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Ride Availability 2017

That is very true, what I was told about smiler was they needed a new part but the park managed to fix the existing one, as always I my if been told a load of rubbish.
 
It looks like both Rita and Thirteen remain close this morning. Unsure if Thirteen has a problem or whether it is closed to allow Rita repairs to take place.

:)
 
According to Ride Times, Octonaughts is currently on a 60 minute queue. :eek:
Wouldn't want to wait that long for a kid's coaster!
 
Looks to be a very busy day on park. Oblivion and Rita both unavailable and 70mins on Galactica and Spinball, 50 mins on Smiler and, believe it or not..... Enterprise!!! RMT 45 mins, Octonauts 60 mins, yep, busy busy!!
 
Went today, very very busy, queues everywhere, we left at 2pm , hate the park when its like that.

Not just the rides, pizza place, roller coaster restaurant , love quiet days.

Also went to pick up my towers pass i paid £70 for in July, noticed an hr later expiry is August 2018 , id have complained later but massive quest services queue id already waited 30 min for! email sent!
 
On park now, given up on trying to get on anything so having a pint. This is the busiest I've seen the park (I haven't been to fireworks) for 3 years. We're being told Rita is off for the "foreseeable future", Glactica, Thirteen and Oblivion all had down time.

Even though it is a very busy day only 1 box office is open, the food and bev offering is the worst I've seen it and the Rapids boats are getting sent out half empty. Park is pathetically ill equipped to handle crowds it used to eat up as standard a few years ago.

Even if I wanted to buy fast tracks I'd have to wait ages to do so and cloud Cuckoo Land Burger Kitchen wasn't serving hot food until 1 this afternoon. I've seen the park much busier than this in years gone by but this is bordering on Thorpe like operations today.
 
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And people say that merlin want alton towers to recover? When they get these crowds but they haven't got the infrastructure or offering to deal with it !! What I understand is that gate figures are on the up this year so they better up the game for next year! Or has nick got this line for the board? " we had record crowds visit us between dates A to date B but we fobbed them off with poor service. Unfortunately due to a terrorist threat they didn't revisit "

Sent from my SM-J320FN using Tapatalk
 
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They don't really help themselves with operations. Was on the park Monday all day. Rita went down at some point in the early evening and didn't reopen (looks like its been down a couple of days now). Ride times on both the app and the screens around the park and outside rides were about as far off as they could have been. Said 35 for Nemesis and ended up being 15 which was nice but then they said 25 minutes for Thirteen and it was closer to an hour. Galactica had down time whilst we queued because they were retrieving lost property (sigh) and best of all The Smiler had about 25 minutes of down time whilst we queued because they decided to add an extra train, surely they knew it was going to be a relatively busy day. Seemed looking at the app every major coaster apart from Nemesis and Oblivion had down time throughout the day and it looked like Spinball was off for a while. They really seem to struggle to keep rides open consistently when it's busy.
 
Balb0wa said:
Rita open according to ride times
Click to expand...
Rita opened about 20:05 according to the announcement they made from the Spinball station when I was in the queue. To be fair on them, it's been closed since Monday and they opened it 55 mins before closing time last night. They could well have just left it for the evening. But they opened it last minute and went out of their way to tell guests about it. I was on second from last train out (the last train had just 2 people on it) and that was 21:40.

That's good operations at ground level. It's not the decisions they make at local level that seems to be the problem. It's the ridiculous pittance they're given to operate the park.

Oblivion went down whilst I was on it for 10 mins at around half 8. Stupid cow sat next to me started filming herself on her iPhone whilst going up the lift hill.
 
Unfortunately there's always that element of stupidity with people at parks. No matter how many videos and audio clips you have playing telling them not to film and not to take loose items on rides they just think they're an exception. Shame really because it let's everyone else wanting to ride down.
 
Credit where credit is due, they've done a great job to get Rita up and running again so quickly (they said yesterday on social media that it would be closed all day). Most parks would have just waited to the next day to open it and not bother with under an hour of the day left.

:)
 
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