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2021: General Discussion

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AT86 said:
Legoland have today released a ‘Gold’ pass priced at £119 with free parking and merch/food discounts, so it seems the Merlin attractions are aligning the benefits/names/pricing on their individual passes. Makes sense.

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Sounds like a good idea and will make it easier for the staff too seems like a win/win too me.
 
Also now on the Chessington website. Thorpe's isn't called 'Gold' (yet) but still listed as sold out in any case.

Will be interesting to see if the season passes come back next season, but even if they don't I think this move challenges the view that Merlin are moving somewhat away from the annual pass market.
 
AT86 said:
Here it is, Alton Towers Gold pass - £119 for a year.

Free parking, 20% off food and merchandise, 20% off Dungeons, Waterpark, Golf, Spa and hotel stays. Three £5 off Fastrack vouchers and 3x Bring a Friend for £15.

https://www.altontowers.com/tickets-passes/season-annual-passes/alton-towers-annual-pass/
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I'd be all for it (especially with 20% off golf :D), but I'm still worried about the availability of passholder pre-book. How many of these are they planning to sell? If it's not going to be possible to reserve the dates you want up to a week in advance then I'm not interested.
 
That's good value. The only thing missing for me is maybe the option of Fireworks (even though I used to miss most years anyway) and I'm guessing before reading the terms that maybe busy Scarefest weekends may be off the table (I'll just go midweek). However, if I really want to do fireworks I can just pay for it extra as I would have been willing to go up to about £180ish for a Platinum version of this anyway. Will be buying shortly subject to reading the T's and C's :)

Edit - Just read that also included is the option of purchasing 1 extra day ticket for only £15 so that could potentially be used on one of the blackout dates if I really wanted to go on one of them.

Further Edit - Purchased.
 
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rob666 said:
The cheap "lead in passes" caused a two class system...
I have the money, so I can push in with paid fasttrack.
I don't have the money, so instead of queueing for twenty minutes, which is acceptable, I have to let a thousand people ride before me, because they have paid an extra fifty quid to push in.

The problem was nothing like as bad when passes were more expensive.
Cheap passes caused massive capacity issues as well.
Booking should be easier when there aren't a million discounted pass holders.
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I didn't encounter any of those problems to be honest.

I just went in, scanned my pass, went on the rides or sat in the gardens, and then went home. Now it'll cost £45 more to do the same thing....
 
I wasn’t sure where to put this, or indeed whether to post it at all as perhaps people will disagree, but Alton Towers are currently advertising for electrical and mechanical engineers.

Nothing strange in that of course. But a line in the job descriptions for both roles caught my eye.

7Itthj5.jpg


It’s the last line in the above screenshot. Considering the events of the recent past at the park, and the fact it was identified that pressure from the company on engineers to minimise downtime was a contributing factor in the Smiler incident, this sentence concerns me.

Now of course it doesn’t mean on its own that there is an accident waiting to happen. But you would expect that if Merlin want and expect a safety first culture at their attractions that it would run from right at the beginning of the recruitment process (I.e the job description) all the way through the organisation at every level. I would expect that an engineers number one priority would be safety, not making attractions available to guests (of course that is one of the important duties, but number one?)

I hope this is just a clumsily written job description, but I feel given the history, it shouldn’t be possible for the culture of the company to allow it to go out written like that.
 
AT86 said:
I wasn’t sure where to put this, or indeed whether to post it at all as perhaps people will disagree, but Alton Towers are currently advertising for electrical and mechanical engineers.

Nothing strange in that of course. But a line in the job descriptions for both roles caught my eye.

7Itthj5.jpg


It’s the last line in the above screenshot. Considering the events of the recent past at the park, and the fact it was identified that pressure from the company on engineers to minimise downtime was a contributing factor in the Smiler incident, this sentence concerns me.

Now of course it doesn’t mean on its own that there is an accident waiting to happen. But you would expect that if Merlin want and expect a safety first culture at their attractions that it would run from right at the beginning of the recruitment process (I.e the job description) all the way through the organisation at every level. I would expect that an engineers number one priority would be safety, not making attractions available to guests (of course that is one of the important duties, but number one?)

