Event Venues: Suffolk Show
The Suffolk Show is a premiere event in the UK, one of its largest agricultural shows, typically hosting 80000 - 90000 visitors over a two-day period each year.
With 13 event rings and around 700 trade stands though, visitors can easily get disoriented, or miss an event they particularly want to see.
SmartNE were invited to provide a Smart Solution for the Suffolk Show in 2018. To our knowledge, this was the first time a location–aware interactive map had been used for a large agricultural show in the UK, possibly in Europe.
The SmartNE solution provided a mobile app that enabled visitors to search easily for activities of interest, save their favourites and generally plan their day. The route-finding feature showed them where they were on the map and gave them precise directions to their activity of choice.
With multiple, very large car parks it's not unknown for visitors to forget where they parked or even which car park they left their car in: an event car park can look very different at the end of the day to when the car was left in the morning! A feature on the app allowed visitors to store their car location.
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The site map was prepared from CAD plans and overlaid on a national map. Tradestand, ring programme and facilities information were loaded into the solution's content manager and automatically consolidated so that they could be quickly displayed following a user search. Public transport information to and from the showground was similarly consolidated. Because there was no universal network coverage across the Trinity showground we ensured that the mobile app could work offline.
With 6000 downloads over the two days of the Show, over 90% of ratings were 4-star or higher.