neil_wilson
TS Member
I’ve created this topic to discuss operational efficiency in theme parks.
I might appear to be a new forum member, and you’re more than welcome to give me a welcome gift (if that’s your thing), but I’ve actually been a reasonably regular poster since the forum was founded. But I’ve always used a forum ‘alias’ because I work in the industry, and I didn’t want people to think I was a spokesman for a park. I’ve worked at a number of parks including Alton Towers, Chessington World of Adventures, Twinlakes, Dreamland, Europa Park and Epcot. But I've always been careful not to discuss parks I'm currently working at, or to reveal information not already in the public domain.
I recently published a book about operational efficiency in the theme park industry, and the moderators have kindly given me permission to create this topic to discuss it. It's called 'Absolute Efficiency: book one - a guide to operational efficiency in the theme park industry'.
https://www.waterstones.com/book/absolute-efficiency/bob-mclain/neil-wilson/9781683903109
https://www.whsmith.co.uk/products/...lain/neil-wilson/paperback/9781683903109.html
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Absolute-E...+efficiency+neil+wilson&qid=1635940756&sr=8-3
It’s available from all good bookshops. If you go to a bookshop and they haven’t got my book, it’s basically a bit ****.
Anyway, the deal is that as well as subtly trying to flog my book, I’ll also start a conversation. We’ve had quite a few discussions over the years about different aspects of managing queues: ride access passes, single rider queues and the role of flat rides come to mind.
To get the conversation going, I thought I’d talk about a few of things I learned while researching my book (and the other ones in the series). I’ll start with Alton Towers, as this is an Alton Towers’ fan site.
We know from a few sources that Alton Tower’s capacity is about 28,000. Most parks set their own capacities. Hong Kong seems to be a bit of an exception to that, because in Hong Kong capacities are set by a government department (the Food and Environmental Hygiene department), so there’s a lot more information about how Hong Kong Disneyland’s capacity has grown over the years, than there is for most parks. Hong Kong Disneyland is co-owned by the Hong Kong government and the Walt Disney Company. When it opened, we know that Hong Kong Disneyland’s capacity was 28,000, so very similar to Alton Tower’s. The Walt Disney Company wanted a slightly higher capacity to maximise revenue, and the politicians wanted a slightly lower capacity to give a better experience. But 28,000 is what they ended up with.
It's interesting to compare Hong Kong Disneyland in its opening year to Alton Towers. In its opening year Hong Kong Disneyland only had 10 rides including 1 roller coaster (Space Mountain), so it is remarkable that they could hold as many people as Alton Towers, and it’s interesting to look at how they did it.
Like other ‘Magic Kingdom’ style parks, it uses a ‘hub and spoke’ layout where guests are directed down Main Street to the centre of the park. From here each area is roughly equal distance away. This helps to quickly disperse guests around the park, rather than having the areas nearest the entrance busiest in the mornings and the areas at the back of the park busiest in the afternoons. Hong Kong Disneyland had a free Fast Pass virtual queue rather than a paid for Fast Track like Alton Towers. Hong Kong Disneyland had a lot more shops than Alton Towers, and guests were encouraged to go shopping while they were waiting for their ride reservations. There were also a couple of live shows and various meet and greets. Hong Kong Disneyland was open for longer hours than Alton Towers typically is. They used an opening ceremony to bring some guests in for the start of the day, and fireworks to make sure that plenty of people stayed until closing time. There’s a point in the middle of the day when most of the morning people are still there, and most of the evening people have also arrived. At this point, a parade helped to relieve the pressure on the rides. Rides are also optimised for efficiency, for example with single rider queues and batchers to fill empty seats. There’s a ‘greeter’ at the entrance to queues who height checks children. This helps to prevent children wasting time in queues for rides they’re too short for, but it also minimises delays on the platform.
Of course, Hong Kong Disneyland did get heavily criticised for not having enough rides, and for feeling like a Disney park built on the cheap. According to former CEO Michael Eisner in the Imagineering Story on Disney Plus, they actually increased the budget for Hong Kong Disneyland after the backlash against California Adventure, but most fans still weren’t happy with it. After opening they quickly ‘fast tracked’ copies of Autopia and It’s a Small World into the park to build it up. Hong Kong Disneyland has grown its capacity quite a lot since it opened with Toy Story Land, Grizzly Gulch, Mystic Point and the Iron Man simulator. If you compare Hong Kong Disneyland to Parc Disneyland Paris, it’s a bit like the hare and the tortoise. Parc Disneyland Paris is still quite a bit bigger in terms of acreage, but once Hong Kong Disneyland opens their Frozen area, they’ll be roughly the same size in terms of the number of attractions.
