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http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/nov/08/merlin-entertainment-share-price-debut

If you think any of Alton Towers' press releases are uniquely tenuous, you may be interested to learn that the main designer of Disney's first Haunted Mansion in California in an interview with the BBC said he was planning on building a retirement home for the lost souls of dead WW2 soldiers...

May I ask, with ERT not on during Scarefest, what time are they opening the gates? Is there still half an hour of milling about?

A question from a Scarefest noob, does the experience of the maze change much after 5pm? The atmosphere is a bit better if the park is dark I guess, but if the mazes are in darkness anyway, I don't suppose it matters much? I'm just wondering why the park are charging £2 extra for the evening...

Yep. They should use the structure to their advantage to create a themeing focal point. They could make the tunnel reasonably tight and dark. The problem with the Dark Forest is that it's a naturally quite open landscape, so having a 'moment' of closeness in the experience of walking around the...

The choice offered in the Scarefest Fastracks is good. Even without queues, in an hour you can maybe get on three rides tops inclusive of faff time. With the wide choice, I bet this won't even make much of a difference to normal queue lengths, and hotel guests still feel like they're getting a...

Given that each photo costs pennies to make, I'm curious what the outcome would be if they ran a promotional "All photos £1" day and flooded adverts online. So many people would buy photos by default. All souvenirs are an impulse buy, but onride photos are so particularly placed. People come...

Sometimes when I'm at Alton Towers I get this surreal feeling that I'm not there at all. There is so much marketing material around the park that it becomes an unavoidable part of the day's experience. The park feels like a showcase for something else you aren't quite experiencing. The amount...

I actually really like The Smiler queue. Because it's made of metal it feels permanent. I like winding under the ride and the claustrophobia feels intentional. However, on a hot day, it doesn't take a genius to tell you that standing in a pit of concrete surrounded by black metal on all sides...

It just makes bizarre business sense. Marketing Fastracks cannibalises their own product by reinforcing the idea that you will be stuck in miserable queues for large sections of the day. It's such a short-sighted way of making money. Marketing should always be boasting positively about what's on...

I remember in 2005, Rita too had a bit of a semi-permanent cattlepen outside the tire. They should make the queue neater, make it take up less space. It should just go out-and-back tightly to the X-Sector entrance.

Though the park has been quite busy in general recently, one point that I think is worth noting is the positive effect that The Smiler is having on the distribution of guests and queue lengths. Obviously The Smiler is having a vogue period this year, and its queues are likely to be twice that of...

http://imgur.com/gallery/spMmMlO Just saying!

I had my first ride today. It is brilliant, it's the coaster which provides the best wider experience on the park. I found the ride very rough, however. I was on the third row both times, but perhaps it was on the same train which is the troublemaker. There was no giggler gas or inoculation...

They're shooting themselves in the foot in a big way. I'd say big queues are the biggest threat to levels of guest satisfaction. Fundamentally, no one wants to be stood doing nothing. However, this is an unavoidable side effect of popular themeparks. The best the park can do is keep through-put...

Yeah, this fella always bewilders me when I see it. Just...how...how does Oblivion hide so much track? I'd be inclined to agree that G5 looks like it provides a slightly superior ride experience simply because the amount of visible drop is so greater, giving you a more intimidating impression...

Th13teen wasn't designed to have the same capacity per hour as Th13teen; its capacity took everyone by surprise. It's easy to say it should have been designed with greater throughput, but it already has a double carriage compared to traditional eurofighters and it has two lift-hills. Short of...

When I was a young guy I read an introductory letter you wrote to anyone about to play the first Rollercoaster Tycoon. In it you talked about the emotional adventure of a rollercoaster, how a good designer has this at the centre of what he or she does and mentioned the Nemesis layout in...

Good lord, the loop is only three minutes long?! This equates to hearing this track sixty times during a three hour queue. I really like the soundtrack...but they need to make a longer ambient loop which is easier on the ears.

Which is perfectly understandable, only I think they should advertise that it is due to open at, say, 12pm during this tentative phase, to take the pressure off themselves.