AusLeisure

Visitance - a free contact tracing solution developed for the leisure industry by leading leisure industry software provider, Jonas Leisure - is now being used by more than 400 operators across Australia and New Zealand (and further afield) with more than 150,000 visits registered using Visitance since its launch in May. 

Visitance helps leisure centres, aquatic facilities, gyms and sports clubs meet government Covid-19 contact tracing requirements and occupancy limits.

It simplifies the process of checking people in and out of a facility by using a QR code which facility visitors scan using the camera app on their phones. Contact information is then gathered and securely held at the Microsoft Azure data centre in Sydney, allowing managers to easily contact facility users if a case of Covid-19 is discovered at one of their sites.

Jonas Leisure Chief Executive Mike Henton advises “the feedback we’ve received has been really positive.

“Of the platforms people have tried, Visitance seems to have been the most user friendly and many facilities are telling us it has helped them re-open safely.”

One of the key points of difference offered by Visitance’s contactless check-in and check-out system is its ability to track when somebody leaves a facility, as well as when they arrive. This enables Visitance to provide a real-time occupancy count, which can be displayed on a screen at a facility’s reception or front desk.

A recent development request has seen the addition of an ‘auto check-out’ option that allows a facility to set a time period, or time of day, after which anybody who has forgotten to check out can be marked as off premises.

Jonas Leisure has also enhanced Visitance’s data retention settings to let facility managers manually set the number of days contact details collected from users are stored for, based on the data retention requirements of the country or state they are operating in. 

Henton notes “these recent updates will be with our users shortly. The danger posed by Covid-19 will be with us for a while yet, so we see no reason to stop developing Visitance.”

Henton also adds that Jonas Leisure created Visitance to give something back to the industry during a particularly difficult time. Many leisure operators were struggling to find a contact tracing solution that catered to their needs and Jonas Leisure was uniquely positioned to create a solution to help them re-open easily following Covid-19 closedowns.

The City of Canning in West Australia was one of the many organisations that used Visitance to support reopening efforts at its leisure centres. The council used the system for three weeks in June before the state entered ‘Phase 4’ of its plan to ease Covid-19 restrictions, removing limits on gatherings and most of its other restrictions on gyms and fitness centres.

In its feedback on Visitance, the council lauded the system’s ease of use, professional look, and ability to record both entry and departure times for visitors. The latter had the added benefit of providing insights into overall average visit times for leisure centre users, in addition to enabling contact tracing and a real-time occupancy count to be displayed.

While the primary users have been leisure and aquatic centres, gyms, sports clubs and programs that run sports sessions for children, Visitance is also being used in other settings. These include libraries, singing schools and even office buildings.

Henton also adds “we’ve been pleasantly surprised to see Visitance gaining traction and recognition in settings we didn’t originally expect. It’s also been going gangbusters in the UK, where we seem to have become the de-facto contact tracing solution among cricket clubs as part of their safe ‘return to play’ measures. The popularity is really great to see.”

Visitance is available at no cost from visitance.net

Click here to contact Jonas Leisure via their Australasian Leisure Management Supplier Directory entry.  

Images: The Visitance interface is easy to use (top) and Visitance can display a real-time occupancy count on a screen at a facility entrance or front desk (below).

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