Disney parks do generally have very high capacities relative to their ride counts. During Covid some parks revealed capacities who would normally keep them a secret. We now know that Shanghai Disneyland has roughly the same capacity as Europa Park (about 60,000). Cedar Point is slightly lower at 54,000. Parc Parc Astérix is 30,000, so similar to Alton Towers. These are regular capacities rather than capacities reduced for social distancing.
Disney parks do have big capacities, but that doesn’t explain their extraordinary attendance figures. In my book I draw some comparisons between Holiday World (Indiana) and Magic Kingdom (Disneyland World). If you filled Holiday World up to its capacity 45 times you’d get its annual attendance (that’s using slightly dated figures and it’d be different at the moment due to Covid). You’d have to fill Magic Kingdom up to capacity about 228 times to get its annual attendance.
Disney are successful partly because their parks have big capacities, but also because they have much smaller peaks and troughs. Although attendance figures are often disputed, Magic Kingdom has roughly triple the capacity of Alton Towers, but roughly ten times as many visitors each year. Alton Towers has been trying to level off their peaks and troughs. They’ve built up a successful Halloween event which has moved visits from the summer to October, and now more recently they’ve added an Oktoberfest to try and persuade more people to visit in the quiet spot between the summer and Halloween. They’ve also had a Mardi Gras event. Universal Orlando added their Mardi Gras event in the 90s, to try and make the park busier in the quiet period before Easter.
Disney have been very good at levelling off peaks and troughs in attendance. For example, they normally open new rides at quiet times of year. Often after the summer vacation finishes. Although I think Disneyland Paris have recently advertised their Marvel area for summer 2022, so maybe that isn’t always true. Disney doesn’t go in for discounting, because they want to maintain good ‘price integrity’. But if you visit Disney World at a quiet time of year and stay in their hotels, you might get a free ‘dining plan’, which gets you free meals. Epcot in particular has quite a few events to help drive attendance to traditional quieter periods, such as the Food and Wine Festival, or the Flower and Garden festival.
Europa Park is a park that this forum has a particular interest in, partly because they’re very good at managing their queues. Europa Park has much smaller peaks and troughs compared to a lot of British parks. As well as doing a lot for Halloween, they also have a very big Christmas event, and now the season runs straight right through to January. ‘Hallowinter’ bridges the gap.
Europa Park gets a lot more older guests without kids compared to most British parks. This is significant, because these people will come during term time when the kids are at school. There are lots of reasons why older guests go to Europa Park: good quality food, live shows, and the general atmosphere around the park. The British parks also tend to have bigger peaks and troughs depending on the weather. It helps that Europa Park has five hotels, and hotel guests tend to book their visits further in advance before they know the weather forecast. Europa Park also has a lot of undercover attractions including shows and dark rides. Most of the rides at Europa Park have undercover queues and stations, even if the rides themselves are outdoors. Some of the smaller British parks have quite a few undercover attractions, but the bigger parks are much more weather dependent. It also helps that Europa Park gets a fairly international mix of guests, particularly from Germany, France and Switzerland. Often they have different holiday patterns, also helping to spread out attendance.
Of course, Alton Towers have tried to spread out their guests. Aside from adding more events, Alton Towers does work hard to bring in school groups on the otherwise quiet term time days. They do much bigger discounts for school groups than Europa Parks, and they have an education officer who does workshops for school groups. This is something that few parks outside the UK have.
Although Europa Park’s layout is more chaotic than Disney’s hub and spoke layout, they also try to spread guests evenly around the park. For example, Voletarium is near the entrance, which means it’s likely to get a big spike in demand at the beginning and end of the day when people enter and exit the park. That’s why they have a free virtual queuing system, to encourage guests entering the park to come back later in the day.
Europa Park’s rides are really optimised for throughputs. For example, very few rides have seatbelts as well as a bar. On a lot of rides you take bags on with you, which speeds things up. In Arthur’s case they’ve got free lockers in the queue. There are other subtler things most people wouldn’t notice.
Feel free to take this thread in any direction you want, and if anyone has any questions about my book let me know. It’s something I’m really passionate about. The first book in the series uses almost 400 sources, so it’s something I’ve done quite a lot of research into. At the same time, I’m interested to hear about other people’s experiences with queuing, either as a guest or from working in the industry. I’ve learned a lot over the years from things people have posted on Towers Street.
