Congrats to Queues for becoming a back-to-back MLB All-Star. OK, maybe I’m taking some liberties here.
But as both the Braves and Phillies are clients of the occupancy-tracking startup, Queues has supported the last two All-Star weeks with its sensors, which have broken into sports as a useful back-of-house tool to manage lines and divert traffic around shopping spaces in stadiums.
The work around Citizen Bank Park with MLB and its marquee event came with a significant milestone for Queues: its data stepped into the batter’s box in a fan-facing pilot with MLB, allowing attendees to go through the Ballpark app to see where the longest and shortest lines were at the New Era Phillies Team Store and its main concourse concessions area.
CEO Samuel Porta said the discoverability in the Ballpark app led to next-level engagement on the Queues platform, which isn’t surprising when you consider that more than 111,000 people passed through the multiday event.
“Whether it be end of this season or going to the next, we expect a good handful of teams will have this be something that fans can use,” Porta said.
Queues, which deploys sensors that only measure an area’s congestion (no identifying data is taken on fans), latched on with the Braves last year and started spreading through MLB with other relationships like the Royals, Phillies and Padres. The startup closed a $3 million Series A round earlier this year, led by Nashville Capital Networks.
The fan-facing component is the next wave of Queues, giving fans the clearest paths toward quicker transactions. Working with T-Mobile for the PGA Championship in May, Queues deployed similarly in the PGA app.
While the fan-facing nature means more user traffic, Queues CTO Caleb Lee noted that the company’s software handled it seamlessly, which he said is a benefit of both he and Porta being technical founders.
“We build all our systems to be super robust, and we always expect for the ‘worst case, but best case,’” Lee chuckled. Worst case here means a lot of traffic. But that also becomes the best case — more retail and concession items moved.
There’s an onboarding conversation that always comes from prospective Queues clients about going with fan-facing intel: the concern that a fan opens their app and sees red (meaning long lines everywhere). But at MLB All-Star Week, Porta said fans were met with steady views of green — like in the photo above. Porta and Lee are hopeful that the MLB All-Star and PGA Championship work sets up a growing ... queue *looks around sheepishly* ... of marquee events for the company to support in the future.
