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Ensuring The Ultimate Visitor Experience
Optimize Your Venue
Improve visitor satisfaction and profitability by optimizing capacity, circulation flow, operating efficiency and visitor service delivery. Create a more successful venue with ORCA Consulting LLC.
Impressive History of Success
Since 1993, ORCA has provided quantitative and qualitative services to a variety of leisure, recreation and entertainment clients - including owners, operators, architects, and designers - to enhance facility performance, improve visitor satisfaction, and achieve their financial goals.
Applied "Guestology"
ORCA applies the concept of "Guestology" - a science combining quantitative analytical techniques with qualitative operational assessments - to help clients strategically analyze each aspect of their venue's capacity, layout, and visitor experience.
How do we do it?
ORCA focuses over 100 combined years of Disney industrial engineering and operations experience – and at high-attendance cultural attractions – to identify and define issues and develop cost-effective solutions to ensure a comfortable and positive experience for visitors.
ORCA Consulting enhances the design development process by identifying opportunities to improve visitor flow, capacity, wayfinding, and placement of service components. We analyze sizing of public spaces and planned programming content to estimate stay times and ensure spaces can comfortably accommodate projected attendance volumes.
Our capacity analysis services balance maximum visitor capacity with infrastructure, finding areas of opportunity to reduce congestion, improve visitor convenience, and increase penetration and conversion rates. Operational strategies help venues create efficiencies and reduce operating costs while promoting techniques that build an environment of improved employee performance and service delivery.
Our Services
- Capacity and Circulation Analyses
- Visitor Flow Simulation Modeling
- Public Venue Planning and Design Support
- Programming and Operations Assessments
- Visitation Management Strategy Development
- Visitor Use Planning and Visitation Research
- Implementation Support
- Admissions and Access Control System Procurement Support
- Training Curricula Development and Delivery
State-of-the-Art Simulations and Analyses
At ORCA we strive to be ahead of the curve while also utilizing our past knowledge and experience. That’s why we accompany modern simulations with our tried and true spread sheet analysis to give our clients every viewpoint of their venue to help them improve their visitor experience. For planning of public attractions, simulation models, such as the examples shown here, allow initial concepts for component placement and capacity assumptions to be tested against forecasted attendance volumes, to ensure any areas of congestion or extended wait lines at service points are intercepted early in design development.
As part of ORCA Consulting’s support for Hudson Highlands Fjord Trail (currently under development), ORCA developed multiple simulation models to replicate current conditions in the neighboring community of Cold Spring (shown here), and to test the impact of various attendance levels at the Fjord Trail.
Our simulation models developed for multi-level venues allow the design team and venue operator to visualize the movement of visitors between floors, and to ensure the is an optimum balance of capacities and visitor densities.
ORCA In Action
Presidio Tunnel Tops
Since 2014, ORCA has been supporting the Presidio Trust in San Francisco in planning this recently-completed venue, located between the Presidio Main Post and Crissy Field for leisure activities and special events and programs. ORCA established visitor demand and capacity figures for the project to determine the ability of the site to support the programming alternatives that are being considered and developed specific configuration recommendations to ensure that the project is designed effectively to accommodate the expected visitation volumes on peak days. Prior to the opening of Tunnel Tops, ORCA partnered with the park’s leadership team to establish visitor service standards, due to their desire to bring visitor engagement by staff and volunteers “front and center” to their operation. ORCA continues to support Tunnel Tops since its initial opening in 2022, providing annual visitor service training to each summer season’s seasonal hires, and ongoing design and business planning support as additional phases to its overall master plan are implemented.
U.S. Capitol Visitor Center
ORCA Consulting provided visitor circulation, attendance capacity, and operations planning support throughout the development and construction phases for the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center, ensuring that the planned areas and facilities within the CVC could support the anticipated peak attendance volumes. ORCA’s scope included assessments of security screening, reservations-ticketing-admissions, two introductory theaters, one events theater, museum spaces, theater queueing, retail, dining, restrooms, baggage check, museum gallery, wayfinding signage (exterior and interior), circulation spaces (including tunnel connection to Library of Congress), Capitol building tour organization and dispatch, tour routing options within the Capitol building, development of operating hours and staff schedules, development of operating procedures, and animated simulation modeling (for Congressional hearing).
