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Blackpool Pleasure Beach: General Discussion

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venny said:
When you say service has gone downhill, are we talking about the early closes (which are inexcusable) or something else?

Generally I feel that staff at Pleasure Beach are rather good. At least until you have a real problem. On a run of the mill visit though, I find the service pretty good.
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Apologies, I should have been clearer. The ride staff are excellent, some of the best in the UK in my opinion.

The poor service is more the overall attitude of the organisation towards their customers, which probably stems from those at the top.

Some examples include earlier-than-advertised closing times, unclear information regarding where we can pick up season passes, terrible availability on some rides (Valhalla, PMBO) and many other smaller issues.
 
venny said:
When you say service has gone downhill, are we talking about the early closes (which are inexcusable) or something else?

Generally I feel that staff at Pleasure Beach are rather good. At least until you have a real problem. On a run of the mill visit though, I find the service pretty good.
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Staff in general seem mostly good, but they don't take the big decisions.

Some bad points from this season.....

1) Early closes. And today's closing time has again been cut to 6pm like yesterday. (this is on a supposedly busy half term illuminations week). Three years ago it would have been 8pm, now its 7pm max (if you are lucky) with nick land no later than 6pm (apart from on fireworks nights of course, but even then few major rides are open till the 10pm close like they were in the past).

2) Dipper regularly being on one train when the queue clearly requires it to be on 2. Its not difficult to put it on 2 when needed and as far as I am aware it requires no extra staff to run on 2.

3) Rides mysteriously breaking down at very convenient times.

4) A reluctance to run the big one in anything more than a slight breeze on quieter days, and a reluctance to put the 2nd train on when it is running.

5) Operations on Nash seem to be getting worse.

6) The removal of the best coaster in the uk

7) Car parking prices increased by an insane amount

8) Walk up entry price increased to a level that will put most punters off

9) East entrance for season pass holders (and anyone else actually) randomly closed for no apparent reason and without warning.

Its still my favourite park and it has much going for it, and I have renewed my season pass, but management are making a right pigs ear of running the place and it has been an extremely worrying year in terms of visitor numbers.
 
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The same as what @Coaster has posted but I also feel an attitude of “we’ve got your money haha” when you do run in to an issue which requires customer service.

An example of that is on a previous visit they closed the Speedypass ride reservation around 45mins before the actual ride close. This meant speedypass was no use at that time. After going to talk about it we were fobbed off with something along the lines we close speedypass based on the main queue as the ride must close on time.

The attitude was simply you’ve used it for the day what’s 45mins lost where you can’t. I followed it up with an email in which it was pretty much the same response and on that occasion I did a chargeback on my card and got the full amount refunded as the bank decided in my favour. Since then I’ve never seen Speedypass close more 10mins before actual ride close but still if you can join the main queue at 16:59 you should be able to use speedypass as well at that time.

Again echo what others say, ride staff are fantastic and they put up with a lot from guests and management. At times they let themselves down like the go slow at close time but that’s more than likely an order from above.

It’s a shame we won’t visit next year but there’s no point in visiting if you come away regretting the visit.
 
Totally unrelated to all of the above, but one thing I noticed on my visit to Pleasure Beach this year is the complete lack of any real-time queue information.

The park was busy so while getting a drink I got my phone out and started looking for an equivalent to Ride Times. I found nothing. It then occurred to me how silly I'd been as there are no queue time screens anywhere across the park. Heck, there aren't even any queue time displays at the entrance to the rides.

It's something I have never noticed before but perhaps the likes of Alton Towers are spoiling us with such information and I'm now conditioned to having queue times instantly at my finger tips*. They've provided basic information on screens going back at least 15 years(?), and yet Pleasure Beach still have nothing even remotely similar. That seems like an oversight to me.

I guess it's not a priority for them but it is something that helps you to plan your day. It's quite irritating to traipse over the park to find a ride has a bigger queue than you'd entertain, or worse... the ride is shut.

(* notwithstanding the accuracy of RideTimes...)
 
Err...
The ride times did appear on the internet, via the speedypass processors site, for quite some time a couple of years ago.
Then some loudmouth idiot told Nick T. about it when idling at the bar with Bernard...
and the link was gone within a couple of days.
Sorry.
 
Alsty said:
Totally unrelated to all of the above, but one thing I noticed on my visit to Pleasure Beach this year is the complete lack of any real-time queue information.

