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LO-Q PLC
       Step Aside: A New Line on ‘Civilized Waiting’
       A decade ago Leonard Sim, a British engineer, stood in line with his wife and two sons for two hot, miserable, sweaty hours for the Little Mermaid ride at Universal’s theme park in Orlando. When they finally made it to the front, they learned that the ride would be out of order for the rest of the day. Fed up, Sim’s wife challenged him to come up with a better way.
       It took a little more sweat, but Sim finally came up with a solution—a pagerlike device, dubbed the Q-bot, that lets people reserve a place in line and then roam around a park until it’s their turn to board. Sim now has theme parks lining up to use it. Six Flags officials say they started last season with 60 Q-bots at their Atlanta test site—and ended up ordering 740 more because the system was so successful. This year Six Flags is rolling out Q-bots at eight more of its theme parks. “The No. 1 complaint at the park is, ‘Gosh, it’s a great park, but if we just didn’t have to wait for the rides’,” says John Odum, general manager of Six Flags Over Georgia. “Now they don’t have to wait.”
       Virtual queuing, as Sim calls it, starts with visitors to a theme park renting a Q-bot for the day ($10 for the device, plus $10 for each member of the family that shares it). They can then set their place in line by pointing the device at a special box by the entrances to the most popular rides. Now they’re free to wander the park until the Q-bot chirps and vibrates to alert them to a screen message that says it’s time to head toward, say, the Batman ride at Six Flags Over Georgia. Robert Ulrich and his 14-year-old son, Sam, are among the 80,000 visitors who’ve tried the Q-bot. “It’s civilized waiting,” says Ulrich. To keep fisticuffs at busy theme parks to a minimum, the system won’t let Q-bot users “jump” the queue and cut ahead of people who are waiting the old-fashioned way.
       The Q-bot system knows where each visitor is at all times, which makes “proximity marketing” easy. The Q-bot signals when it knows a family is near a certain restaurant, for example, and offers a discount to get them to chow down. “It’s immediate advertising,” says Sim, whose two-year-old British company employs 23 people. And this year Six Flags Over Georgia is testing the tracking feature to help parents find lost children (kids would wear a special wristband).
       Sim expects that theme parks in Europe will soon catch on to his technology. But for now he’s focused on the United States, home to half the world’s theme parks, not to mention people who are generally “a bit more entrepreneurial and open to new things,” he says. Sim’s wife, by the way, has said she would like her husband to turn his energies to finding a way to make shopping more pleasurable. He’s working on it.
       —Karen Springen