In our last post, we talked about several ideas to manage season pass holder reservations alongside daily ticket sales to manage daily capacity limits. While you don’t necessarily need to require season pass holders to make a reservation, it is the best way for them to ensure there will be availability on the pass holders day of choice.

Prior to season pass reservations, you may not have been able to know which of your season pass holders visited your resort each day, unless you have access gates. During COVID times, it is especially important to understand exactly who has been at your resort each day. Why? Contact tracing.

According to the CDC¹, “contact tracing involves identifying people who have an infectious disease (cases) and people who they came in contact with (contacts) and working with them to interrupt disease spread.” To prevent further spread of COVID-19, people who may have been exposed are encouraged to stay home for a quarantine period. If you don’t have a clear record of exactly who visited your resort on each day, it’s impossible to communicate with those guests.

For example, if you are informed by a visitor to your resort that he or she has COVID, you can then quickly identify and communicate with all of your guests who visited the same-day as the infected visitor. Contact tracing is widely used across other parts of the world, with countries such as Italy and  Germany even rolling out apps to assist with the task². Of course, maintaining guest privacy is extremely important (keep guest names anonymous, always), but these types of measures are necessary if we’re to mitigate further spread.

As you make plans for your operations, reservations can help not only with capacity planning but also as a safety tool for you and your guests.

1 https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/contact-tracing.html

2 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/world/europe/contact-tracing-apps-europe-coronavirus.html