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Indoor Outdoor Navigation Systems for Resorts & Parks

Apr 20, 2021

7 min read

By: Lucy Bragg

Have you ever found yourself wandering around a resort or a theme park desperately trying to find your destination? Whether it’s your first time visiting or you’re a returning guest, these entertainment spaces are often filled with complex layouts and facilities that make it difficult to orient yourself.

Take Walt Disney World for example. While being one of the most entertaining hotel and park destinations, it’s also one of the easiest places to get lost! With so many locations to visit, guests can easily feel disoriented during their trip.

This is why digital indoor mapping with an indoor-outdoor navigation system is extremely beneficial for resorts, hotels, parks, and all types of entertainment venues. Guests will have access to up-to-date information and directions, special offers, enhanced safety notifications, and much more.

Keep reading to find out how you can create an unforgettable guest experience using digital indoor maps and navigation technology!

Custom Digital Mapping Experiences

Theme parks, resorts, and entertainment venues can attract guests by offering a customized digital mapping experience. By transforming 2D maps into an interactive 3D digital experience, you can ensure that your maps stand out from other competitors, while highlighting your venue’s best attractions and services. For instance, in a theme park, you can showcase popular rides, games, concession stands, events, and other attractions that grab the attention of your guests.

Maps are essential when visiting a theme park or a resort because they help guests visualize your venue and everything that it offers. With a digitized map, these visualizations are interactive, so guests can pan, rotate, zoom, and explore indoor and outdoor locations with ease. This helps visitors get acquainted with your resort or theme park, as well as orienting themselves within it. The best part is that these maps can be accessible from any device, so guests can take maps on-the-go!

Even better, you can customize your map to match your park or venue’s branding, ensuring a seamless and consistent experience for visitors. This gives you the flexibility to add icons and logos, choose colours that fit with your marketing strategy, provide different language options, and much more.

Enhance the Guest Experience with Wayfinding and Navigation

Looking to find an interesting excursion? In a rush to the bathroom? Can’t locate the pool from your room? With Smart Search, category listings, events and promotions, and indoor-outdoor navigation and wayfinding, you can ensure that guests can find their way around, and ultimately get the best out of their visit!

Interactive maps for theme parks and resorts enable real-time positioning for blue dot navigation, allowing visitors to see their precise location on the map. This feature also provides intuitive step-by-step directions as they navigate to their desired destination. From parking, to rides or restaurants, guests are offered an end-to-end wayfinding experience.

This technology also calculates the fastest route to your destination, ensuring that guests can discover more of your venue, and avoid stressful situations. For instance, you can avoid missing a restaurant reservation or spa appointment by populating your estimated arrival time. With the multi-destination feature, you’re also able to populate the most efficient route to your desired locations. At a theme park, this would make it easy for kids to squeeze in as many rides as possible during their visit!

The dynamic map visuals enable you to search, browse categories, and seamlessly navigate between the indoors and outdoors. Functionality such as Mappedin’s Smart Search allows you to easily search and locate a ride, food vendor, washroom, ticket stand, and more. As you type, predictive results appear and minimize the number of keystrokes needed to find a location. This way, guests can avoid wasting time searching, and spend more time exploring your resort or theme park.

Accessibility should also be top of mind for resort and theme park owners. With accessibility mode, guests are provided with accessible routes that utilize elevators and ramps over stairs, guaranteeing safety and seamless navigation for all visitors. This ensures that your resort or park provides inclusive, barrier-free access to all, so your guests can enjoy the amenities and activities without trouble.

The amazing part about navigation technology is that it can be implemented anywhere, from kiosks and directories, to mobile applications, to printed materials. Kiosks can be featured in main points of entry and common areas, so that visitors can self-serve and get directions during their journey. With a mobile app, guests can avoid referring to a physical map, and simply enter their destination in the application for turn-by-turn directions. Mobile pass is another way that your venue can offer the ability to transfer directions from a QR code to visitors’ mobile devices. By scanning QR codes featured on printed or digital materials around your resort, users can take the interactive maps on-the-go, ensuring a contactless and paperless experience. No matter the solution, you can ensure that visitors can navigate your venue and never get lost again!

Use Indoor Positioning to Showcase Events and Promotions

Location positioning technology can also be used to enhance your marketing strategy by gaining valuable insights, showcasing events and promotions, enabling on-site notifications, and more.

Location-based analytics can be leveraged to provide detailed reports on how visitors interact with various spaces and their intent at your resort or theme park. This not only helps you better understand your guests, but can be used to inform business decisions. For instance, if people are constantly searching for a spa or sauna that doesn’t currently exist at your resort, you might consider adding it.

These analytics can also be used to serve up highly engaging content, promotions, and events that drive increased foot traffic and revenue at your property. For example, if you notice that visitors constantly search for food and drinks, you could send-push notifications of nearby vendors to draw their attention. Proximity marketing allows you to send specialized offers when guests are passing by locations, such as concession stands, to prompt them into making a purchase. For instance, if someone is walking by a pretzel stand, you could send a “10% off coupon code” to grab their attention.

Proximity marketing is particularly useful for resorts and theme parks because you can trigger automatic notifications whenever guests enter a specific zone. You could send personalized “welcome” and “see you soon” messages at the registration desk, delivering an enhanced guest experience. This can also be used to promote events at your venue, up-sell excursions and services, send personalized reminders of vacation packages, and more. In the case of an emergency, these notifications can alert your guests and lead them to the nearest exit and emergency routes. This way, you can ensure that guests are delivered the best and safest experience at your property.

Real-Time Resort and Theme Park Management

Maps can also be used as a property management solution. Resorts and theme parks are ever-changing to account for new additions, renovations, expansion of services, and more. For instance, a theme park might add a new ride, move concession stands in a different location, or shut down a section of the park for maintenance. These changes can quickly render a static map useless, as the information is no longer up-to-date.

Luckily, indoor mapping technology allows you to update your maps in real-time, so you can keep guests updated when a new ride is open, an existing ride is undergoing maintenance, or a washroom is closed for cleaning. Moreover, if your venue undergoes layout changes quite often to account for different events, you can save these map layers and interchange between them. Not only does this save time, but it also offers convenience to property owners and staff!

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