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Virtual Lines

ASturge21

TS Member
Favourite Ride
Anything but Thirteen
I thought it would be good to start a thread for discussion on virtual lines and their implication and application.
I will use my experiences of Volcano Bay, Race through New York and Kraken Unleashed, all during peak summer time.
Despite the good intentions with Volcano Bay the implementation especially during peak times awful with many rides having wait times of 60 minutes plus and this left 90% of guests roaming the park and outwith queues leading to lazy rivers becoming overcrowded and unenjoyable and having to queue. Unfortunately there is only one slide on ride now all time and had around 20-30 minute queues. From this experience a theme park full of virtual queue attractions would be a disaster with the need for higher number of shows and other entertainment.
Kraken and race through New York both had better execution however SeaWorld should probably make it easier to reserve virtual times due to being on a separate website instead of the app like Universal which worked extremely well. The Race through New York waiting areas I believe are perfect for virtual wait times as it seemed to keep virtual wait to a minimum of 3 hours just after park opening compared to Krakens 4 or 5 hours.
From these experiences for virtual queue lines to be most effective the whole attraction needs to be designed for this purpose with effectively minimum queuing once inside the attraction similar to Race through New York. When a virtual queue is used with a standard queue line this leads to larger and unnecessary waiting times. I believe that major high attendance parks will add virtual queue rides to their parks but only on new attractions and be designed around this purpose. I would like to hear your thoughts on how virtual queues should be implemented and your experiences of using them at various times of the year.
 
They had tons of grief with reserve and ride at Thorpe didn't they?
Good idea in theory, but it tends to all fall apart in practice.
I think you need a large number of filler attractions, minor shows and flats that are not on the v.cue system for this to work...so it won't happen again at the Towers in decades!
 
Don't think Alton and all other UK parks have the attendance to justify let alone enough supporting rides and attractions to stop the Volcano Bay situation. Virtual queues should be reserved for large attendance parks like your Magic Mountains, Cedar Point and Disney and Universal.
 
The problem at Thorpe was there was no dedicated queue, on Swarm you had to go up the fast track and join the fast trackers, which was already a 30 min queue on the busy days, plus what happened was it didn't take long for people to work this out and enter the queue before their time and because there was nobody at the queue entrance stopping this, it just ended up with two huge queues and lots of angry impatient punters.
 
I remember they did trial it with Nemesis one season, but the queue for the time tickets ended up nearly as bad as the queue, though some enterprising punters managed to make a few quid!
 
The entire system of park wide virtual queues is fundamentally flawed as it doubles (as a minimum) each guest's presence in the park - waiting for a major attraction and doing something else. Disney get away with this (usually) with their fastpass system as their parks are built to handle crowds, but with the majority of parks if you were to turf everyone out of the coaster queues it quickly leads to overcrowding. This is the main reason why Europa Park has never embraced fastrack - they know they need 20k people in queues at peak times to keep the paths moving.
 
By doubling each persons presence in volcano bay you basically need the wave pool and lazy rivers to handle everyone in the park which is not feasible and leads to queues for lazy rivers. I enjoyed volcano bay but sitting around on deck chairs for most of the day was boring and led to us leaving by 4pm as we had exhausted both lazy rivers and the wave pool and had no intention of queuing to redo a lazy river.
 
I remember they did trial it with Nemesis one season, but the queue for the time tickets ended up nearly as bad as the queue, though some enterprising punters managed to make a few quid!

To be fair, Nemesis intermittently ran with free Virtual Queue/Fastrack relatively succesfully between 1999 and 2004. Paid Fastrack was still available, but I think in the otherwise bleak period of 2004, The Flume, Black Hole, Nemesis and Air all offered the free service. Imagine!
 
But you had to queue up at a turnstile gate...for bloody ages...I know as I had to queue, and just couldn't see the point.
...and some people don't go on lesser rides in the virtual queue, they are busy drinking, resting their old knees in the Courtyard Tavern.
 
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