Could YOU find your way around these parks just using their maps?
Theme park maps have to be practical since their primary purpose is navigation. Even beyond just showing pathways, queue entrances, and rides, they have to show and label the locations of restrooms, first aid, guest services, and other necessary structural locations. Even if many park enthusiasts know their favorites like the back of their hand, most visitors actually need the map.
So maps are treasure troves of information for the average guest, sure. But they’re best when they’re beautiful. The location of the nearest restroom is important, but tons of visitors collect park maps for their artistic style. Like the parks themselves, they’re idealized and dreamy little miniatures of the wonders within. Maps are like billboards, highlighting key rides and recreating the park’s signature architecture.
The best park maps are a balanced blend of style and substance. And when one starts to overcome the other, bad things happen. Here, we’ve got a few examples of maps that either forfeited all practical usefulness to focus on artistic representation, or maps that left any artistic style behind in favor of bland realism.
1. Alton Towers
© Merlin. Click for larger.
Problem: Alton Towers is one complex park. Having grown organically over the last century, the park has expanded and re-adjusted its layout many times as it’s changed, leaving it with a sprawling and sometimes chaotic layout that can defy intuition. The whole thing is made a lot worse by the 2011 park map (above). Finding your way from Point A to Point B may be practically impossible with the confusing and cartoony map. A fine collector’s item if you’re into the style, but not exactly practical.
© Merlin. Click for larger (PDF)
Solution: Alton Towers has toiled for years to find and stick to a map style that is legible and sensible while still showing off the park’s unique rides. 2011’s was a swing and a miss. For the life of us, we can’t figure out why they didn’t just stick with the very sensible style they’d used in the 2010 park map. An earlier 2006 edition was also incredibly successful at simplifying the park’s paths with a really unique stylish twist. The good news is that by the 2014 park map (above), they’d returned to their senses. While the park’s layout will always be convoluted, at least this year’s map legibly highlights main paths and more or less appropriately scaled.
2. Busch Gardens Tampa
© SeaWorld Parks. Click for larger.
Problem: A wave of visual disaster swept across US parks in the early 2000s during which maps became exaggerated, comic-book style representations of parks. Busch Gardens Tampa in Florida was one of the worst offenders, plunging its park map into an outrageous disaster of a situation that looks more like a child’s seek-and-find book than a guide map. With rides and animals co-mingling along twisting and diverging paths, the park map might just induce nausea if you look too long.
© SeaWorld Parks. Click for larger.
Solution: It seems pretty obvious that a convoluted park layout requires extraordinary clarity of the park map. Finally, Busch Gardens seems to have caught on. The 2014 map is to scale, and even highlights the park’s main path so as not to confuse guests who get lost along its African-themed trails.
3. Disney’s Hollywood Studios
© Disney. Click for larger.
Problem: To coincide with the release of MyMagic+ and the associated My Disney Experience smart phone app, Disney commissioned new park maps that would be smart phone and tablet friendly. The intention was that the maps – to scale and GPS-designed – would be able to show guests live position in the parks through the app. And, part of a seamless, resort-wide map, guests could zoom into any park or even land, then trace that park’s connection to nearby hotels, waterways, transportation, and other parks as one giant, huge, 40,000 acre, accurate map.
It works for the app, but Disney made the unusual decision to switch the paper, in-park maps to the new GPS style, too. The results have been met with groans from fans, and it’s sort of easy to see why. Sure, the maps are now hyper-scaled and great at the “practical” element of showing paths and services. But where’s the artistry? Oriented north (which makes sense as part of that giant resort-wide map, but causes lots of confused map shuffling from guests trying to figure out where they are on paper), the entrance is in the upper-right corner. The map itself is also tiny, with the labels and legend taking up more than twice as much room as the map itself. Who would hang that on their wall as a souvenir?
© Disney. Click for larger.
Solution: This one is not solved. The GPS map above is the current park map. The most viable solution is to simply turn back the clock… What exactly was wrong with the trusty, artistic maps that had graced the park for many years? We’re not afraid of change, but this might be a case of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The new, hyper-accurate map does make sense for live-tracking locations on electronic devices, but the old map is much more user-friendly and a lot more likely to be saved and hung up by park fans. Ah well.
4. Thorpe Park
© Merlin. Click for larger.
Problem: Contained on an island, Thorpe Park has had a most unusual explosion into the public consciousness. Existing as a simple family park with a petting zoo, 3D theater, and collection of family flat rides for decades, the park got supercharged in 2002 under the guidance of Merlin (owners of Alton Towers). Since 2002, the park has added five massive steel coasters and re-branded itself as the nation’s thrill capitol. Maybe, but the 2013 park map did no favors in guiding guests from thrill to thrill. Click the map to open a much larger version, then tell us: Can you spot the vomiting rider? How about the one with his arm cut off?
© Merlin. Click for larger.
Solution: The map was radically redesigned for 2014, and while it appears a lot less cluttered and easier to navigate, it’s not exactly crystal clear. According to 2014’s map, the park’s five massive coasters each reach to the stratosphere. Better than a dizzying and unclear collection of rides and sick guests.
5. Phantasialand
Via Theme Park Review. Click for larger.
Problem: This unfairly overshadowed German park is perhaps one of the most impressive of the parks stuck in Disney’s shadow. Its realistic themed lands and collection of incredible family and thrill rides set it apart and earn it a spot in Europe’s most attended. Problem is that for many years, its park map was practically useless, drawn in a fish-eye orientation that highlighted only a few paths and grouped the park’s many rides into an odd corner.
Image via Theme Park Review. Click for larger.
Solution: The park got wise for 2014, changing its map into an almost GPS-specific style that doesn’t sacrifice detail OR artwork. Easy to navigate AND collector-friendly, the map is a whole lot better than it used to be at guiding guests.
6. Busch Gardens Williamsburg
© SeaWorld Parks. Click for larger.
Problem: Like its Floridian, Africa-themed sister, the European-themed Busch Gardens in Virginia has a storied past archive of park maps trying to make sense of its complex layout. The park is located in the dense forests of Williamsburg with extreme climbs, bridges, and very intense stairs connecting its many country-themed lands. In that same unfortunate style of the early 2000s, the park’s map was more comic book than guiding aid. It was full of exaggerated architecture and mangled paths that resemble a seek-and-find book, with little help on how to actually get anywhere or what landmarks might actually look like.
© SeaWorld Parks. Click for larger.
Solution: Following Tampa’s footsteps, the map was simplified and given a harsh dose of reality, becoming an accurate representation of the park’s layout. Maybe it does lose some style in the process, but in a park like Busch Gardens, practical maps have got to come first. Noticing just how different the first map is from the second shows how inaccurate and out-of-scale the first really was!
Conclusion
You wouldn’t think that making good park maps would be that hard. But some of the parks above have tried out new styles every year or two just trying to find the right way to balance beauty and usefulness. The results have been staggering, as you can see. Next time you visit your favorite park, grab a map and pretend you’d never visited before… Could YOU find your way around by the map alone?
