Beyond Invisible: Why the Best Attraction Technology Makes the Day Better

Every great attraction shares something in common with a favorite neighborhood restaurant: the best ones make you feel recognized. They remember what you like and anticipate your needs. That feeling of recognition is what Lee Cowie, CEO of accesso, thinks about when he considers the role technology should play in the attractions industry.

“I just want to enjoy the day at a theme park without technology getting in my way,” Cowie says. “When tech appears, you’re often interacting with different systems that aren’t intuitive or effortless, and now you’ve got friction grinding into your fun.”

Memories, emotions, and reputations influence revisitation, yet Cowie feels many amusement parks and attractions welcome longtime visitors back as if they were strangers, at least from a technology standpoint. Annual passholders, multi-day visitors, and even same-day park hoppers may engage with multiple interfaces within a single venue, with some platforms asking them to reauthenticate their identity, repeatedly provide payment information, or sign back into their profile.

Cowie believes technology solutions should create a connected ecosystem where individual guests are acknowledged, valued, and most importantly, remembered.

Technology as a Friend
The thrill of a roller coaster, the scent of a soft pretzel, and the final burst of fireworks at the end of the night are the moments amusement park guests cherish. And a venue’s technology can enhance those moments—or interrupt them entirely.

Some amusement parks and attractions deploy technology solutions as direct responses to individual challenges without considering the fluidity of the guest experience. A theme park may ask a guest to engage with a virtual ticketing queue on one interface and then present guests with a different interface when purchasing food or souvenirs.

These points of friction are exacerbated by the contrasting use of technology in a guest’s daily life: single-click access, digital wallets, and increasingly seamless authentication across multiple, unrelated apps. Cowie believes this is especially disruptive for a theme park’s most loyal customers.

“An annual passholder should not have to reintroduce themselves every time they engage with technology at a venue,” he says. “If a guest has visited your park a dozen times, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t have a congruent, tailored experience at every interface that rewards their loyalty,” Cowie says.

With more than 1,100 venues in 31 countries using accesso’s ticketing, point of sale, membership, and payments solutions, Cowie clearly sees a growing demand for a simplified, connected ecosystem that allows operators to cater to individual guest profiles. The fact is that operators no longer want à la carte products that create roadblocks between a guest and a good day.

“We view accesso’s solutions as a connected ecosystem of capabilities that interact with each other, not a line of products operating in their own segmented spaces,” Cowie says.

Cowie explains that the best technology should appear at the right moments to make a guest’s day better, while remaining so seamless it is almost invisible during engagement. But for Cowie, invisibility is only the baseline: truly elegant technology should reduce friction and create more room for guest engagement.

“We get out of the way,” he says. “The best tech is elegant. It makes your day better without you realizing that it’s there.”

Less Friction in the Guest Experience
One of the instant intrusions that can sour a smiling guest’s mood is found at the point of sale. Guests want to pay for meals and mementos in their preferred method, which requires attractions to increasingly augment point-of-sale systems to include countless digital wallets and payment networks.

In an ideal world, managing diverse guest payments would be as straightforward as money moving from one bank to another. Unfortunately, the e-commerce landscape is inundated with dozens of payment methods, each one asking for a percentage of the transaction from the operator.

“For the guest, tapping their card or phone feels easy, but for attraction operators, it’s a complex, expensive space,” Cowie says. “Domestic banks, international financial institutions, digital wallets, online payment systems—each payment provider adds cost and complexity to claim their slice of the pie. And before a venue knows it, they’re spending an awful lot of money just to receive a guest’s payment.”

Cowie believes that operators incorrectly view payment tech as a fragmented commodity rather than a keystone in infrastructure. By incorporating a unified POS with the accesso Pay Embedded Payments processing platform, operators can streamline and simplify transactions across the venue no matter how a guest chooses to pay.

“We handle the intermediary step by negotiating rates with payment processing providers and managing the multitude of payment types available,” Cowie says. “That allows operators to accept as many payment types as possible, as cost-effectively as possible.”

The same idea applies to AI. Technology should support the experience rather than become the experience.

“Technology can be really powerful in an attraction, but it can never replace authenticity,” Cowie says. “Attractions forget that authenticity is what made, and will continue to define, their success. Our tech augments specific areas of the operation so real people are free to preserve the authentic experience through personal interactions with guests.”

Instead of adopting an AI-powered solution for the sake of innovation, Cowie believes operators should use AI to make better decisions from the full range of data generated across the operation, including the operational information that has historically been difficult to connect and put to work.

“The secret ingredient to the accesso Intelligence platform is data,” Cowie says. “If an attraction is not harnessing the data gained from any of their software, they’re ignoring the golden truth.” Cowie explains that accesso Intelligence gathers data from across the operation and facilitates conversational insights, whether it’s connected to the larger accesso ecosystem or integrated into an enterprise’s other software tools.

“A manager can literally ask the platform why attendance was down on a certain day or why a restaurant menu isn’t resonating with guests of a certain demographic and receive plain language answers backed up by real-time data,” Cowie explains.

Cowie also suggests that operators leverage their data to connect with a guest in a meaningful way. For example, if visitors generally skip a specific roller coaster when it exceeds a certain wait time, the operator can send a push notification to their mobile app prompting them to reserve their spot in a virtual queue.

“We could nudge them to buy a fast-track pass, but that encourages engagement through spending,” Cowie says. “Instead, we can offer to reserve their spot in the queue and thank them for waiting by offering a voucher for the concession stand.”

Used thoughtfully, these personalized interactions aren’t intrusions. They reduce obstacles and help guests spend more of their day enjoying the experience they came for.

Platform Consolidation that Creates Engagement
“I think the goal of every attraction is to get the visitor to come one more time, to leave them wanting just a little bit more, to commit to another visit, and build loyalty,” Cowie says. “The data that we pull together in our intelligence platform allows operators to discover why a guest came and encourage them to return.”

Evolution from a ticketing vendor to a comprehensive venue solutions provider parallels the industry’s technological transformation. Attractions now desire simplicity and scalability across their operation from a single, unified system. integrated solutions create a roadmap that prioritizes simplicity without diluting sophistication.

“Any attraction can benefit from the sophistication of our ecosystem, even if they aren’t adopting certain features,” Cowie says. “It’s always there behind the scenes, so if an attraction doesn’t need it now, the road is still paved and accessible as their needs change.”

While Cowie is confident that a connected ecosystem augmented by AI can enhance attractions across the globe, he also recognizes that expectations around personalization—and the technology used to enable it—vary by market, and some markets may adopt it faster than others.

Cowie believes that a consolidated, actionable platform is the simplest strategy for managing multiple guest experiences while cultivating authentic, individual relationships with each of those guests.

“You could be one of 30,000 people visiting a theme park that day, but you’ll feel like you’re the only person that matters if the experience was curated just for you,” Cowie says. “I think that’s where loyalty comes from and that’s what our technology is designed to do.”

Contact accesso and discover how creating connected experiences can help make every guest interaction more seamless and meaningful.

The article above is sponsored by accesso. The content presented does not imply endorsement by IAAPA, IAAPA.org, IAAPA News Daily, or Funworld magazine. The information contained should not be construed as a formal recommendation for products and services or instructional guidance provided by IAAPA.