Easy access control
6. May 2022
For the guests, it just has to be easy. For sports clubs, amusement parks, and festivals, it should work smoothly. This is Venue Manager’s job when providing access control solutions.
There are more combinations of tickets, season tickets, time-limited stays, different zones that guests have access to, and rides you can try than you might think. And there are many things to consider. For example, the connection to the Internet may fail – and it’s important that access control works as efficiently as possible.
Three cases
Venue Manager’s Access solutions are best illustrated by three examples of how they are used.
Project and team leader at Venue Manager, Rakel Hovn, says that the most common model of the access control solution is the classic stadium. This is where guests have bought a ticket or a season ticket, like for the super league club AGF. The audience enters via access turnstiles, where their tickets are scanned. The control box located on the turnstile can read whether it is a genuine ticket and what type it is. For example. whether it provides access to the VIP area. The box can also display colours depending on the type of ticket, so staff can intervene if an adult walks through on a child ticket. The access turnstiles can be supplemented with hand scanners.
At an attraction, like an amusement park, it may make sense to use the queuing system with which Access can be expanded. Guests book rides on boxes in the park. The guest is placed in a virtual queue and given a ride time. Then they don’t have to stand in a physical queue. This solution is in use at Universe Science Park in Denmark.
Access control is used differently at festivals like Smukfest. Here guests wear wristbands. The wristbands are scanned to determine whether they have access for a single day or to the entire festival. At the same time, it’s important that the solution has a built-in robustness. So that all devices, including hand scanners and control boxes on access turnstiles have the necessary data themselves. They even work if there is a failure on the Internet connection, says Rakel Hovn.
Dyrehavsbakken near Copenhagen uses the solution in a third way. Here there is free access to the park, but every ride costs. This is controlled with ride wrist bands and multi-ride passes. Guests buy a Fun Card with 44 digital coupons, and then use them to access rides and games, each of which costs a between 4 and 10 coupons. If you don’t have enough coupons left on your card for a ride, you can pay cash to make up the difference.
Free events
Another variant is events that are free to attend, but which require control over the number of guests. For example such as big-screen events for the European Football Championship last summer, where corona restrictions limited the number of participants. This model is also relevant in buildings where, due to the risk of fire, there is always a maximum number of guests. The access turnstiles keep track of the number of guests that have entered and won’t allow too many.
