used.

And remember, reading the presence of a tag by itself is meaningless. It's just a number. Without comparing that number to some known data, it's useless.

99er said:
All the Disney issued costumes have RFID tags in them. Plus I would assume there are RFID chips in the company issued ID.

You really think they have the time to track company issued costumes? LOL You're really reading too much into the Magic band program!