Smart Visitor Management: LoRaWAN People Counting at NSW National Parks

The challenge of counting visitors at scale

NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) manages millions of visitors across hundreds of parks and reserves each year. At the Jindabyne Head Office - the primary visitor centre for the Kosciuszko National Park region - staff needed reliable data on visitor foot traffic to make informed decisions about staffing, programming, and resource allocation.

Traditional manual counting methods were inconsistent and time-consuming. What was needed was an automated, low-maintenance solution that could operate reliably in a government environment with minimal IT infrastructure overhead.

Why LoRaWAN?

LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) is a wireless communication protocol designed specifically for Internet of Things (IoT) deployments. It offers a compelling combination of features that made it well-suited for this project:

• Long range: LoRaWAN signals can travel several kilometres, making it ideal for environments where running cables is impractical.
• Low power consumption: Devices can run on small batteries for months or even years, keeping operational costs low.
• Low cost: The technology is mature and hardware costs are modest compared to alternatives.
• Secure transmission: LoRaWAN uses AES-128 encryption to protect data in transit.

For a busy visitor centre, LoRaWAN allowed the people counter sensors to be installed without cabling works or changes to the existing IT network.

The deployment

Arrochar Consulting deployed people counter sensors at the key entry and exit points of the Jindabyne Head Office visitor centre. The sensors use passive infrared and beam-break technology to detect and count individuals as they move through monitored doorways.

Count data was transmitted wirelessly over the LoRaWAN network to a cloud data platform, then processed and surfaced through a custom web application built for NPWS staff. The app provided:

• Live visitor count dashboards showing current occupancy in real time
• Historical charts showing visitor volumes by hour, day, and week
• Trend analysis to identify peak periods and seasonal patterns
• Exportable reports for operational planning and stakeholder reporting

What the data revealed

Within the first weeks of operation, the visitor count data surfaced patterns that had previously only been estimated. Peak visitor periods were identified with precision, and the data confirmed that staffing levels during certain shoulder periods could be optimised. Specific public holiday spikes - previously not well accounted for in operational planning - were clearly visible in the data.

The dashboard also revealed that visitor dwell times at the centre were longer than expected, suggesting that existing programming and displays were engaging visitors effectively. This finding directly informed future investment decisions around the visitor centre layout.

Lessons learned

• Gateway placement matters: LoRaWAN range is excellent in open environments but can be affected by thick walls and metal infrastructure. Early gateway placement testing was essential to ensure reliable data transmission.
• Plan for calibration: Some counts required calibration to account for staff movements and overlapping detection zones. Building a calibration phase into the project schedule is essential for accurate people-counting.
• Visualisation drives adoption: Providing staff with an intuitive web app - rather than raw data exports - was critical to making the data genuinely useful. The charts and dashboards became a regular fixture in operational conversations.
• Low maintenance is a genuine advantage: After initial installation and calibration, the system required minimal ongoing attention - a significant benefit in a resource-constrained government environment.

The broader potential

The Jindabyne deployment demonstrated that LoRaWAN-based visitor counting is a practical, cost-effective approach for park visitor centres. The same architecture can be scaled to other centres and entry points across the NSW parks network with relatively low incremental cost, since a single LoRaWAN gateway can support many sensors across a wide area.

For government agencies managing public spaces and heritage sites, IoT-based visitor analytics represent a genuine opportunity to move from intuition-based planning to evidence-based management - delivering better visitor experiences and more efficient operations from a modest technology investment.