Moving to Seamless, Queueless, Independent Attraction Visits
Semnox, headquartered in Mangalore, India, and The Experience Ticket.com of Copenhagen, Denmark, recently announced a partnership. Semnox’s Tixera attractions management solution—which encompasses ticketing and cashless food, beverage, and retail sales transactions—will incorporate The Experience Ticket.com’s queue management reservations system.
Funworld asked Ashish KS, head of parks division for Semnox, and Peter Rødbro, CEO of The Experience Ticket.com, exactly what an entirely digitalized and contactless guest experience entails, from ticketing to queueless attraction experiences, and what such systems mean for the attractions industry.
- Now that Tixera is incorporating The Experience Ticket.com’s queue management, how do these systems affect the industry?
Ashis KS: Tixera has one of the most complete stacks of modules in the industry, and this integration helps make the end-to-end guest experience seamless. With an added queueing solution, it alleviates one of the most painful aspects of the guest experience. It also gives venues the option to provide packages, combining tickets with food, retail, etc., and it provides combined integrated guest behavior data for targeted marketing.
- What do you mean when your companies say, “Everything is automated and powered by artificial intelligence?”
Ashis KS: Once the guest has chosen their visit date and the start and end time, the solution itself uses multiple business logics and availability to give the guest an itinerary that suits them. Then the ticket and itinerary can be sent to a mobile device. Cashless credits can be purchased online for food and beverage, etc. So in effect, guests don’t ever need to wait in line or wait for attendants to help them.
- Describe, step-by-step, what will happen when a guest purchases a ticket from a venue and chooses to build a queuing itinerary.
Ashis KS: Guests purchase tickets for a visit date, then enter those who’ll be visiting together and their heights, ages, and other details. They then choose which guests wants to visit which attractions. There are preexisting guidelines defined in the system, like age and height restrictions, as well as ride capacities. Based on the guests’ choices and the guidelines, the system recommends an itinerary with timeslots. The guests can accept or reschedule the itinerary.
When the guests visit the venue, the online ticket may be directly used or converted to a physical tag using a self-service kiosk. This ticket or tag is scanned, and the gates open automatically. The guests can then proceed to the attractions booked, based on the itinerary. The entire guest experience is without any manual intervention or waits in queues.
- Explain how the system maximizes the number of rides and other attractions guests are able to visit.
Peter Rødbro: It’s quite simple. The guest tells the attraction what they want to experience and when they wish to eat. The guest does the same thing they do hundreds of times a year when they plan and make arrangements on their smartphone. An itinerary is created in a way that is efficient for operations, so all bookings are evenly spread out over the day. Therefore, all attractions run at full capacity, and total capacity is increased about 20%.
- What do amusement parks and other attractions need to know about systems like Tixera/The Experience Ticket.com before choosing to incorporate them into their facilities?
Peter Rødbro: When selecting the right ticketing and queuing system, it’s important to know if the systems can deliver much more than just issuing a ticket or placing a guest in a queue for a ride. To do that, the attraction should use systems that create a dialogue with the guest. In addition, it’s important the guest can enjoy the visit conveniently and without hassle, using smartphones for cashless payments, personal tickets, and facial and contactless fingerprint verification.
