At 115. birthday Harley Davidson handled 150,000 visitors.
When Harley Davidson celebrated its 115th anniversary in 2018. birthday, over 60,000 motorcycles and 150,000 visitors gathered at the Prague Exhibition Centre. Clearing all the tickets for such a mass of bikers
was a huge challenge for the organisers, which was helped by the Samsung Knox mobile apps and mobile device management technology implemented by System4u.
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The event was preceded by 2 years of preparation
The main organizers Jaroslav Vavřina, Michal Šesták and Martin Cieslar had a lot of experience with events for motorcyclists, as they have been organizing the annual Prague Harley Days since 2013. However, this event did not match what they expected at 115. the brand’s birthday, there was no comparison.
“At Prague Harley Days we managed to check in visitors manually – the bikers took out a paper ticket, we checked it and let them into the area. But we knew that many times more people would come to the anniversary celebrations where a similar approach could not work.”
“It can take a few minutes before a biker parks, turns off the engine, finds a paper ticket in his leather jacket, says hello to his friends at the gate, starts the engine and drives into the area. We calculated that there would be such a queue of people and motorbikes at the gates of the exhibition centre that we would probably block traffic in Prague.”
Therefore, the organizers had already been touring similar events abroad for 2 years before the anniversary, looking for inspiration. Nakonec se rozhodli, že odbavování vstupenek vyřeší pomocí mobilní technologie.
The solution was a QR code on the tickets
“We wanted visitors to not have to get off the bike at the gate at all. They just had to get a visitor’s wristband to quickly legitimize themselves and move on. That’s why we decided to put a QR code on the tickets, which the operator will read with a mobile phone, immediately put a wristband on the biker for visitors and let him into the area.”
Harley Davidson’s target audience is men aged 50 and over, so Cieslar and Šesták anticipated that party-goers would need to be prepared for this technological change in advance. Therefore, with plenty of time to spare, they launched an e-shop with tickets, wrote an informative ten for visitors and sent a series of emails explaining how the electronic check-in would work.
“It was clear to us that not all bikers have a smartphone to just show the ticket on the display. We were counting on someone showing a phone and someone else showing a printed ticket. In both cases, however, the QR code check-in was supposed to be faster than manually checking each ticket.”
Two apps and phones from Samsung
To give motorcyclists the greatest incentive to come to the event with an electronic ticket on their smartphone, Harley Davidson developed a mobile app in collaboration with Juicymo that visitors could download for free. In this app, they could upload their ticket, find the event programme, a map of the venue or tips for motorcycle tours in the area. At the same time, a second mobile app was created to help the organisers verify the QR code on the tickets.
It was also necessary to equip the organizers with mobile phones. Samsung has taken it upon itself to loan Harley Davidson 100 smartphones. Their management was then handled by System4u – the only certified partner of Samsung Knox, a system for mass management of mobile phones, in the Czech Republic.
“By using Samsung Knox, we didn’t even have to see the phones. Samsung just sent us the IMEI codes of the devices and we set them up remotely. After turning the phone on, the organizers were shown the Harley Davidson logo with the 115th anniversary written on it. We set up a motorcycle-themed wallpaper for them, as well as a mobile app for check-in that we updated remotely on a regular basis. So the organizers just turned on their phones and were all set.” Petra Holubcová, marketing manager of System4u
Convenient management of all phones
The Samsung Knox mobile phone management system also came in handy for Cieslar and Šesták. The two organizers could see in a simple console exactly where each organizer was standing or how busy they were, so they could position their people appropriately to avoid queues.
“We brought a power bank for the busiest organisers so that their phones don’t run out. We could stand in one place and keep track of all our people all over the area. 60 organizers were directly at the exhibition grounds, we had others at OMV petrol stations and a few more at the airport. We managed to coordinate the people so that there were no queues anywhere, and at the moments of the biggest rush the motorcyclists waited for a few minutes at most.”
In addition, just before the official start of the event, System4u demonstrated its responsiveness in customer support.
“On Friday night we discovered that the ticketing app had disappeared from some of our phones and damaged the hardware of the devices – the security protection chips for the Samsung Knox system were damaged. Luckily we had spare phones and the guys from System4 worked on it at night, so everything was working again on Saturday morning.”
