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Chessington World of Adventures Resort

Problem with chessie, is that it’s suffered capacity issues for years and years, but all their recent investments have been returned, which means they aren’t gaining anything, but are probably getting more guests because they are marketing “new rides”. It’s a issue because most of their rides are old and need major work, so they either need to bin and replace or re theme.

What they really need is to add more rides and not lose anything.

And lack of any planning submissions this year shows that we will most likely be looking at either another retheme or nothing next year....
 
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Now, these flying dumbos at Chessington.

Last three times I’ve been on they don’t get off the ground with an adult in them. Oknwith he wife in, but when I take my son the thing won’t lift. I’m no waif, but it does eeem to struggle with most other adults in.

Go Jetters at AT is fine, as is Jeremy Jet at DM and dumbo at DLP.

In fact, last season I could get half way up at Chessington. I am, therefore, concluding the ride is knackered and needs some new bits.
 
Chessington have just posted this on twitter:

After sailing the high seas for 30 years, Black Buccaneer has run aground and unfortunately won’t be setting sail in 2019. Keep a ‘weather eye’ on the horizon though to see if the most fearsome ship in Pirates’ Cove will take to the seas again.
 
Chessington have just posted this on twitter:

After sailing the high seas for 30 years, Black Buccaneer has run aground and unfortunately won’t be setting sail in 2019. Keep a ‘weather eye’ on the horizon though to see if the most fearsome ship in Pirates’ Cove will take to the seas again.
oh dear, not looking good for Chessington :(
 
So basically it’ll be refurbished / replaced and themed to a Donaldson book as that’s the only way funds will become available for it :rolleyes:
 
If anyone didn’t ride it, you may have missed the boat.

I think they might bring it back if they can shoehorn in some Captain Pugwash vinyls. Or more seriously, this seems like the kind of thing Merlin would go for:
http://zamperlaplus.com/galleon/

It is getting silly now that they’ve lost Safari Skyway, Peeking Heights and Black Buccaneer. Between the three of them, that’s over 1000 rides an hour lost from the park’s capacity. When you see on their app that Sea Storm’s getting 90-minute queues, it’s embarrassing. First we started seeing the theming getting stripped away from rides because it was falling apart, and now the actual rides are being removed. It’s amazing that Chessington is still able to sustain two hotels and a holiday village. You’d think there’d come a point soon where significant numbers of people would start saying, “Well, we won’t bother with that again”.
 
Merlin might as remove every single flat ride from their RTP portfolio now and get it over and done with. Seems that's the end goal, so might as well do it in one fell swoop to start the cost cutting immediately.
 
They’re a joke. It’s got to be one of the simplest pieces of ride technology going, they had months last year to deal with any issues whilst it was SNBO, and yet it’s taken until several months into the season to have the decency to tell their customers it won’t be opening.

It’s not even like it’s surplus to requirements either. One look at TripAdvisor will show you the park can’t handle the crowds it receives. Yet it’s acceptable just to give up on it and allow visitors to endure the ever decreasing attractions and ever increasing queues.
 
Chessington have just posted this on twitter:

After sailing the high seas for 30 years, Black Buccaneer has run aground and unfortunately won’t be setting sail in 2019. Keep a ‘weather eye’ on the horizon though to see if the most fearsome ship in Pirates’ Cove will take to the seas again.

Hmm, why does this sound familiar?

Oh yeah.

X7NwNvh.jpg
 
Only difference this time is that they've typed it out in pirate speak to make their lies seem more lighthearted.

There's absolutely no way this is coming back. If they can't fix a swinging ship over the closed season then there really is no hope.

Although it wouldn't surprise me if it's perhaps a health and safety issue. It's absolutely huge and the operators are always telling people to sit down on the ride.
 
A word of warning if visiting Chessington. Whilst, Gruffalo aside, almost all rides have inadequate capacity to cope with even a moderately busy day, Tomb Blaster stands unrivaled in its inefficiency. Beware seemingly short queues for this ride!

Picture the scene: our poor unsuspecting group sees an advertised queue time of 5 minutes. When we meet the back of the queue at the entrance to the building it quickly becomes apparent this is not entirely accurate, however the scale of the discrepancy surpassed our worst nightmares as somehow this seemingly innocuous queue was in fact an eyewatering 55 minutes.

It turns out the target throughput for the ride when running 3 trains is, for some reason, a mere 400 per hour (or a train every 4.5minutes or so). Factor in 1/3 of the capacity given over to RAP and at least half of what's left to fastrack and that leaves a main queue throughput of around 130/hr. On a ride that looks like it should be getting 1000 or more.
 
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