Reopening Theme Parks After COVID

Hinata Takahashi, CEO of Tokyo Theme Park (TTP), wanted a smooth reopening of the park after it was shut for four months because of the COVID outbreak. With a focus on customer experience, she wanted to ensure that customers felt safe and were able to enjoy the rides. She sat down on her desk to look through the opening plans in detail.

Pre COVID Times at TTP

TTP was an 85-acre theme park in the Chiba prefecture near Tokyo. It had proved very popular with the local population since it opened in 1986. Over time, its reputation grew and the park drew visitors from nearby Asian countries. At its peak in 2019, the park drew 46,000 visitors a day.

The park had a total of 30 rides with each ride lasting 7 minutes (this included loading and unloading time). Each ride could seat 200 people at a time. Ten of the rides were very popular and drew a disproportionate amount of interest from visitors. Visitors averaged 73 minutes of waiting time for each popular ride. Thus, visitors spent, on average, 80 minutes for each popular ride, 73 waiting in queue and 7 for the ride. The people who were not in line at the popular rides, were either walking between rides or lined up for one of the other rides where waits were shorter. On average, about 10 percent of the visitors were walking between rides at any moment.

Given the popularity of the park, all visitors arrived before the gates opened and spent their entire day going from one ride to the next. Visitors tolerated the long waits at popular rides because TTP kept them informed about their wait in queue and ensured that popular characters were on hand to entertain the children in queue. Visitors expressed a high level of satisfaction with their TTP experience. It was consistently rated as one of the best parks in Asia. 2019 had been a banner year and Hinata had hoped that 2020 would be at least as good.

COVID and its Aftermath

Hinata ordered the shutdown of TTP from March 1, 2020, as the number of COVID cases surged in several Asian countries. The number of visitors to the park had dropped sharply because of the COVID scare and Hinata and her team felt it was best to shut down the park until the prevalence of COVID in the community decreased and arrangements could be made for visitors to have a safe experience. Erring on the side of safety, she shut the park before the Japanese Government required a shutdown.

After peaking in April, cases in Japan declined significantly in May. As a result, the Government allowed theme parks to open starting July 1 as long as they satisfied distancing guidelines. Hinata's team had indicated that sufficient distancing could easily be maintained in the park if the average wait at each of the 10 popular rides was no more than 11 minutes and the average wait at each of the 20 other rides was no more than 5 minutes. Having fewer people in queue allowed for them to be spread over the available space for queues. For example, a queue of 11 minutes was significantly shorter than a queue of 73 minutes for the popular rides. This allowed sufficient distancing at each ride. The grounds were large enough that a thousand visitors could easily be allowed to walk between rides and maintain distance. In order to maintain distancing on the rides, they had to be operated at 50 percent capacity, i.e., each ride would only accommodate 100 visitors at a time.

Questions to consider

Consider the pre COVID times that drew 46,000 visitors each day. On average, how many visitors were at popular rides (either waiting or on the ride) at any time?

On average, how many visitors were walking between rides?

On average, how long did visitors wait at other rides?

How many visitors could Hinata allow post COVID, if she wanted to hit the safe targets suggested by her team?

Team members had suggested that installing plexiglass separators in the rides could increase safe ride capacity to 130 visitors at a time. How many more tickets could TTP sell each day (while maintaining safe targets at the park) if it installed the separators. Do you have other suggestions for Hinata?