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Right on queue: Lo-Q plc

09 April 2009

Visitors to North Yorkshire theme park Flamingo Land can expect to spend less time queuing for rides this spring after AIM listed virtual queuing expert Lo-Q plc won a deal to install a special queue management system at the family attraction.

For Lo-Q’s chairman, Jeff McManus, Flamingo Land is the latest addition to a growing list of clients that dates back to 2001 with the Six Flags park in Atlanta, US, and now boasts attractions as far afield as Australia and Italy and as close to home as Legoland in Berkshire and Thorpe Park in Surrey.

With revenues surging 73% to £13.52m last year, and pre-tax profits up 236% to £1.85m, McManus heads a business that suffered in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks but is now enjoying more prosperous times.

Indeed, while last year’s figures were enhanced by advantageous exchange rates achieved from international operations, McManus and his team have spent the past eight years tweaking a business plan to find the right formula – and that now looks to be paying off.

Virtual reality

Frustrated by the queues his family encountered at a Florida theme park in the 1990’s, Lo-Q’s founder Leonard Sim came up with a system that allows attraction visitors to make ride reservations. Using what are called Q-bots – or hand-held devices – users can avoid queuing for a seat on a ride by making a reservation with their Q-bot for later the same day.

Using clever wireless “mesh” communications technology, the Q-bots in a park transmit messages between themselves and a master transmitter to tell users not only when they are scheduled to join a ride but also any other important park information, such as ride break-downs.

According to McManus, the system doesn’t give anyone in the park an unfair advantage except to say that for the price of a Q-bot – roughly £10 per person – users can wander off and do something else while they wait their turn in a virtual queue.

He maintains that the £10 charge – on top of the regular park entry fee – gets a daily park penetration of between 4% and 10+% depending on overall visitor numbers. And with tough economic times causing people to think twice on holidays, he says the business is performing well in the recession – with Q-bots seen as a way of squeezing the most out of a day at a theme park.

Evolving strategy

In its early years, Lo-Q opted to lease its technology to park customers and allowed them to run the system in-house. That strategy evolved over time, with the company now hiring staff locally to sell the Q-bots direct, with revenues then split with the park. McManus says hiring an army of up to 400 seasonal employees led by full-time supervisors, works more effectively for the business by keeping it in control of the overall sales effort.

With three new park customers added during 2008 and another four since the start of the year, McManus is now exploring ways of enhancing Lo-Q’s technology. Indeed, it has already adapted its Q-bot system to work on mobile phones for smaller-scale attractions such as Flamingo Land, Madame Tussauds and London Dungeon.

Elsewhere, the company has been working with technology partners and parks to introduce infra-red ‘people counting’ systems along with what McManus calls “anti-bunching” software to help ease the problem of peaks and troughs in visitor numbers coming to rides. In the future the system could also incorporate RFID – or cashless payment systems – to allow visitors to buy anything from souvenirs to snacks with their Q-bot.

With few competitors and more than 40 years of park experience across the company’s management team, McManus says the future direction of the business will focus on introducing new technologies to help it personalise its service for existing parks and make it more attractive to prospective customers.

Ben Hobson, SmallCapNews.co.uk