Traffic flow cannot be deciphered on a map of a festival … other than the tendency for an audience to go to the right.

💡 Sidenote: We have assumed for decades that this was related to driving and yielding to the right… But studies show it may have more to do with the dominance of right-handedness, as even in left-driving countries there is a tendency to turn right when given an opportunity.

👥 The Real Factors That Control Crowd Movement

The flow of customers is strongly steered by sight lines, which are different at specific levels of crowdedness of your festival… And that crowdedness has multiple elements:

• Performance troupes
• The “display creep” of artisans and merchants
• Hawkers
• Temporary signage
• The audience themselves
• Shops that increase in size over time beyond simple display creep

🚶‍♀️For Marketplace Managers:

Walk Your Grounds

If you are a marketplace manager, you need to walk your festival grounds both when the site is closed and at varying levels of busyness in order to spot bottlenecks and diversions that will impact some locations in a negative way.

🏪 For Vendors:

Know Your Approach

If you are a seller inside said marketplace, you need to walk upstream of your shop to be clear about how the audience approaches your location. This is important for your signage and display placements, as well as allowing you to have informed conversations with the marketplace manager when you’ve noticed detrimental traffic alterations around your shop.

⚠️ Common Traffic Disruptors

• A long line at a pub can bounce traffic away from the following booth line
• A pair of cast members doing a bit with no situational awareness for the traffic they are blocking… can be a barrier to commerce

This is more common in festivals with narrow pathways. With wider paths, the performance may only be altering the traffic flow, which can be used in a purposeful way if you have need of a pinball bumper to push guests into an under-trafficked area of the park.

📊 The Attendance Number Myth

In festivals that share attendance numbers with their concessionaires, astute merchants can decipher the traffic level at which their shop works best or does not perform well.
🔑 It is important to understand that there is both a low traffic lull in sales AND a high traffic lull in sales. More people in the park is not the answer to every problem.

🎯 Location Strategy for Merchants

If you are a merchant, be it artist or service provider… ideally, you will study the traffic before purchasing or building in a specific location in the park.

Many products or services have a time of day and a location that is ideal for guests to interact with it. Thus:

• Some vendors would rather be near the back of a park
• Some vendors would rather be near the front gate

If you don’t yet know which is perfect for your business, try different types of locations in the different festivals you participate in. The speed at which a guest walks past your shop might be more important than whether you’re at the front or back of a festival.

🔍 What to Watch For

All of these things can be determined by watching how a crowd moves through a festival:

• What are guests’ eyes landing on? 👀
• Are they reading signs?
• How far ahead are they making decisions about their next stop?
• What times do the nearby stage shows release their audiences?
• What time is the last performance on the stage near your shop?

🚀 Next Steps

There are some techniques for driving in-park traffic to your shop, but that is another article. Here we are building awareness of the traffic patterns you might want to alter with one or more of the in-park traffic strategies…
And you can’t easily change what you don’t understand.