The park was busy so while getting a drink I got my phone out and started looking for an equivalent to Ride Times. I found nothing. It then occurred to me how silly I'd been as there are no queue time screens anywhere across the park. Heck, there aren't even any queue time displays at the entrance to the rides.

It's something I have never noticed before but perhaps the likes of Alton Towers are spoiling us with such information and I'm now conditioned to having queue times instantly at my finger tips*. They've provided basic information on screens going back at least 15 years(?), and yet Pleasure Beach still have nothing even remotely similar. That seems like an oversight to me.

I guess it's not a priority for them but it is something that helps you to plan your day. It's quite irritating to traipse over the park to find a ride has a bigger queue than you'd entertain, or worse... the ride is shut.

(* notwithstanding the accuracy of RideTimes...)
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Both times I went to Blackpool the queues weren't long enough to need queue time boards. Longest queues I've seen at Blackpool were 30 minutes. It would be good mind you, but for me at least there isn't the pressure to plan out your day based on queue times, like there is at Towers
 
It's probably windy, in which case the choice is run it on 1 train or close it entirely.
 
Because as I predicted some time ago, they cannot cope with anything above a reasonably busy day.

The Grand National was taking up to 5 minutes to dispatch which makes the use of 4 trains irrelevant. The queue was almost in the arcade and was almost an hour.

The Big Dipper again, with full extention open was spilling onto the path and was 30 minutes.

The Streak continue's to be a joke on one train, however we joined the queue at the top of the ramp at 9.45 and we're off in time for the fireworks, due to the staff running (and I mean running) down the train to check the bars, sending it without walking the extra distance to ring that pointless bell at the end of the platform and basically cutting out all the standard faff we see at any other time of the day.

Steeple and Avalanche on 2 with ridiculous queues and when I walked past the Big One at 7.30 the queue was closed.

Icon also despite being on 3 was stacking with little urgency being shown to shift the line.

Very unimpressed.
 
Absolutely everything about yesterday was terrible, I can't find any positives.

Big One didn't open until gone 12, and even then took an extra half hour after they opened the queue before it actually opened. 1 train all day, 5 minute dispatches with a queue that looked well over 2 hours long. I'm sorry but that is just horriffic, on one hand I'm certain it has run 2 trains in higher winds than what we saw yesterday and on another note the staff just couldn't be bothered to put any effort in, when faster turnarounds could have made the queue at least slightly more bearable. To make matters worse, they closed the queue at 7:30 when it was advertised on the website and park maps as 9pm?!

Elsewhere Steeple was on 2 for most of the day despite having a massive queue (though they swapped lanes so wasn't an issue with one in particular), dispatches on Nash were a joke, Valhalla had hardly any effects working, and the staff on Icon were both rude and slow aside from one point in the day where they sped up, as well as it starting the day on 2 trains.

I have no idea what was going on with the horror maze, we joined the queue and then they let two groups of around 5 people in at intervals, and then just left us standing there for 25 minutes?? There was no member of staff around to tell us what was going on so we left the queue, but that's 25 minutes of the day gone due to terrible communication.

In addition Big Pizza Kitchen was a disgrace. We were brought dirty plates (one had cheese on, one had tomato sauce and they were all wet!), then when we asked for clean ones they came back dirty and it took a 3rd attempt to get plates that were even approaching fit for use. The pizza itself was horrible and deformed, with most of it being burnt and/or squashed. Thankfully the staff were kind enough to give us a full refund upon me asking.

Fireworks were average, as they only lasted about 8 minutes.

Lots of parkwide lighting broken/off, such as Dipper and PMBO didn't look anywhere near as well lit up as usual.

Overall an absolute shambles of a day.
 
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Whilst I don’t disagree with most of the above, I’ve got to say I thought the fireworks were actually rather good. Loads of shells, good pacing and just long enough.

It does feel like the park has sort of given up in some respects this season. Combine that with an extremely busy day like yesterday and chaos ensues. A real shame that the park can’t capitalise on what they know is their busiest time of year. Even Merlin managed to draft in additional entertainment and further extend closing times yesterday. BPB on the other hand just seemed completely unprepared. I suspect they’ve jeopardised a lot of return visits based on yesterday’s antics.

I’ll add another observation on queue closings. With Big One a debacle, it was poor to see the Icon queue also closing before 9pm. It certainly wasn’t done to clear the queue prior to fireworks because the ride was not just clear of a queue, but completely closed down just after 9.30pm.
 
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