6 Simple Ways to Tackle Capacity Management with Wristbands

As venues and live events plan their reopening, capacity management is a key component for compliance and the health, safety, and peace of mind of your guests and staff.  Theme parks and festivals will need to put strict procedures in place to manage attendance and occupancy levels into and throughout their venue to adhere to state and local capacity guidelines.

Transitioning to a Capacity Managed Attraction

The more confidence you instill in your guests with effective health and safety measures, the more likely you will be to draw visitors and get them to recommend friends and family, and to repeat visits.  Now more than ever, it’s essential to utilize identification solutions and technology to manage guest capacity.  A highly valuable and beneficial approach is to adopt the use of wristbands to help you effectively monitor guest and staff capacity and flow throughout your venue. Below we offer 6 tips for tackling capacity management at your attraction.

Attendance Tracking Made Simpler with Colored Wristbands

Capacity management will be the new normal for quite some time once parks and venues reopen their doors to the public.  Controlling and managing guest attendance will no longer just be for special events anymore, but for your entire attraction.  Adding wristbands as part of your reopening strategy will help your venue manage things like capping daily admissions, enforcing time slots for admission, particular areas, or groups.

1.  Enhance Guest Experience with RFID Applications

RFID wristbands offer the ultimate guest experience and ability to manage guest capacity.  With real time data analytics, guest data is captured so staff is able to see how many people are in the venue at a particular time, and how many people they are able to let in.  RFID wristband dispensing kiosks allow you to reduce direct contact with your staff and track how many wristbands are dispensed. You can easily program the kiosk to limit the number of allowed admissions.  RFID checkpoints can even be installed to track attendance and the flow of foot traffic going into different locations. And RFID wristbands enable cashless point-of-sale throughout your venue or event, further reducing direct contact and providing guest convenience for all of their food and merchandise purchases.

2.  Track & Adhere to Limited Attraction Capacity

Many attractions opening are limiting attendance to 25% - 50% of park capacity to maintain social distancing guidelines.  Consider utilizing wristbands to keep track of the number of guests allowed in your venue at a given time.  For example, brightly-colored wristbands give you the opportunity to identify and color-code each guest or group that enters your doors to make sure guests and staff adhere to the mandatory cap.  

3.  Identify and Categorize Limited-Time Attractions

Venues like theme parks, water parks, museums, and family entertainment centers are instituting not only daily capacity limits, but are introducing split attendance times as well.  For instance, if your guests follow a pattern of arriving in the morning and leaving in the evening, you may want to split your day into morning and afternoon admissions.  Some smaller venues may limit dwell time to a couple hours to better manage and track flow.  Wristbands can play a key role in assisting with these new attendance procedures during these unprecedented times.  Brightly-colored wristbands are the ideal visual identifier for staff.  Issue a certain color wristband for each different time slot.  Blue wristbands may categorize guests that arrive in the morning, and yellow may indicate afternoon hours.

4.  Custom Print Wristbands On-Demand and On-Site

Another beneficial solution for smaller events or venues is to customize print-on-demand wristbands on-site at your venue.  Designed to be used with a compatible direct thermal printer, you can print the exact number of wristbands you want when you need them.  Offered in a variety of bright colors, consider implementing a color-coding system where you can easily interchange wristbands depending on the day, hour, group, or access area.  Since you are able to print on-demand, colors can be changed as often as needed and staff can easily see which guests should be in the park, event, or in a certain area at a given time.

5.  Capture Guest Capacity with Barcodes

Print unique barcodes, QR codes, and text, (like arrival time, access type, or group name); onto each wristband to better manage guest capacity.  Barcoding allows your attraction the opportunity to not only capture the number of guests in your venue and set a cap, but it can also be used to connect guests’ wristbands to your point-of-sale-system to keep track of occupancy levels.

6.  Assist with Staff Rotation and Timed Shifts

Since parks and events may be operating with limited attendance, the number of employees may also be reduced.  Wristbands, and/or customized ID holders, lanyards, or badges can also assist with staff rotation based on staggered or timed shifts, or groups.  These identification solutions can also be customized with important safety and health information to enhance guest’s peace of mind and promote healthy reminders for all.

Identification Solutions for Safe Guest Management

There are many useful ways to utilize wristbands and RFID technology to assist with your reopening strategy.  You’re in the business of fun and entertainment, and people need that now more than ever. We can help you plan your access control and guest identification strategy to support screening, capacity management, cashless point of sale, and more. Contact PDC today!