Universal recently announced that they will soon be discontinuing the TapuTapu virtual queue system for their Volcano Bay water park.
When Volcano Bay opened in 2017, one of its primary distinguishing features was the use of 100% virtual queues via the TapuTapu system. This requires guests to tap into a virtual queue using a free rented wristband in order to wait for a slide. When it is the guests turn to ride, they are notified by the wristband to come back to the slide, where presumably they have a short wait before their turn.
The announcement of the change to queuing at Volcano Bay happened within months of Disney changing the ratio of Fastpass to standby capacity in order to increase the ratio of standby guests and presumably lower the number of Paid Fastpasses (or Lightning Lane or whatever they call it this month). The reason for these changes were not announced.
When TapuTapu was introduced, the industry was experimenting with a variety of alternative queuing strategies like: games in queue of Space Mountain (2009-2020); scare actors in the queue of Skull Island Reign of Kong (2016-2020?); pager-based queses in holding areas at Dumbo (2014-today) and Race Thru New York (2017-?); and a number of virtual queues including Rise of the Resistance (2019-2021), Hagrids Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure (2019-2021), Fast & Furious Supercharged (2018-?), Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind (2022-2025), Remy's Ratatouille Adventure (2021-2022), TRON Lightcycle /Run (2023-2024), and Tiana's Bayou Adventure (2024-2025).
Today, nearly all of those attractions operate conventional standby queues with a paid skip-the-line option.
These experiments in line management were intended to tackle the number one complaint at theme parks: the long lines.
But I think the big operators might be realizing that complicated line management systems reduce overall guest satisfaction due to their reduced legibility while technically solving the number one complaint.
Guests probably report fewer complaints about waits while complaining more about confusion, technical glitches, and the sense that they didn't even get the opportunity to ride the most popular attractions. Is that actually better? At least everyone understands how stand by lines are supposed to work. They may not like them, but it doesn't make them feel left out. And if a paid skip-the-line option exists, that fits their expectations too.
In the case of Volcano Bay, switching to a standby queuing system may open the door for Universal to offer their paid Express line in addition to the standby line.
As a long time critic of overly-complex queue management systems, I think this is a positive sign. Let people wait in line, no matter how long it is (unless the ride is truly so unreliable that you can't), and offer the option to pay to skip the line (but crucially make it expensive enough that the vast majority of guests choose not to pay for it).
We will see how long the virtual queue lasts at Harry Potter and the Battle at the Ministry...