I might appear to be a new forum member, and you’re more than welcome to give me a welcome gift (if that’s your thing), but I’ve actually been a reasonably regular poster since the forum was founded. But I’ve always used a forum ‘alias’ because I work in the industry, and I didn’t want people to think I was a spokesman for a park. I’ve worked at a number of parks including Alton Towers, Chessington World of Adventures, Twinlakes, Dreamland, Europa Park and Epcot. But I've always been careful not to discuss parks I'm currently working at, or to reveal information not already in the public domain.
I recently published a book about operational efficiency in the theme park industry, and the moderators have kindly given me permission to create this topic to discuss it. It's called 'Absolute Efficiency: book one - a guide to operational efficiency in the theme park industry'.
https://www.waterstones.com/book/absolute-efficiency/bob-mclain/neil-wilson/9781683903109
https://www.whsmith.co.uk/products/...lain/neil-wilson/paperback/9781683903109.html
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Absolute-E...+efficiency+neil+wilson&qid=1635940756&sr=8-3
It’s available from all good bookshops. If you go to a bookshop and they haven’t got my book, it’s basically a bit ****.
Anyway, the deal is that as well as subtly trying to flog my book, I’ll also start a conversation. We’ve had quite a few discussions over the years about different aspects of managing queues: ride access passes, single rider queues and the role of flat rides come to mind.
To get the conversation going, I thought I’d talk about a few of things I learned while researching my book (and the other ones in the series). I’ll start with Alton Towers, as this is an Alton Towers’ fan site.
We know from a few sources that Alton Tower’s capacity is about 28,000. Most parks set their own capacities. Hong Kong seems to be a bit of an exception to that, because in Hong Kong capacities are set by a government department (the Food and Environmental Hygiene department), so there’s a lot more information about how Hong Kong Disneyland’s capacity has grown over the years, than there is for most parks. Hong Kong Disneyland is co-owned by the Hong Kong government and the Walt Disney Company. When it opened, we know that Hong Kong Disneyland’s capacity was 28,000, so very similar to Alton Tower’s. The Walt Disney Company wanted a slightly higher capacity to maximise revenue, and the politicians wanted a slightly lower capacity to give a better experience. But 28,000 is what they ended up with.
It's interesting to compare Hong Kong Disneyland in its opening year to Alton Towers. In its opening year Hong Kong Disneyland only had 10 rides including 1 roller coaster (Space Mountain), so it is remarkable that they could hold as many people as Alton Towers, and it’s interesting to look at how they did it.
Like other ‘Magic Kingdom’ style parks, it uses a ‘hub and spoke’ layout where guests are directed down Main Street to the centre of the park. From here each area is roughly equal distance away. This helps to quickly disperse guests around the park, rather than having the areas nearest the entrance busiest in the mornings and the areas at the back of the park busiest in the afternoons. Hong Kong Disneyland had a free Fast Pass virtual queue rather than a paid for Fast Track like Alton Towers. Hong Kong Disneyland had a lot more shops than Alton Towers, and guests were encouraged to go shopping while they were waiting for their ride reservations. There were also a couple of live shows and various meet and greets. Hong Kong Disneyland was open for longer hours than Alton Towers typically is. They used an opening ceremony to bring some guests in for the start of the day, and fireworks to make sure that plenty of people stayed until closing time. There’s a point in the middle of the day when most of the morning people are still there, and most of the evening people have also arrived. At this point, a parade helped to relieve the pressure on the rides. Rides are also optimised for efficiency, for example with single rider queues and batchers to fill empty seats. There’s a ‘greeter’ at the entrance to queues who height checks children. This helps to prevent children wasting time in queues for rides they’re too short for, but it also minimises delays on the platform.
Of course, Hong Kong Disneyland did get heavily criticised for not having enough rides, and for feeling like a Disney park built on the cheap. According to former CEO Michael Eisner in the Imagineering Story on Disney Plus, they actually increased the budget for Hong Kong Disneyland after the backlash against California Adventure, but most fans still weren’t happy with it. After opening they quickly ‘fast tracked’ copies of Autopia and It’s a Small World into the park to build it up. Hong Kong Disneyland has grown its capacity quite a lot since it opened with Toy Story Land, Grizzly Gulch, Mystic Point and the Iron Man simulator. If you compare Hong Kong Disneyland to Parc Disneyland Paris, it’s a bit like the hare and the tortoise. Parc Disneyland Paris is still quite a bit bigger in terms of acreage, but once Hong Kong Disneyland opens their Frozen area, they’ll be roughly the same size in terms of the number of attractions.
