also known as the pint to pee ratio.
Within the United Kingdom for the past couple of weeks, there have been a lot of queues being formed across the country following a tour, followed by a few tempers getting lost, a lot of crossed legs, dancing on the spot and followed by a good few moans and complaints.
The Spice Girls stadium tour has raised a few problems when it comes to toilet provision. Now I am sure there have been many an event planning team making what they seen as the best of plans, followed by a fair bit of frustration when it never went to plan.
First thing to consider, football stadiums! Now there is no point in kidding ourselves that females have an even level of service in a stadium that is still dominated by males.
Second thing, 80 – 90% female attendance.
Third thing, most stadiums have a fixed footprint so how do you increase your facilities.
There is always the event guidance documents to turn to. Providing the answers as to the ratio of toilets to attendees; they have the answer, correct???
So, why have there been queues up and down the country of desperate woman, just wanting to use the toilet?
Let’s consider the things that guidance is not keeping up with. Pre- loading is now the norm for attending concerts. This tour is seen as a celebration of recapturing the 90’s, with a celebration, comes the chance of slightly overdoing it. The age of those attending, bladder retention does not improve with age now, does it.
We came across an interesting paper that we thought we would pay a game with. The paper was – The toilet paper: Bathroom dwell time observations at an airport; Gywnne et al. On looking at it, we decided to have a bit of fun.
Using the observations, we put the following calculations together:
| Average time for females in a toilet | 166seconds | ||
| Attendance | 50,000 | (Average) | |
| Time in stadium | 360 | minutes | |
| Average drinks consumption | 3 drinks | ||
| Visits to toilets | 2 visits | (Average) | |
| Calculation | |||
| attendance | 50000 | ||
| visits | 2 | ||
| total | 100000 | ||
| time | 166 | Seconds | |
| Time of toilet use | 276667 | Minutes | |
| Open times to toilet use | 769 | ||
| Toilets required to have no queues | 769 |
Now……don’t go taking this all serious and trying to debunk figures and such. It is us just taking a look at something from a different point of view. How many stadiums have 769 toilet cubicles? And how many have enough space to bring that volume of additional toilets (or money).
So,through a bit of fun, can it be said that we have to consider our services to customers when the requirement differs so much from what guidance says.
Workingwithcrowds.com 10th June 2019
