Buckingham Palace, London, opens up for 2 -3 months every summer with certain areas of the Palace open to the general public (click for tickets). Visiting such a unique attraction is a great opportunity to see how wayfinding is used in the Palace and in the grounds (at least in the areas we have access to as the general public). The areas that are open to access are:
- The State Rooms (the main rooms where the queen meets, greets and entertains visiting dignitaries).
- The Queen’s Gallery (where you can see some of the world’s best painters represented in the collection on display).
- The Royal Mews (where you can view the Royal carriages, horse stables and livery).
Every tourist attraction uses wayfinding to guide visitors to different areas for a variety of reasons.
The attraction will want to make us have to come across sales points, away from secure and private areas, whilst also ensuring that a level of crowd control is maintained.
The popularity of an attraction such as Buckingham Palace with the sheer number of visitors in the summer months and the fact that most areas you will get to view are internal spaces mans a definite need to carefully control the crowd movements.
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People as a Resource
No matter what technologies are created and can be used for signage or for navigation and wayfinding, people continue to be one of the most efficient ways of helping tourists to find their way through an attraction such as Buckingham Palace.
The Palace uses a large number of volunteers (you can apply here) and a large number of staff means that you are always able to easily get pointed in the right direction.
For a lot of tourist attractions and travel spaces, using human navigators to guide people is not a practical consideration given the cost of hiring the people needed.
The palace though can play to their prestige and there tends to be no shortage of people willing to offer their services each summer.
Inside the State Rooms, the volunteers seem to be chosen with semiotics in mind, in that every volunteer which I saw was a young lady and this seems to reflect the way in which the palace likes to place some emphasis on the youth of the future.
In the Royal Mews and the Queen’s Gallery, on the other hand, expect to see wayfinding helpers who are much older and where the emphasis seems to be put on tradition and experience.
Using Technology
The palace is not shy about using technology and the Queen’s Gallery tour comes with a self-guided navigational audio system tour.
Overall the audio system (which you listen to with headphones) is a logical idea but tends to mean a lot of people spend several minutes starting off their tour fumbling around with the technology, trying to get it to work.
Personally, I do not like the way in which it can be so distracting but it does mean the chance to learn a lot more about each painting.
Commerce Opportunities using Wayfinding
Just like with any tourist attraction, trying to increase commercial revenue is essential and wayfinding in an attraction such as the Queen’s Gallery is one way to achieve this.
Apart from ensuring that you have a souvenir shop in place, for example, many attractions do very cleverly force tourists to have to walk through the shops.
You see many attractions including aquariums. museums and other tourist attractions making sure that the souvenir shop is the only way to exit the attraction.
Another option if the attraction is large and takes several hours to navigate through (such as an amusement park) is to strategically place cafés and refreshment facilities.
The shop in the Queen’s Gallery uses the idea of space well with an open entrance and thus an inviting space in which to enter and to spend.
With shopping baskets there immediately to pick up and with great use of color to draw your eyes to the shop entrance, it is hard not to want to enter.
Bristol Airport in England takes this took an improve to the point where you can only reach the departures area of the airport (after going through security), by walking through the large duty-free area.
You have to literally zig-zag through the duty-free and past several displays, whether you wish to or not.
Attraction Overview and Experience
After doing the tour of the Houses of Parliament the day before, a tour on which we were literally shepherded in groups where we were forced to stand squeezed together and moved around at pace and without the opportunity to take any photographs of any kind, it was a pleasure to do the summer opening of the palace.
What a difference a day makes! I would highly recommend the Palace tour and would say to leave the Houses of Parliament.
Seeing the staterooms, royal mews and the queen’s gallery on the same day works out fine, and given how well-organized the individual attractions are set up, you should be able to enjoy the experience.
Do not expect to see the queen though given that for the summer opening of the palace, she heads off to her summer home!
