‘TripAdvisor for theme parks’ will help you plan your next vacation to Disney World

Photo credit: Loren Javier

Millions of families opt for theme park vacations every year. With hundreds of rides, shows, and restaurants on offer, these getaways can last for several days. The plan is to visit every attraction, and ride each roller coaster – something that can’t be covered in a single day.

Theme parks themselves encourage families to stay for longer periods. Some, like Disney World, run their own hotels so vacationers are comfortably ensconced within its boundaries. And consumers lap it up – in 2015 the most popular theme park in the world, Magic Kingdom, attracted a little over 19 million visitors.

But while theme parks are wildly popular, consumers still face difficulties in accessing specific information pertaining to rides, shows, or restaurants. Sites like TripAdvisor will give you an overall feel of the destination, but it’s cumbersome searching for more details. This is important because theme parks are gargantuan entities in their own right – practically impossible for each and every single attraction to conform to a uniform standard. And, if you browse through the park’s own site, you’ll think everything inside is world-class. Which, of course, is not the case.

That’s the problem ThemeGo is trying to solve. The site is a social platform where people can read community-based reviews about every single thing inside specific theme parks. This includes attractions, shows, shops, rides, and restaurants. It’s also helping solve the problem of discoverability – if you’re stumped on which theme park to visit this year, it’ll help you narrow down choices based on preferences, events, and handy lists.

“I’m a huge theme park fan and have visited more than 30 theme parks all over the world,” explains Yariv Padva, founder of ThemeGo. “To plan a vacation to a theme park or resort was always very difficult as you needed to use multiple sites to validate all the information.”

ThemeGo, which is based in Israel, started approximately a year ago and is backed by Japanese investor SamuraiHouse. Yariv claims there’s a huge market for his product both within Asia and across the world. “In Japan alone almost 51 million people visited theme parks last year while the global figure was 800 million. The potential is enormous,” he adds

Crowdsourced

All reviews on the portal are user-generated, but Yariv explains the team does its best to ensure authenticity before uploading on the site. Reviews are usually solicited from theme park fans through Facebook groups or Twitter, whom Yariv describes as “incredibly passionate.” Furthermore the startup is also working with entertainment complexes to encourage visitors to post their own reviews directly on the portal.

In an effort to promote transparency, the startup also creates its own maps for each theme park on the site. Yariv explains maps produced by theme parks themselves are usually outdated and not entirely indicative of the size and location of each attraction. ThemeGo’s maps are built on top of the Google Maps API to give a better idea of where to meet your favorite Disney character. It also solves the problem of managing multiple lists and maps.

Photo credit: Garry Knight

This specific part of the startup’s product is not user-generated. An in-house team works with reviewers and theme park administrators to create the maps.