Credit: Inside the MagicThere are few things worse than planning a day at Disney World, getting to the park, and waiting all day for your favorite rides or attractions. Disney World and Universal Orlando have created ways to get around this problem, but unlike days past, guests have to pay for the privilege of skipping the line.
Dinsey World does offer guests reasonable up-to-the-minute wait times for its rides, but those can be deceiving. Sometimes, they oversell the wait time, while others severely undersell them.
However, even if you know the wait time, guests still have to wait in those lines, sometimes waiting hours for a single 90-second ride. But what if there were a way for technology to end the waiting in lines for guests completely?
Theme park companies have started using artificial intelligence and the data it produces to help keep guest wait times down and adjust the number of ride vehicles in real-time. The information can also help mitigate any breakdowns before they happen and keep the rides functioning throughout the day.
Legoland in Florida uses this new technology to help keep guests moving through the attractions and ensure the rides function properly.
Adrian Thompson, operations transformation director for Legoland’s parent company, Merlin Entertainments, told Business Insider:
We’re using a technology called Vision AI. We have cameras placed over our attractions that analyze the number of people physically riding those attractions at any given time. It doesn’t identify you uniquely, but it identifies the number of people riding an attraction.
If they see anomalies in that data — the number of dispatches has reduced or the queue times have gone up — they can take action at that moment and make changes. Before, when it was all paper-based, we didn’t have access to all that data in real time. You might not have gotten that information until the end of the day, at which point it’s too late to impact the guest experience.
If this new technology can accurately predict when a line will be at its peak and help mitigate the wait times at that attraction, this could be game-changing for the theme park industry. It would allow guests to experience their favorite rides without waiting hours.
This technology could also help guests plan their day and tell them when to go on which ride. This would allow guests to get everything they want without the dreaded wait times.
While this technology is just getting started, it could revolutionize theme parks and improve the experience for everyone.
How do you think AI will change the theme park industry? Let us know in the comments.