There was a financial crash in 2008 which would probably be a big factor to the losses for that year, but prior to that the park were in the black overall for the preceding 10 years.
My point about the piers was just to show that free entry doesn't create a crime ridden park which families won't visit. The size of the rides on the piers has nothing to do with it. They are free to enter and as far as I am aware there is little or no issues with family safety.
It is true that the visiting patterns to Blackpool have changed a lot since the last century, and people are much more likely to come for just 1 or 2 nights or for the day. But that makes a full day at pleasure beach even less appealing when there are many other things to do.
I appreciate a hybrid PPR and POP system is difficult to get right but almost every other seaside park in the UK does it.
But even if they are going to stick to POP , a gate price of £50 when there's thousands of punters right outside the gates on busy days, seems crazy to me.
And when you have a scanner system in place for every ride, why not bring back the walk round pass and get more families in ?
The funny thing with the 2008 financial crash is that it was actually thought to have increased domestic tourism and caused a boom in the “staycation”; the 4 Merlin parks had a bumper year in 2008! Surely the Pleasure Beach should have benefitted from increased domestic tourism, no?
I’d also raise that rather than 2008, the 2005 season actually saw the largest loss of the ones I looked at both pre and post entry fee, with a loss of
£5,649,000 being recorded that year. And of the 5 years pre-entry fee (the 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 seasons), 3 of them reported losses and 2 of them reported profits, and the overall average profit/loss was actually a
£1,053,600 loss. I feel that 5 years is long enough to gauge a basic trend, and 2004 is a pivotal point because this was the year in which Geoffrey Thompson died, which, rightly or wrongly, is widely seen as another big turning point in the park’s fortunes.
The thing is, I’d argue that the lesser crime and such on the piers could also be to do with scale. The piers don’t get nearly the same amount of guests as the Pleasure Beach does (or at least did in the 1990s), so they won’t have problems on anywhere near the same scale as Pleasure Beach would. You only have to watch the Pleasure Beach documentary from the 1990s to see how much antisocial behaviour the park often had back then; it seemed like they were dealing with drunk people, miscreants and other forms of antisocial behaviour every episode.
In terms of the other seaside parks in the UK; I’d argue that Pleasure Beach isn’t really comparable with them in a lot of ways bar location. Not to do any of Britain’s other seaside parks a disservice, but I’d personally argue that the other seaside parks in Britain have more in common with the piers in Blackpool than Blackpool Pleasure Beach. Even the relatively bigger names like Fantasy Island, Great Yarmouth Pleasure Beach, Adventure Island and Dreamland Margate look more like permanent funfairs with a few major-scale rides sprinkled here and there than the full-fledged, large-scale theme park packed with headlining attractions that Blackpool Pleasure Beach is.
I do agree that Pleasure Beach could probably sustain a return to the walk-around fee with some reasonable pay-per-ride fees alongside wristbands. However, I don’t agree that whacking the gates open to all for free and charging £5 a go for the park’s coasters like in the olden days would see an automatic increase in profits. This is for the reasons that
@Rick identifies as well as another reason that hasn't been mentioned.
It should be noted that the park was probably helped on the profit front during the sole pay-per-ride days because back in the 90s, they had more attractions and widely throttled the throughputs to within an inch of their life to get more people through the attractions in a given time period. The park has notably less attractions to absorb guests these days, and the ones that they do have are not attaining throughputs nearly as high as they used to attain due to age, H&S concerns and various other reasons. They could probably improve the throughputs if they wanted to on some attractions, but I think that on most rides in the park, it would be physically impossible to return to the throughput levels attained back in the 1990s. This was in the era where The Big One ran 3 trains, the woodies had either no restraints or far more minimal restraints, and Revolution had its restraints opened and closed manually by the staff using a foot pedal (I feel like I’ve seen a video of this somewhere?). That sort of approach to throughputs wouldn’t fly in today’s world, and indeed, I also doubt that the more lax approach to safety and getting rides back open after a breakdown back in the 1990s that allowed for maximum profits above all else (I’m reminded of JR’s “Get the damn thing open!” moment in the 1997 documentary…) would fly in today’s world. And the amount of money the rides make is strongly correlated with their throughputs and the amount of time they’re open for…
With this in mind, I don’t think that the park could physically make as much money from the individual rides as it did back in the day for various reasons, and I feel that that would considerably hamper the success of a wholesale return to free entry and pay-per-ride.
) couldn't afford to - they didn't give up on it without a fight. If the park weren't able to get it into a condition that they & other bodies would sign it off, I don't really know what they were supposed to do.