Mitigating Theme Park Crowding with Incentives and Information on Mobile Devices

Abstract

Long wait times for rides and restaurants are major sources of visitor dissatisfaction with theme and amusement parks. Crowding is often worse than it needs to be because park visitors distribute themselves unevenly. In this paper, we discuss a novel method of routing visitors to less crowded areas by offering them well-timed incentives and information on mobile devices. Two large field studies ( n = 910 and n = 1,370) were conducted to test how receptive visitors were to altering their paths in response to incentives and information. The results indicate that a system such as ours can mitigate suboptimal crowd distribution in real time in a typical theme park environment.