5 Tips to Avoid Queues Forming at Your Event
It’s never a good experience for your guests to spend most of their time waiting in lines and attendees certainly don’t want to be welcomed by long queues. You might have heard horror stories about attendees waiting in the wind and rain to enter an event, or maybe you’ve personally queued for hours only to find out it’s already over capacity, or you’ve missed the deadline for entry. We’ve put together five key points to help you avoid this at your own event, and boost your attendees’ satisfaction.
- Make Check-In Seamless
A good check-in system can help to prevent a backlog by making the process fast and efficient. If your guests have to be manually checked-in, given identification, and perhaps go through a security check, then a backlog can quickly emerge. This is where event technology solutions, including those offered by Eventogy, come in handy.
Its badge-printing function gives planners the option to print directly from the app seconds after a guest has arrived, helping to get things moving. You can be sure nobody will be receiving the wrong badge if you cross-reference this with a QR code individually supplied to each attendee. This, in turn, means that all guests need to do is scan a code and have a badge quickly printed, making their entry smooth, seamless, and incredibly efficient.
2. Register Your Guests Online
An efficient check-in process only works if the majority of your guests are registered early on. By providing an online registration tool, you can avoid too much faffing around at the entrance as guests try to sign up for your event at the eleventh hour. This is particularly useful at a larger event, where mass registration at the entrance would be slow and laborious, and cause a massive backlog. To avoid this, make sure your registration process is fast and easy to use, so that guests can see the benefits of doing it early. Since you’ll never be able to eliminate impromptu registrations entirely, a smart instant registration tool would do much to alleviate this pressure.
3. Offer Self-Service
There are plenty of opportunities to speed up event check-in using self-service technology. One option is self-service kiosks, which offer a unique degree of flexibility to guests. If you’re planning a large event, this solution might be particularly effective as it eliminates the need for supervised entry, speeding up the time spent checking in and queueing.
Event technology has definitely allowed planners to adopt this. For instance, Eventogy uses the aforementioned QR code ticketing, while other planners might offer RFID technology, or simple codes or passwords to input.
4. Identify Your VIPs
Quite often there will be guests at your event who won’t be caught dead in a queue. Perhaps your executives and managers who need to enter swiftly and seamlessly. If this is the case, you need to identify these VIPs, and facilitate their entry, perhaps through a separate entrance or a fast-track line. With Eventogy, you can organise attendees into different categories to ensure that guests who require special attention are catered for appropriately. You might want to offer guests a chance to upgrade their own attendance if queues are moving particularly slow for them. This way, all your Ps can remain VI.
5. Keeping Your Attendees Organised and Informed
Before you consider these check-in solutions, you should prioritise careful organisation, and keeping your guests informed. Using event technology solutions to provide guests with schedules and reminders will ensure they know when and where to arrive, perhaps cutting down the time they spend queueing, and ensuring that they’re in the right place at the right time.
If you plan ahead, you can use your venue to facilitate a smooth, well-organised event that cuts down queueing times. For instance, entrances should be signposted, and volunteers on hand to point your guests in the right direction. If your event venue makes it easy to implement something like self-service check-in, even better.
At its heart, the process for avoiding queues is all about organisation. By planning ahead, picking your event tech solutions carefully, and ensuring your venue is up to scratch, your event can go ahead like a smooth, well-oiled machine. Queues can be the first thing an attendee encounters, and if they’re especially taxing, it will reflect poorly on the rest of your event.
