Matt N
TS Member
- Favourite Ride
- Shambhala (PortAventura Park)
Transparency is good to a point, but I think this was one of those situations where transparency could have been problematic. If you explained in too much detail about what specific part of the lift hill was broken, how it might have broken, the process they were going through to fix it and what have you, then that could easily raise more questions than answers. If the park had publicly explained that a certain part was broken, then you would have had accusations of it not being safe and such, which you definitely don't want in a post-Smiler safety climate.
You also have the issue of roller coaster maintenance being far too complex to explain in a short-form video. If the park had tried to give a full, blow-by-blow explanation of what had gone wrong and such, then they might have risked people zoning out of all the technical jargon and only latching onto certain soundbites. Some people might easily have used these soundbites to provide ammunition for some argument that the coaster was unsafe or whatever, and the park definitely doesn't want this.
Yes, the approach of keeping reasonably shtum on the technical specifics might have led people to speculate and come up with baseless theories, but I think that's the lesser of two evils compared to potentially intimidating people with technical jargon and revealing too much. The speculation is just that; speculation. Whereas if the park had gone all technical and publicly explained in great depth what had gone wrong, then they might have risked worrying people and causing accusations unnecessarily. The good old saying of "what you don't know won't hurt you" comes to mind; there's only a certain amount that the general populace needs to know and cares about.
It's very, very rare for a park to publicly delve into technical specifics when a ride shuts. The only time I can think of that a park got marginally more technical is when Fury 325 closed last year, and that was probably only because the reason for the closure was very hard to hide, what with the giant crack in one of the supports being spotted by a member of the public in the first place!
With all things considered, I don't think Thorpe Park could have handled this situation much better, aside from a few minor things. I think the initial communication of the closure on the 25th was evidently poor, and the decision to keep putting out random dates that they couldn't meet was strange, but overall, I can't really complain about the level of communication we've received from Thorpe Park.
