5 Important Considerations for Capacity Management at Your Venue

The outbreak of the coronavirus has affected people, businesses and industries across the globe, and as lockdown continues to ease, we are faced with a “new normal”. For attractions across the country, this new normal includes protective equipment, sanitation points, one-way systems and visitor and capacity management.

Below, we’ve outlined 5 important considerations for opening your attraction and managing capacity to support the health and safety of your customers. These considerations are made significantly easier through the installation of visitor management software, which will allow you to support the health and wellbeing of your customers.

Consider: what should your capacity be?

For some visitor attractions, the government has offered advice on how many customers you should allow through your doors. For example, the guidance states that zoo’s can open with a significantly reduced capacity of 50% of their usual visitor numbers.

In other cases, however, you will need to decide on capacity numbers yourself. Consider your most congested area within your establishment – what percentage of your guests would be found there pre-coronavirus? If before lockdown, you already had a visitor management system in place, look at the figures to get a deeper understanding of your visitor sales and behaviour.

Now, with social distancing rules in place, consider what number of guests should be there at any given time going forward. Then, as the government’s rules or your visitor’s behaviours change, you can amend your capacity in line with this.

With an online management system, detailed sales and admissions reports make analysis of visitor demographics easy and quick, thus allowing you to optimise future events. With sophisticated dashboards, you can tailor your analysis and see real-time information on admissions, ticket sales and memberships.

Consider: do you have an online booking system?

The government’s guidance for visitor attractions includes allowing customers to book online, in advance and to stage intervals of entry. In doing so, you can reduce queue-time and the number of people waiting to enter your establishment.

With a visitor management system, you can offer online ticketing and ticket reservations so that your customer receives an E-ticket or booking confirmation straight to their mobile device. This can be redeemed electronically on site quickly and efficiently, without the need to hand over tickets. Not only will this reduce the amount of people waiting to purchase tickets, but it also avoids tickets having to be physically handed over, reducing contact and risk of transmission.

With an integrated online booking system, you can rest assured knowing that your venue will not oversell tickets, with regular updates on ticket sales at particular times. This makes capacity management significantly easier.

Consider: how will you manage pass holders and memberships?

After being closed for many months, pass holders and members of your establishment are likely to be eager to get back to your venue. Previously, members or pass holders could show up unannounced, show their pass and enter, however this won’t work well as you strictly manage your capacity in the “new normal”.

Many attractions are requiring their members to purchase free tickets online prior to entry or setting aside certain times just for pass holders. With online membership management software, you can create, manage and renew memberships easily and effectively, both at the point of admission and online. Promotions or offers can be integrated with membership reference and recorded against transactions, which allows you to facilitate tracking and analysis of member visits, spending patterns and history.

This means that whatever method of entry you prefer pass holders to take, you can facilitate it. Whether you prefer members to book free tickets in advance or have dedicated reserved capacity for pass holders, you can easily and effectively record their behaviours.

Vennersys

At Vennersys, we’ve been providing integrated ticketing, capacity management tools and visitor management software to a wide variety of visitor attractions for over 25 years. Our systems are hardwearing, reliable and easy to use.

VenposCloud is an all in one system that is key for the successful operation of yourattraction as you reopen following the coronavirus pandemic. Our VenposCRM facilitates a more detailed capture of visitor information and the reporting module enables you to analyse visitor numbers. By processing admissions & memberships, you can rest assured with reduced queues and an improved customer experience, while continuing to support the health and safety of your customers.

If you’d like to speak to a member of the Vennersys team, please contact us on 01922 472 044 or email info@vennersys.com.