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Blackpool Pleasure Beach: 2021 Discussion

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Benjsh said:
Still think they missed a trick not having one really tall element in the ICON layout. That's the type of thing that the GP get excited about. When they see the layout it's all pretty low to the ground and dwarfed by the nearby Big One.

It seems that most people still head to BIg One first in the morning so that's still the major pull for people.
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Easy with hindsight I know but if they had built a coaster with more height I am sure it would have been more successful.

Big One will remain the true icon of the park unless they get the chance to go big again.



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rob666 said:
The ride was closed Tuesday and Wednesday Jamie, like the park used to do.
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I don't doubt that they might have done that sort of thing before, but do you really think that on their opening week, after spending a fortune re-tracking it and testing it for weeks, they would choose to have The Big One closed? The park wasn't exactly dead either from what I gather.
 
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Yup.
Called low season cost saving...been going on for years, Nash, Valhalla, Grand Prix are all vulnerable to midweek closures on a routine basis.
You don't go off peak do you...
 
Coaster said:
I reiterate my point, it's the first week of the season and the park wasn't empty.
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I would also add that this week is far from off peak. It is school holidays for most parts of England, and the Merlin parks have been consistently getting queues of 60-80 minutes for their major rides every day this week (despite the apparent cap on numbers)

Off peak this week definitely is not.
 
Enter Valhalla said:
I would also add that this week is far from off peak. It is school holidays for most parts of England, and the Merlin parks have been consistently getting queues of 60-80 minutes for their major rides every day this week (despite the apparent cap on numbers)

Off peak this week definitely is not.
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Agree with this. People certainly travelled to the park this week, as Blackpool schools were back. Do we know for certain what the actual problem with Big One was, presuming there was indeed a problem with it? Regarding the off peak closing of some rides, I don't think that closing a park's flagship ride unless you absolutely have to (ie major technical fault, high winds) is ever a good idea. Surely if staffing is an issue (Big One needs 6 staff, I keep reading on here), closing 1-2 lesser family rides (or Infusion, ha ha) and having Big One open would be a better use of said 6 staff.

As @shakey keeps reminding us, Big One is the true 'icon' of BPB, it's the one everyone sees from miles away, a rite of passage for youngsters having built up the courage through the other coasters, and the coaster that seems to generate the most excitement amongst the GP. It will most likely always be the park's flagship ride and I think thus should be open whenever possible. I don't think that shutting it on off peak days is a good idea unless it is for one of those 2 reasons.
 
Ice Drome Jack was created by Tom Purvis in 1937. The character was transformed into Mr Sunshine in 1977 by Keith Ingham and the name altered to Mr Funshine in the early 1980s.

Yup ... the man who created Mr Funshine was also responsible for Preston Bus station, which divides opinion locally, shall we say ...

Preston_Bus_Station_32234.jpg
 
Double post, sorry (not sorry).

Season passes, I feel like such a luddite. I bought my 2021 pass last year and have now registered it online via a link I was sent in January. Seemingly, I can now book E-tickets and the like. Is that it?

What's with all these teeny boppers on Facebook spending an hour waiting to get a card from the Globe ?
 
So proud to be a teenybopper.
If you are a troglodyte/luddite with no mobile or access to your email account due to a three legged dog, you are sent to the naughty corner..."The Globe"...where you have to stand still for an hour before they register you, then tell you to come back at half four to collect your card.
Then they close the Globe at four.
 
Rick said:
Double post, sorry (not sorry).

Season passes, I feel like such a luddite. I bought my 2021 pass last year and have now registered it online via a link I was sent in January. Seemingly, I can now book E-tickets and the like. Is that it?

What's with all these teeny boppers on Facebook spending an hour waiting to get a card from the Globe ?
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I am presuming we still need a season pass card. Big slow moving queue on opening day. Went back later, got to front, was about to get my card and the printer ran out of ink. Told to return by 4:30 to collect card, by no later than 4:10 it was closed up!

