To create a safe, secure, and enjoyable experience for sports fans and event goers, stadiums need to understand how visitors move through their venues—both historically and currently. It’s important to understand where congestion forms, how fans move through your venue, and the dynamics of queue length and wait times. These insights help stadium managers optimise staffing, security, safety, and operations, empowering them to transform the fan experience.
Optimizing the Fan Experience With Data Analytics
The combination of the right technology and effective data analysis can provide these needed insights and help solve these challenges. Data from cameras, WiFi, sales transactions (gathered through PoS integrations), people counters, and mobile apps can provide stadiums a complete view of the fan from the moment they park until they exit the stadium. Harnessing these data inputs into an intelligent data platform combined with expert analysis can provide tailored crowd management solutions for your venue.
Beonic’s AI-powered crowd management solutions can help your stadium run as efficiently, safely, and securely as possible—helping you provide a more enjoyable fan experience. Here is how data and analytics can do just that.
Efficiency
From finding their seat to purchasing merchandise or concessions, it’s important fans get where they need to go as efficiently as possible. Data from various sources—including cameras, LiDAR, and WiFi—can help you identify areas of congestion, unauthorised access to areas, busiest times, popular areas, dwell times, heat maps, and fan pathing throughout your stadium. This helps make traffic flow more efficiently, and can also help you optimise staffing, security, and operations to meet demand and improve the fan experience.
Another way to keep traffic flow efficient and wait times down is to utilise a data-driven communications and marketing platform—like Engage—to provide targeted offers to fans based on their location in your stadium. By providing offers for concessions and merchandise in a fan’s particular location, you eliminate the need for them to gather in areas outside of their section. This helps minimize overcrowding and long queues while increasing fan satisfaction and revenues.
In addition, entry gate turnstile data analysis can help stadium operators understand and predict fan arrival times depending on several factors including weather and event type. This information is useful for planning purposes to create the most efficient fan experience.
Data analysis can also help stadium managers understand historical attendance levels for specific event categories. This is important information for predicting audience attendance levels so stadium managers can efficiently staff their venue to keep it as safe and secure as possible.
Safety
By ensuring fans have the most efficient journey through your stadium, you also help ensure their safety. Data from cameras, WiFi, BLE, or LiDAR provide visibility on how fans move in real time, where queue times are high, and where congestion occurs. In the event of a spill or safety incident, the Beonic platform can detect the nature and location of the incident immediately and notify staff instantaneously. This allows you to deal with the situation as quickly as possible.
You can also utilise Beonic’s intelligent crowd management solutions to notify fans of safety incidents and queue wait times, rerouting them to less crowded areas or advising fans to wait if congestion is at its peak in key areas. This helps you keep fans safe by regulating crowd circulation and keeping crowds to a minimum.
You can harness data to help optimise your staff as well. Data analysis can provide a ratio of staff to fans and the impact staff ratios have on queue times, congestion, and more. Staff can also receive automated notifications to optimise cleaning cycle frequencies based on increased or decreased fan volumes. When you have the right amount of staff to aid with crowd control and cleaning, your stadium is safer for your fans.
You can visualize the ratio of staff to fans while analysing the impact these ratios have on queue times, congestion, and more. It’s also important to consider accessibility levels to best ensure fan safety. Camera or LiDAR data can detect the behavioural patterns of fans based on classifications (such as people walking or wheelchairs moving). This data can help stadiums understand the best paths for wheelchair users so stadium operators can plan safer and more efficient accessibility routes and services.
Security
Stadiums are complex venues with lots of different rooms and areas with varying levels of security. It’s important to have AI-driven crowd management solutions that can help you direct people where to go, detect when people are in areas they shouldn’t be, and quickly respond to or prevent incidents.
Data from cameras, WiFi, BLE, or LiDAR help you monitor all areas in real time and send alerts to staff when unauthorised persons are in secure areas. When a security breach or incident does occur, you will know what happened and where immediately. The analysis of surge patterns can also help you detect the potential for or beginnings of an incident before it occurs. This allows you to alert security to deescalate or respond promptly.
In addition, these data insights can help you develop operational crowd management plans for evacuations and emergency situations. You can refine and develop tactics based on historical data to ensure fans are protected as much as possible.
Does Your Venue Need To Update Its Crowd Management Solution?
Effective crowd management solutions take into account every aspect of your unique venue so you can provide an efficient, safe, and secure experience for fans.
At Beonic, we provide fan measurement data and insights that you need to make better decisions at your stadium. We help you understand what is happening to your entire fan population in real time so you can act decisively to increase efficiency while improving the fan experience. Over time, this data accumulates and can provide reliable evidence for planning, maintenance management, and investment decisions.
Interested in learning more? Check out our blog on the various use cases we enable in the stadium vertical and request a demo of our platform.
