At some point (and mine is about 90 minutes), it's merciful to free people from the drudgery of standing around and to make a queue virtual instead. But people have limited patience for even wonderfully designed queues. Queues can, and should, be part of the show. Attraction designers can - and have - created wonderful immersive environments in which to queue people for the main attraction in a theme park experience. Virtual queues offer a powerful tool for improving guest satisfaction in theme parks and other high-demand, limited-capacity venues. Outside of Universal Orlando's Volcano Bay, no major parks in the United States are using virtual queues in this way, however. It's the same process as using traditional physical queues, but without the physical standing around. Make every popular attraction in the park a virtual queue, then allow people to wait in just one at a time, so you're not cloning visitors and blowing up wait times. The fairest way to run a virtual queue is all or nothing. The virtual queue did away those problems, at the expense of leaving hard-core, dedicated, "we will wait 10 hours for this" fans in the same pool with fans who just entered the queue lottery on a whim. A physical queue back then likely would have spawned another epic queue in front of the guest relations department at Disney's Hollywood Studios, as fans lined up to complain about the mess at Rise of the Resistance. if the ride stayed operational that whole time. Rise's virtual queue likely spared fans from what could have been an all-day wait for one ride. And Rise's uptime record was not as good back then, either. The crushing demand for the ride was real in its first months of operation. ![]() So should Disney never have implemented a virtual queue for Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance? I wouldn't go that far. ![]() That's cut demand and helped make the resulting wait times even more manageable. With the virtual queue now gone, only the people willing to wait in the physical queue are trying to ride. That meant many perhaps-less-than-enthusiastic fans claimed spots to ride, pushing out those who really wanted to go but got unlucky with what played like a lottery on many days. It didn't cost you anything but a moment to click to try for a space. Trying to get into the virtual queue for Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance became a "must do" for everyone visiting Disney's Hollywood Studios, including, I suspect, a large number of people who really didn't care all that much for Star Wars or for this ride. That effectively clones park visitors, increasing the demand - and thus, wait times - for attractions throughout the park. The problem with virtual queues - as well as all non-traditional queuing systems - comes when they allow theme park visitors to wait for more than one attraction at once. ![]() With wait times now routinely under two hours - and often under one - those fans (including me) are wondering why Disney stuck so long with a virtual queueing system that left some devoted Star Wars fan unable to ride an attraction that's now pretty easy to access.
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