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Chessington World of Adventures Resort

Chessington (and the surrounding area) suffered another power issue today with people outraged

Warning, getslurry link.

https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/whats-o...on-world-adventures-apologises-after-14733558

There are thousands of people all trying to leave the car park now so we’re going to stay here until that clears up.

For a company as big as this, there seems to be no alternative procedure in place. It is quite shocking - everyone is just telling us to ring head office.
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They eventually took us on a shortcut back to where we started but there was nobody there when we got off apologising or giving out refreshments.

It’s a hot day and staff have closed all the stalls so we can’t even get water. The toilets are all dark and so nobody can use those.

Customer satisfaction is zero out of ten for me - the attitude of staff was shocking, everyone just told us they didn’t know what was going on.

One person even told us the animals were a priority, not us.
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Rick said:
Incredulous.

Interestingly. One of tweets that Auntie emebdded mentioned 'inadequate response from young staff' @MakoMania @IanSR
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Doesn't sound like the customer-facing staff are at fault to me.

The park need to ensure that the procedures / training is in place for them to deal with a situation like this, otherwise how are they in any kind of position to implement an organised response?
 
Wow, the above quote from today demonstrates possibly one of the worst things about the internet in that it lets self-entitled people vent to a huge audience when they need to be quietly taken aside and told the world doesn't revolve around them during a major problem.
 
Yeah some of us would pay highly to get a back stage tour or be left sat on a coaster for an hour or so (something that did happen to us once on vampire and we loved it).

Rick said:
Incredulous.

Interestingly. One of tweets that Auntie emebdded mentioned 'inadequate response from young staff' @MakoMania @IanSR
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I'd imagine that was more to do with the "young staff" not knowing what to do, probably through a lack of training (and therefore managements fault, not theirs), rather than the staff parroting instructions regardless of the obvious flaw presented.
 
I would of thought a place like Chessington would have staff who primary role is animal care. With guest interaction as a secondary role within their job.

So some staff saying animals come first, may be allocated animals that have enclosures that use electricity for environment control.

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You'd think they'd have UPS if climate control is that important.... and I don't mean the courier lol
 
I was working there back when they had about 3/4 sets of power cuts in quick succession; and though we'd never been trained, everyone seemed quite sorted at dealing with it... Mean I pretty much ran straight to Fury entrance for the first one and did similar when Sea Dragons died on me (granted though it was harder to tell, since it just stopped normally)...

Remember seeing shop staff selling off drinks and ice cream in Market Square... Not sure why they wouldn't do that again since most of that stock would be dead...
 
delta79 said:
I would of thought a place like Chessington would have staff who primary role is animal care. With guest interaction as a secondary role within their job
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I think there is already a spilt in responsibilities, some staff work in the zoo team and others in the park side of things.

You would think there is a procedure for dealing with a power outage. Maybe staff on the ground are not trained for the specific scenario, but it would be communicated to them from management when it happens and instructions given on what to do.

From a rides perspective, it's just like any other downtime, although the logistics of evacuating every ride is difficult. You need the handful of managers to be present at a ride before you can evacuate, and this would really slow things down if everything needs evacuating.

Without being there it's difficult to comment on how well things were handled. I don't trust anecdotal stories from social media.
 
Benzin said:
I was working there back when they had about 3/4 sets of power cuts in quick succession; and though we'd never been trained, everyone seemed quite sorted at dealing with it... Mean I pretty much ran straight to Fury entrance for the first one and did similar when Sea Dragons died on me (granted though it was harder to tell, since it just stopped normally)...

Remember seeing shop staff selling off drinks and ice cream in Market Square... Not sure why they wouldn't do that again since most of that stock would be dead...
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Because society has got to a point now where people don't use initiative in unexpected situations, and the general rule of thumb now is don't do it unless told to.

It was probably no where near as bad as its been made out to be though.
 
Saying that animals come first is a perfectly natural thing for a zoological professional to say. There are animals that need heat, aquariums that require the powering of life support systems and the like, of course the animals come first. A power outage could be deadly if not handled correctly, usually there are back up power systems for vital operations and I presume that Chessington has these?
 
ringo said:
I was would never presume anything with Chessington / Merlin. This was the theme park that said it’s penguin enclosure was fox proof and unfortunately the poor penguins found out it wasn’t.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/20...ustomers-horrific-penguin-massacre-fox-snuck/
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Yeah, I heard about that, it's horiffic. Clearly there was a major oversight at some point in the habitat design process.

The article does state that Chessington aee a member of the EAZA so I would imagine that due to this they do have back up power systems in place which all accredited facilities are required to have.
 
I think they forgot fixes can climb when it came to the Penguins, and they don't need much help, we have one that spend most of the day halfway up the tree in our garden sleeping (a fox, not a penguin) and he/she climbs up like a squirrel would.
 
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