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Blackpool Pleasure Beach: General Discussion

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Valhalla was a double A ticket when it opened (so £4 I think). So in opening season every full boat was bringing in £32 to the park.

By the following season (2001) the park were offering wristbands during the cheap weekends that started the season back then. (the 50p weekends were amazing in the mid 90s).
So suddenly the park were automatically banking around £30 per wristband but this led of course to people feeling they needed to get there moneys worth.

If project 2000 had been say an indoor coaster similar to something like a Vogel Rock the change from PPR to wristband would've been less of an issue as with a coaster the actual running of the ride would've been much cheaper than the effects driven experience the park had gone for.
 
You can see the Star flags on the front of the station at the end of the video.
I used to take groups of young kids to the park for 50p weekends, but they ended up so popular they would only get on 2 or 3 rides in a visit.
Only time I ever got my pocket picked...cheap weekends late nineties.
 
I can see how the introduction of wristbands would affect the economics. Presumably though they didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to change their pricing structure. Not sure if it’s anything Geoffrey Thompson ever discussed in interviews? It feels like the kind of decision they might have been ruminating on for a while. You’d think a possible change to pay one price is something they would have considered when they were doing their projections for Valhalla, given that the change was only one year after it opened. Or was 2000 a poor year for the park, and that’s partly what pushed them over into changing their pricing model?
 
I actually sorta miss the old ticket sheets that forced you to pick between rides so you had to go on bigger and smaller attractions. Plus a discount on a matinee magic or ice show!
 
Funcone said:
You’d think a possible change to pay one price is something they would have considered when they were doing their projections for Valhalla, given that the change was only one year after it opened. Or was 2000 a poor year for the park, and that’s partly what pushed them over into changing their pricing model?
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Wristbands were quietly introduced as early as the 1998 season, and readily available in 1999. I just don't think the park foresaw quite how much tourism and visitor numbers would drop off into the early/mid 00s. I would suspect they expected footfall to maintain a POP/PPR split. WGT's death was tragic and didn't help the bottom line. I'm going to go out on a melodramatic limb and argue that 2000 was BPB's last truly great season.
 
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What makes Valhalla expensive to run is the fire effects and the maintenance of the ride system. If you could make it pay a big profit then surely it could only be a good thing for the park. Why dont they get a sponsor in again? Like Thorpe does with Tidal Wave, stick a logo on the door to help pay the running costs if it's that disproportionate to the ridership.

Also I dont see how cutting corners on the original project made it an expensive ride to run, other than having to rebuild the facade. The rest was pretty well built right? You can expect any big ride like this to need refurbishment after 20 years.

I think they could get away with reducing the amount of fire effects, but removing altogether would take the impact out of it and defeat the whole appeal. And please make it less wet so that people arent afraid to ride it!

I admire their guts to get it made in the first place. We dont really know the whole situation anyway, for all we know it could have been a big boost to the park in its early years and only became an issue when the whole of Blackpool declined
 
Blackpool would do well by getting on with dropping wristbands like they supposedly want to.

WRT Valhalla, it costs a stupid amount to run, has a massive frontage that rots from the sea air that they built badly the first time (why use bits of PMBO track to make a frontage?!?!?!?!?!) and I think the public have moved on from the PPR model too much now that going back would cause problems, plus the fact Icon is 15 quid a go on that model.
 
People complain at Olympia Looping being £9 a go and that's better than any of the coasters at PB, so I don't think tickets would be a great idea. Unless they drastically re-value every ride back to a sensible level. I could see the ticket system falling apart when they had to start pricing things as 'AA' - 'AAAA'
 
Dar said:
People complain at Olympia Looping being £9 a go and that's better than any of the coasters at PB, so I don't think tickets would be a great idea. Unless they drastically re-value every ride back to a sensible level. I could see the ticket system falling apart when they had to start pricing things as 'AA' - 'AAAA'
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If we knocked off some for the London pricing and said OL would be £6PR if parked outside PB, Icon would have to be about £2.50 or £3 to make it work.
 
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You can see it here.

valcon3_302.jpg
 
Poisson said:
Blackpool would do well by getting on with dropping wristbands like they supposedly want to.

WRT Valhalla, it costs a stupid amount to run, has a massive frontage that rots from the sea air that they built badly the first time (why use bits of PMBO track to make a frontage?!?!?!?!?!) and I think the public have moved on from the PPR model too much now that going back would cause problems, plus the fact Icon is 15 quid a go on that model.
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With the old ticket sheets though you didn't notice how much it was per ride though.
You paid £15 or whatever and got one AA ride, two A, two B, three C and three D (or something like that). Then you used the ticket on the ride. Its only the newer system since they started pushing wristbands more in the last 2000s where you pay £1 per token that you notice how much each one costs.
 
OilyWater said:
Probably the most hilarious example of corner cutting and "we'll do it properly later" spreading of costs ever, just a shame that the eventual replacement with the proper structure didn't look as good
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I’ve always found it funny that they used old track lengths to prop up a building facade. I might try using some lengths of Scalextric track on the front of my house.

@OilyWater are you named after the Blur song of the same name perchance? I played Modern Life Is Rubbish for first time in years the other day. Really good stuff
 
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