Disney parks do generally have very high capacities relative to their ride counts. During Covid some parks revealed capacities who would normally keep them a secret. We now know that Shanghai Disneyland has roughly the same capacity as Europa Park (about 60,000). Cedar Point is slightly lower at 54,000. Parc Parc Astérix is 30,000, so similar to Alton Towers. These are regular capacities rather than capacities reduced for social distancing.
Disney parks do have big capacities, but that doesn’t explain their extraordinary attendance figures. In my book I draw some comparisons between Holiday World (Indiana) and Magic Kingdom (Disneyland World). If you filled Holiday World up to its capacity 45 times you’d get its annual attendance (that’s using slightly dated figures and it’d be different at the moment due to Covid). You’d have to fill Magic Kingdom up to capacity about 228 times to get its annual attendance.
Disney are successful partly because their parks have big capacities, but also because they have much smaller peaks and troughs. Although attendance figures are often disputed, Magic Kingdom has roughly triple the capacity of Alton Towers, but roughly ten times as many visitors each year. Alton Towers has been trying to level off their peaks and troughs. They’ve built up a successful Halloween event which has moved visits from the summer to October, and now more recently they’ve added an Oktoberfest to try and persuade more people to visit in the quiet spot between the summer and Halloween. They’ve also had a Mardi Gras event. Universal Orlando added their Mardi Gras event in the 90s, to try and make the park busier in the quiet period before Easter.
Disney have been very good at levelling off peaks and troughs in attendance. For example, they normally open new rides at quiet times of year. Often after the summer vacation finishes. Although I think Disneyland Paris have recently advertised their Marvel area for summer 2022, so maybe that isn’t always true. Disney doesn’t go in for discounting, because they want to maintain good ‘price integrity’. But if you visit Disney World at a quiet time of year and stay in their hotels, you might get a free ‘dining plan’, which gets you free meals. Epcot in particular has quite a few events to help drive attendance to traditional quieter periods, such as the Food and Wine Festival, or the Flower and Garden festival.
Europa Park is a park that this forum has a particular interest in, partly because they’re very good at managing their queues. Europa Park has much smaller peaks and troughs compared to a lot of British parks. As well as doing a lot for Halloween, they also have a very big Christmas event, and now the season runs straight right through to January. ‘Hallowinter’ bridges the gap.
Europa Park gets a lot more older guests without kids compared to most British parks. This is significant, because these people will come during term time when the kids are at school. There are lots of reasons why older guests go to Europa Park: good quality food, live shows, and the general atmosphere around the park. The British parks also tend to have bigger peaks and troughs depending on the weather. It helps that Europa Park has five hotels, and hotel guests tend to book their visits further in advance before they know the weather forecast. Europa Park also has a lot of undercover attractions including shows and dark rides. Most of the rides at Europa Park have undercover queues and stations, even if the rides themselves are outdoors. Some of the smaller British parks have quite a few undercover attractions, but the bigger parks are much more weather dependent. It also helps that Europa Park gets a fairly international mix of guests, particularly from Germany, France and Switzerland. Often they have different holiday patterns, also helping to spread out attendance.
Of course, Alton Towers have tried to spread out their guests. Aside from adding more events, Alton Towers does work hard to bring in school groups on the otherwise quiet term time days. They do much bigger discounts for school groups than Europa Parks, and they have an education officer who does workshops for school groups. This is something that few parks outside the UK have.
Although Europa Park’s layout is more chaotic than Disney’s hub and spoke layout, they also try to spread guests evenly around the park. For example, Voletarium is near the entrance, which means it’s likely to get a big spike in demand at the beginning and end of the day when people enter and exit the park. That’s why they have a free virtual queuing system, to encourage guests entering the park to come back later in the day.
Europa Park’s rides are really optimised for throughputs. For example, very few rides have seatbelts as well as a bar. On a lot of rides you take bags on with you, which speeds things up. In Arthur’s case they’ve got free lockers in the queue. There are other subtler things most people wouldn’t notice.
Feel free to take this thread in any direction you want, and if anyone has any questions about my book let me know. It’s something I’m really passionate about. The first book in the series uses almost 400 sources, so it’s something I’ve done quite a lot of research into. At the same time, I’m interested to hear about other people’s experiences with queuing, either as a guest or from working in the industry. I’ve learned a lot over the years from things people have posted on Towers Street.
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