At Thorpe Park they have introduced a new technology on their newest ride, The Swarm. This technology allows you to queue on your mobile. The website on your phone or iPod touch (there is free wifi everywhere in the park) gives you a slot and counts down until then. When it reaches 0:00 minutes it gives you a barcode and then the staff at the ride entrance scan it.
The problem with this is that when I was at Thorpe Park today they let people scan after there time had got to zero. This meant that there were more people going in at one time than appropriate. This caused real queueing after queueing virtually. This was alright the first time I went onto the ride, as only ten minutes passed after having my barcode scanned before getting on the ride. The second time I went on the ride I queued 40 minutes after queueing online. By about 5pm they seemed to have given up on the system for the day. Being the second day of this system for Thorpe Park, and the day before being the first day and the whole system crashing it was a reasonable decision to just queue people normally for the rest of the day.
I think this is a great idea if they only let you in from the end of your count down to five minutes after. If that was applied this idea would be amazing as you could be queueing for a ride whilst having a coffee in a cafe. If this rule is not applied and people were allowed in after their slot they might as well queue normally.
Noam Solomons-Wise 