I hope this is just a clumsily written job description, but I feel given the history, it shouldn’t be possible for the culture of the company to allow it to go out written like that.
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I think this is just a clumsy written job spec - there was a post in another thread that highlighted a grammar/spelling mistake in a job description for a marketing role so maybe the person writing up job adverts isn’t the best at wording things, which is odd for a company of Merlin’s size and park history because you’d think a job spec would need to be signed off by a senior manager.

Ultimately, every ride engineer’s role is to keep rides open as much as possible and to minimise downtime but I agree this could have been worded better
 
Ultimately, every ride engineers primary role is to keep the rides safe for the paying customers at all times.
The advert wording is completely wrong, and gives out the wrong message.
 
I think it was supposed to be written as 'keep rides up and running for guests as much as possible, but in the safest way possible. It seems like common sense to me if the ride system has detected an issue not to override it, or at least check the ride area before making that decision. The events leading to the incident just seem like pure stupidity to me. Seriously how can you override the system which is telling you a section of the ride isn't clear... without checking that section just to make sure
 
Ethan said:
The events leading to the incident just seem like pure stupidity to me. Seriously how can you override the system which is telling you a section of the ride isn't clear... without checking that section just to make sure
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You might think it's stupid or that you couldn't possibly fall into the same mistakes. You'd be wrong. It's called human factors and it's something accident investigators spend a lot of time looking into.

As a comparison, the Air France 447 crash was the result of an aerodynamic stall that the pilots were causing. This was despite an aural warning sounding throughout telling them they were stalling the aircraft. This happened with highly trained professionals with thousands of hours of experience.

I recommend reading the relevant accident report(s). They give an insight into this kind of thing.
 
Before I left my old job, I read an advert for it. It promised it was like "running your own business" and "our people are at the heart of everything we do". It told me my "number one priority will be looking after colleagues" etc etc. All lies and completely the opposite to what the job and the culture of the business was actually like. No mention of not poisoning anyone or keeping anyone safe.

Job adverts are just marketing flim flam. Nothing more.
 
AT86 said:
I wasn’t sure where to put this, or indeed whether to post it at all as perhaps people will disagree, but Alton Towers are currently advertising for electrical and mechanical engineers.

Nothing strange in that of course. But a line in the job descriptions for both roles caught my eye.

7Itthj5.jpg


It’s the last line in the above screenshot. Considering the events of the recent past at the park, and the fact it was identified that pressure from the company on engineers to minimise downtime was a contributing factor in the Smiler incident, this sentence concerns me.

Now of course it doesn’t mean on its own that there is an accident waiting to happen. But you would expect that if Merlin want and expect a safety first culture at their attractions that it would run from right at the beginning of the recruitment process (I.e the job description) all the way through the organisation at every level. I would expect that an engineers number one priority would be safety, not making attractions available to guests (of course that is one of the important duties, but number one?)

I hope this is just a clumsily written job description, but I feel given the history, it shouldn’t be possible for the culture of the company to allow it to go out written like that.
Click to expand...
I wouldn't worry too much, it just sounds like marketing guff to me.
 
Ethan said:
Seriously how can you override the system which is telling you a section of the ride isn't clear... without checking that section just to make sure
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The engineer was under the impression that there were four vehicles on the system, and three were in front of him in the station and the other one at the top of the lift. He made the age old mistake of "assuming" the section was clear and so overrode it, obviously not realising a fifth vehicle had been added before he had got to the cabin.

A simple mistake that could've been avoided so easily, but also was very easily made due to lack of process in place. A simple handover procedure of confirming how many vehicles are on the ride before performing the block reset would have averted disaster...

Then again this was just one of many operational mistakes that happened that day. Anyway I forget which topic I'm in, shouldn't this discussion be about 2021, not 2015? :p
 
Towers seems to have a high throughput of techs. They no longer advertise the salary for techs in their job adverts but when they did the money wasn't great, especially for someone working in a high pressure environment.
 
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