Wait Times Go Mobile with 'Lines'

Waiting in line for an attraction at a theme park used to be a test of stamina and patience, but technological innovations have changed the experience over the years. The introduction of services like Disney's FASTPASS and the Universal Express Pass have made it easier to plan a day around frustratingly long wait times. Now, to paraphrase a certain commercial, there are apps for that. To learn more about the development of these types of mobile applications, we talked to Henry Work, a developer at TouringPlans.com, about its latest product, Lines, a mobile Web site that displays estimates for wait times at Walt Disney World.

There's been an explosion in the mobile application market. What sets Lines apart from your competitors?

It's exciting to see so much interest in trying to improve the in-park experience with mobile devices. What we've really focused on is bringing our decade's worth of experience researching Disney crowds for The Unofficial Guide Walt Disney World into the mix. Our estimates are based on historical data (which we are constantly updating) and statistical modeling prepared by a professional statistician. One of the nice benefits of this is that our system is not dependent on how many users we have in the parks. This also means we can predict future wait times ... things like, "What will Space Mountain be like at 5 p.m.?", or "When will Expedition Everest FASTPASSes be gone for the day?"

Where do you start with the development of a mobile application? Obviously the iPhone has the biggest reach right now, but what role did other smartphones play in the development phase?

We're all fervent iPhone users, so we started there. But we made the decision to try support as many platforms as possible, and do it with a small development team — so we decided to make our "app" a website. We tried to make it look and feel as much like a native app as possible. Currently we support iPhone, Android, and Palm Pre/Pixi phones, and we're working furiously on others.

According to the site, you've been researching wait times at Walt Disney World for more than the past 10 years. Besides reader submissions, how else have you been tracking the data?

Reader submissions have actually been a small amount of our overall data-collection effort, and we've only really accelerated it this year thanks to Twitter and smartphone ubiquity. We've actually sent teams (including ourselves) to walk around the park and collect wait times for the past decade, both the times that are posted outside the attractions and how long it actually takes to wait in line. One of the things we're excited about with Lines is easy it is for users to input data back into the system. We're not dependent on it, but it certainly improves our estimates!

Does Disney ever release this information to developers?

Not that we know of. All of our research has been, like the guide, Unofficial!

TouringPlans.com is home to the unofficial guide to Walt Disney World. Are there plans to expand to the West Coast parks?

The same team that does the Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World also works on the Unofficial Guide to Disneyland (as well as our Vegas book). We definitely want to integrate some of our products to Disneyland — me more than anyone; I live in California!