Wholesale virtual queueing is itself far from free of problems, though, and would necessitate a considerable rethink of park design to even have the slightest chance of working successfully.
The thing it boils down to is that most (if not all) theme parks are designed to account for the fact that a considerable percentage of guests are in queues. When you take guests out of the major ride queues, you need somewhere else to put them, and the vast majority of parks do not have enough additional space to successfully absorb everyone displaced from queues. Even at parks with more "non-queue" entertainment than most, such as the Disney and Universal parks and Europa Park, they have never made the long-term leap to 100% virtual queueing simply because it wouldn't work.
Virtual queueing technology has existed for years, and given that, there must be a reason why no theme park has yet implemented wholesale virtual queueing on any kind of long-term basis. The trials that parks have done have proven that the "queueless theme park", while a utopia in concept, does not work that way in execution. Thorpe Park briefly trialled it about 10 years ago, and it was disastrous. Walibi Holland trialled it during COVID, and it was disastrous. Even in Volcano Bay, a waterpark designed bespokely with virtual queueing in mind, it is not free of issues.
Some of the key problems I would cite with virtual queueing are:
- As mentioned above, it displaces people from queues and those people need somewhere else to go. Most parks do not have this "somewhere else" in sufficient quantities to successfully absorb everyone who would otherwise be in a queue.
- It does not allow for any kind of variance in ride throughput or regular operation, and that simply isn't attainable in the real world. Virtual queueing works fine where throughput is meeting targets and no breakdowns or stoppages occur... but as soon as that throughput slips, or the ride breaks down, that all goes to pot and a sizeable physical queue forms.
- It does not offer any kind of deterrent to joining a large queue. A large physical queue offers some deterrent to joining it, which means that crowds disperse more evenly, but with a virtual queue, this deterrent doesn't exist, meaning that the queue times become a lot more lop-sided. Popular attractions end up with massive queues that never subside while half of the rest of the park is walk-on.
Admittedly, virtual queueing would ostensibly be more "inclusive" in that everyone would suffer from the same problems equally, but I don't think it would be a feasible solution. It would not be the touch-all panacea to the RAP issues, and it would introduce a whole host of new ones to the extent where I think we'd quite quickly be calling for regular queueing to return.