Introducing Pretparkje (Themeparkie)

I love theme parks.
I hate queuing.

For a long time, I've been very intrigued by optimizing theme park visits. You enter a park, and your goal is to queue as little as possible. Do you start at the back of the park? Seems smart, but maybe everyone thinks the same, and it might become smarter to start at the beginning of the park.

Same goes for which day to visit. School holidays influence theme park crowd levels, but so do other factors like weather, day of the week, month of the year, ...

Luckily, there's a lot of data available out in the open, and for a long time I've been wanting to bring all that data together.

This accumulation of data has now resulted in Pretparkje - or ThemeParkie in English (continuing my streak of using diminutive words like Woordje, Lijsje, and Festivalletje).

Pretparkje combines data from the Themepark Wiki API - a very cool open-source project that knows how to speak to all theme park backends to fetch waiting times with some other sources:

• OpenMeteo: live weather and forecasts.
• OpenHolidays: live information on holidays worldwide.
• Openverse: a library of free-to-use images under the Creative Commons license.

Yes, there are already other sites doing similar things. Loooopings has a good overview of a lot of theme parks, but it's pretty basic (and ad-riddled). Queue-times has a lot of parks, and a lot of statistics, but it just shows you the data. Pretparkje aims to help you decide what to do with it. But more on that below.

Phase 1

Currently, Pretparkje is accumulating that data. Every time it fetches the waiting time for an attraction, it records it together with the current time & date, the weather, and school vacations.

In phase one, Pretparkje already allows for some very nice insights. You can of course look at the current live queue times of a park, but you can also view general theme park statistics to see what might be a good day to visit, or dig deeper into an attraction and see when it's generally less crowded.

In addition, it's already possible to enable notifications when a ride gets less busy than a threshold you specify. On iPhone, this requires installing the website to your homescreen.

What's next?

In the next phase, it will become possible to use the gathered intelligence to plan your day. Tell it when you'll visit a park and which attractions you want to do, and it will use a complex algorithm to give you the best order in which to complete the attractions. But it still needs more data to get there. And some more product thinking from my side.

What about an app?

Right now you can add Pretparkje to your home screen and have an app-like experience. I want to turn that into a full-blown app in the future. It would be awesome to have live activities and widgets tailored to your theme park visit.

But I've been working on Pretparkje as a side project. Even though my main job now is working on my own projects and monetizing them, I didn't set myself any goals for this one. Hosting costs are minimal, the data sources are free, and Pretparkje doesn't need to make money.

Creating an app would mean allocating more time to Pretparkje. Before taking that step, I want to discover whether Pretparkje is useful to more people than just me and what they would actually want from an app.

Conclusion

I still don't know whether you should start at the end of the park or at the beginning, but at least now I have some data to back whichever I decide to do.

For now, Pretparkje will keep collecting data and become smarter and smarter as it goes.

If you also love theme parks and hate queuing, please give Pretparkje a try. And if there's something you would want from a future app, I'd love to hear about it.