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Chessington World of Adventures Resort

Benzin said:
Even a RCT park has better signage.

It's just so basic. Why not have some massive tree trunks as the base?

Poundland theme park.
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I think that's harsh for Poundland. At least they have mutiple paint colours. It looks like they received bulk orders of one shade of green and just used that.. to achieve different colours they added water to thin it down and make it go further.

In honesty when all this is over I can see other parks doing so well and CEOs being more of a joke. Think of the cuts to come!
 
This reminds me of some kind of Twilight Zone style story. Someone’s life long dream has been to become an attractions designer. They’ve spent their whole life studying themed design, architecture, graphics, model building, psychology… Eventually their dream comes true, and they end up being given that to design.

Maybe there’s more to it when you ‘explore’ the area in real life, but it doesn’t look like there’s much at all to it. Is there a backstory? A message about conservation? Have they done research into real rain forests to make it authentic? What emotions is it meant to evoke? There’s clearly no wow factor. Is it meant to be touching? Humourous? Are there little ‘Easter eggs’ for the fans to spot? Have they thought about sightlines?

I’m not criticising the designers. They’ve clearly been given a tiny budget. The whole brief seems to have been ‘make it as cheap as possible’. I really hope it does look better in real life, because that looks terrible.
 
DiogoJ42 said:
At this point I actually want to see the park fail, shut, and bulldozed. You wouldn't let a dog keep limping on like this. It's the humane thing to do.
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Agreed. If they can find a loving home for Dragon's Fury and the animals (Mingo might be interested in both?) they can just go ahead and shut the place down as far as I'm concerned. I bet the land is worth a fortune as a real estate opportunity.

Even the other surviving attractions that were once great (Vampire & Rattlesnake) are limping on rather pathetically now.

But they still get *so many* visitors. When will people finally get fed up?
 
Chessington doesn't receive that many visitors in comparison to other parks in the country; in 2018, it was the least visited of Merlin's British theme parks according to the TEA attendance report, with 1,670,000 guests visiting. By comparison, Legoland Windsor had 2,315,000 guests, Alton Towers had 2,100,000 and Thorpe Park had 1,880,000, so it's definitely the least visited Merlin park in Britain.

However, I must admit that the park is doing very well at seemingly keeping up similar guest figures to what they had in the park's initial years, so they must be doing something right! 2014 was allegedly the park's second highest year for attendance behind 1995, for example!

As for what Chessington could do long term, I actually think that re-emphasising the zoo aspect could work well for them in the long term. In recent years, zoos seem to have had somewhat of a resurgence in popularity across the world compared to how popular they were when Chessington was first turned into a theme park. It is also worth noting that Chessington struggles with planning restrictions even more than the likes of Alton Towers do; the locals have said that they do not want another ride on the scale of Vampire built at the park ever again due to noise, and Rattlesnake had to be dug into a pit at only 49ft high. For this reason, I think that Chessington should probably try and emphasise the zoo aspect of the park if it wants to remain successful while still retaining some of the rides (sort of like West Midlands Safari Park does), and they do seem to be doing this to some extent. For example, they rethemed Mystic East around tigers in 2018, and they're building a (presumably, from the concept art) crocodile-themed drop tower in 2021. As much as I'd love to see Chessington embrace the full-on theme park route, I don't think planning restrictions would allow for it nowadays, and I also think that zoos are arguably more popular than theme parks now, especially among the young family demographic that Chessington aims at.

In terms of the Rainforest area, I think it looks OK; perfectly nice for what it is. Bearing in mind that it's a low investment year just before a high investment year where the park is building a new drop tower, I think it does the job. It looks vibrant and colourful, there are some nice little themed features in places and on the whole, I think young kids will like it!
 
I do get that it’s a low investment year, but there still have to be certain standards. Guests aren’t going to go around the park saying, “That looks really cheap, but I suppose it was a low investment year, so I can’t complain”. For low investment years they can drop the scale, but not the quality. That doesn’t look like the sort of area you’d expect to find at a major theme park.
 
Chessington is their least visited park for a reason.
They havent invested in it like they have with the other parks.
Would have better attendance if it had taken its turn in major ride input.
But they chose not to.
Passholders will visit regardless of how crap the experience is.
And spend extra to jump the horrible queues.
 
I think the sole reason that they haven't invested into rides at Chessington like they have with the other parks is because the locals seem very reluctant to approve large-scale ride investment. Also, I'd imagine that the operating costs of the zoo are very high, so that might swallow up any potential CAPEX budget.

I personally still think that trying to emphasise the zoo while keeping some rides would be Chessington's best bet in the long term. It would be a way of improving one of the key elements of the park while also pleasing the locals, and it does seem to work successfully at other places (e.g. West Midlands Safari Park, Wildlands Adventure Zoo Emmen). I actually reckon that the zoo is arguably still the most popular part of Chessington; when talking to most people I know about Chessington, they usually cite the zoo as the star attraction, and I also think that zoos are more popular among the park's young family demographic than theme parks are.

As sad as I am to say it, I think that in the UK, a number of things have changed since Chessington first opened, with the principal change being that zoos have surged in popularity again and theme parks have arguably become less popular.
 
I agree that Chessington are trying to move in the right direction, becoming a zoo-based theme park and Zufari was a great step towards that, as it combined a ride and animals pretty well. The rainforest area in theory should be great, but it needs a lot more planting and props designed by a scenic theme park designer not just stuff they picked up in B&Q.
 
jon81uk said:
I agree that Chessington are trying to move in the right direction, becoming a zoo-based theme park and Zufari was a great step towards that, as it combined a ride and animals pretty well.
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Zufari was a massive missed opportunity to become that. It is an atrocious cobbled together mess.

In fairness, that makes it fit well in the park. But it wasn't a move in the right direction, it was a misstep and for me the final nail in the coffin in that it was in concept the perfect fit of an attraction but once they'd spent the money and got it so wrong it was never going to be fixed, it was always going to be left to rot. Like it has been.
 
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That's the big issue here. The fact that Zufari is clearly a catalogue of cuts, missed opportunities and never seen the desire to be properly enhanced.

As is the case with much of what Chessington does. The park is, and has been, chronically underfunded for 20 years now.

Chronic underfunding is a developing theme within Merlin's theme park estate.
 
I was wondering how old Chessington's rides actually are on average (how old the ride systems are not the last time they were rethemed), I have calculated it to be 20 years. For comparison, the average age of rides at Paultons (which is older than Chessington World of Adventures) is 12 years. I have made a spreadsheet but I can't work out how to post it here. There are two gaps in my spreadsheet, I can't work out how old the Victorian Carousel at Paultons is or the new River Rafts (which I believe used to be at Sealife Weymouth), if anyone knows how old these rides are then do tell me (and please don't point out that Victorian means 1837-1901, I already know that).
 
Is it true that the original budget for Zufari was only reduced because The Smiler went over budget? I could have sworn that I heard somewhere that the original budget for Zufari was £12m, but got reduced to £8m late on in order to fund whatever problems they were having with The Smiler.

What was actually cut from the ride, if this was true?
 
Matt N said:
Is it true that the original budget for Zufari was only reduced because The Smiler went over budget? I could have sworn that I heard somewhere that the original budget for Zufari was £12m, but got reduced to £8m late on in order to fund whatever problems they were having with The Smiler.

What was actually cut from the ride, if this was true?
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I have no idea but it sounds plausible
 
Zufari's budget was cut. Main section affected was the finale room out of that. No idea what other ideas were mooted for it though probably along similar lines to what we got.

Doesn't excuse the poor design of the queue, station and original pre-show mind.

Good idea, awful execution is the Merlin way.
 
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