Edit: Posted at exact same time as @rob666 ! You should have seen the staff faces when he declared “I have no mobile phone, the dog sat on my tablet and I’m locked out of my email.”
 
Can you imagine my excuses for no homework in my schooldays.
And yahoo want a fiver a month for a year to unlock my email account.
Curse you google chrome password safe.
 
I found my 2001 season pass the other day, surely they were duplicated like nobody's business. Polaroid photo (taken in south ticket sales) stuck on a card with a glue stick, with my name hand written on it.

It cost £125 ... £215 in today's money.
 
You'll still need the physical card for using it for on park discounts.

Also have they said anything about the app they said they were bringing out?
 
Not that I've seen. The mobile site wasn't too painful and I could put it in my Google Pay wallet with one click.

Whole system still feels very OTT. I got a new phone in January and haven't dropped it once yet, I am nervous that won't be the case after boozing at Crevettes and some clumsy scanning on Alice.
 
Rick said:
Whole system still feels very OTT. I got a new phone in January and haven't dropped it once yet, I am nervous that won't be the case after boozing at Crevettes and some clumsy scanning on Alice.
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Having everyone (apart from those without a phone!) getting their phone scanned right before getting on a ride seems like a bad idea. Previously it was just a few people scanning their Sp**dy P*ss. I guess it makes little difference to those of an age who have their phone surgically attached to their palm anyway, but for the rest of us it’s a bit of a pain. I mean it’s simply enough to present your phone to the scanner, but as you say, how many phones are gonna get dropped, someone accidentally deletes their eTicket, loses phone signal / can’t access email, their battery dies right at the scanner having waiting in a long queue, etc?

I’m not even sure how the on park phone charging facilities work anyway. All I can picture is the old charging stations which I think were in the little Big One shop which is now the donut shop, and that’s going back a few years. I’ve never used a park’s phone charging service in my life thus am not familiar with how they work, but am interested to know about them. Are they still fixed charging points, where you go back in say an hour to collect them? Or do they loan you some sort of power bank? Perhaps not the latter actually as I think I saw on the FAQ that you can buy power banks in the merch shops. If you did buy one, would it even be ready charged though? Again, I’ve never owned a power bank so I hardly know anything about them. It just seems like an extra, annoying thing to have in your pockets on rides to me. If they still have fixed charging points, that would be quite laughable right now as it would mean that effectively you couldn’t go on a ride whilst your phone was charging, unless you went to get a wristband from Guest Services I suppose.

I do wonder though, on rides like Big Dipper where you scan your phone then seconds later board the train, how many phones will be dropped onto the platform / track / bottom of car. It doesn’t seem like a great idea for everyone to have to be fiddling with their phone seconds before boarding a ride, that’s all.

Another thing is that it really should be easier to acquire your physical season pass card. When we went to try and get ours, the queue was long and slow moving, with only 2 or 3 staff on duty giving them out. On the third attempt, we got to the front only for the card printer to run out of ink. Staff had to call to request that an ink cartridge be brought over. Surely a spare should be sat next to the printer ready to install if they are expecting to be doing a lot of printing on opening day. The Globe then shut at least 20 minutes before they said they would, so we couldn't return to collect our cards, as we had ben told to do. Surely they should be posting out the cards, especially at the moment. I'm sure most people would happily pay a fiver for tracked home delivery, rather than lose time queuing to receive their card. Also in previous years, once you had paid for your season pass, it was printed ready, and when you arrived to collect it, it was there ready to simply hand to you. We all had to register our passes online, surely the cards could have been pre-printed at that point. It's not rocket science, they know you've paid for your season pass and already uploaded a photo, so why they couldn't have them posted out to you, even for a small extra charge, or printed ready, I don't know. Also with everyone getting park entry straight under Noah's Ark, I don't see why the Ticket Centre couldn't be open even just for the first week or two of the season, solely for season pass collections. But this is BPB, so logic and common sense goes out the window!
 
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