Timed Entry Ticketing at Sarah P. Duke Gardens

The Situation

Cliché as it may be, the opportunity to ‘stop and smell the roses’ is a major reason why people visit Sarah P. Duke Gardens. Boasting 55 acres of specialized gardens and five miles of pathways on the campus of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, Duke Gardens attracts more than 600,000 visitors from all over the world each year.

But that was before the COVID-19 global pandemic.

Like many attractions in the United States, the gates to Duke Gardens were closed and locked on Friday, March 13, 2020. The closure at the end of that now infamous week in March 2020 was part of ‘Duke’s university-wide efforts to minimize health and safety risks to the Duke community and beyond, and to encourage social distancing to help slow the spread of the COVID-19 virus.’

The gates would remain locked for visitors for the next 384 days.

During its year-long closure, Sarah P. Duke Gardens began to plan for a phased reopening. Set to begin on April 1, 2021, phase I included limited capacity to ensure best practices for health and safety. In this initial phase, entry was also limited to Duke students, faculty and staff that completed symptom monitoring and had a Duke ID.

Beyond capacity limitations, the hours for the Gardens were also reduced to 10am to 4pm from Thursdays through Sundays – a significant change from the normal operating hours that allowed people to visit from 8am to dusk, 365 days a year.

The Solution

Historically, because it is a free-admission botanic garden, Duke Gardens had few options to control access, capacity and flow, aside from its limited parking. In recent years, especially in peak cherry blossom and tulip season, paths would be increasingly packed with throngs of excited nature-lovers, while the parking lots filled with drivers frustratedly seeking a vacant spot.  But viewing the guest experience through the new lens of social distancing was an added cause for pause, especially given the fact that many of the Gardens’ paths are only two to four feet wide – making it nearly impossible to create a safe distance with large spring crowds. 

In its more than 80-year history, Duke Gardens never required visitors to make a reservation or acquire a timed ticket for entry, although the ever-increasing spring crowds had prompted its staff to consider the possibility. The COVID-19 driven restrictions turned that distant possibility into an urgent need. Reopening with a strictly limited capacity would enable the Duke community to return to a beloved part of its campus while enabling the Gardens to shape its crowd-control logistics for a later reopening to the public.  

These new requirements led the leadership of Sarah P. Duke Gardens to enlist the help of the Duke University Box Office, a university service provider that works with different organizations across the campus community to ticket events of all kinds. The ticketing professionals in the Duke University Box Office use the AudienceView Unlimited platform to meet the unique needs of their campus clients – ranging from smaller events run by student organizations to the four-day, morning-to-midnight Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.

“The Duke Box Office team is a service provider for the entire University,” explains Jessica Reveal, Associate Director of Ticketing and Guest Services at Duke. “We’re often presented with challenges related to event logistics – from ticketing to house management – and take great pride in solving them. We’re like puzzle masters that don’t usually get the benefit of seeing the full picture before we get started.”