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Chessington World of Adventures Resort

Bloody hell. O_O

Is this a dream...? A Merlin park launching a series of costly refurbishments of old rides without an obvious profit motive...?

This is amazing! And it kinda has hints of Disney's rolling upgrade programs. Maybe we'll begin to see this at Merlin parks across the board? I'd love to see Towers rides given a rehabilitation like this! :D

So Dragon Falls and Runaway Train are both down? Kinda big losses before Zufari opens, but for a good cause!
 
DiogoJ42 said:
Why could this not be done over the closed season? So as well as a joke of a new attraction, the park will open with three major rides closed?

Shocking.
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I assume you're actually joking...? All I've seen from you in this topic for years is how the park's glory days are behind it, and that they don't invest enough, and that their old attractions are rotting away and being ruined.

The park now announce a major investment program in refurbishing their classic old rides and you call it "shocking"...? I honestly can't work it out, is this irony are you actually angry about this? It's almost beyond belief.

:eek:
 
One would assume they were concentrating on getting their new main attraction open for the start of season. As much as that half failed, perhaps they didn't want to end up like Towers and have to delay it until after the start of the season. Juggling refurbishing other rides with constructing a new one could have caused this to happen.

Plus they're not exactly going to be down for months on end ::)
 
DiogoJ42 said:
It's shocking that they couldn't do it while the park was closed.
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Maybe they were a bit busy... I dunno, building their biggest ride in a decade...?

Disney have rides in refurbishment all through the year.

It absolutely astounds me that someone who calls themselves a Chessington fan is against a £5 million refurbishment program, just because two mid-size attractions will be closed while it's done. When Zufari opens, they'll be down by just one ride. This is an acceptably low drop in capacity, especially given the reason for it.

It's finally confirmed to me that you are just simply against literally everything Merlin do. I didn't think there was a way you would possibly be against this until I read your post, but somehow you found it. You literally can't say anything positive about anything Merlin do, to the point where you even contradict yourself in the past (all your complaining about Chessie's decaying rides and lack of investment)...
 
Thing is, construction of the new ride will most likely have very little to do with rides maintenance or any other in-park team - it'll be completed by external contractors, with only a small handover right at the end.

So, it is a bit odd.
 
Remember that Annual Pass day was cancelled due to overrunning refurbishment works? Yeah, that was this.

Unless you just can't remember. So, it was going on over closed season, but it's overrun.. hence taking into April. Least they're doing it, it's been needing doing for ages..
 
I'm all for refurbing rides, but this should have been done in closed season.
 
On another note Flying Jumbos is no longer part of Forbidden Kingdom and is now part of the ZUFARI land. According to the the map the elephants have been painted grey. The whole area around the ride should look a lot better now, due to the addition of the bridge, signage and I'm assuming some new paving too.
 
Are my eyes deceiving me, or is Sam actually being positive about Chessington for a change?

I guess this is where the £4 million from Zufari went, just a shame that they didn't have all the planned features on it.
 
So that's probably where all the money cut from Zufari has gone to...

I'm all for refurbishment of old rides though, the small sum of money (compared to this £5 million) that Oblivion got has done it wonders.
 
This is marvelous, and reflects the tonnes of investment that's gone into sprucing things up at Towers over the past closed season...someone somewhere clearly gets it (and has managed to make whoever has the chequebook get it too)!

I'm sure everyone'll live without a few rides for a month or so :)
 
I find it more weird that they were doing NOTHING to the Runaway rocks on my Zoo Day visits and there was no prior knowledge to these events considering how rare the words Chessie and investment ever go together...

Why it wasn't started earlier though is my question as well, indeed, Disney might refurb rides ALL the time, but that's an issue with opening 364 days a year...

Also means the HIGHEST throughput ride is down for opening... Hmm... Whilst refurbs of these two rides are great news, the timing is rather strange...
 
So has Zufari been cut back to refurb other rides?

I'm not having a go, but a few pages ago Merlin where getting a slapping for cutting budgets.... but now it reads there that Chessington cut the budget to put money elsewhere.
 
Another thought, their highest throughput ride is CLOSED for Easter...

There is NO way that any sanely run park would be deliberately plan that to happen... There is certainly something more behind it than just a sudden refurb...


Couldn't care less about Peeking Heights mind, closing it might give it a higher throughput...
 
Dave said:
So has Zufari been cut back to refurb other rides?

I'm not having a go, but a few pages ago Merlin where getting a slapping for cutting budgets.... but now it reads there that Chessington cut the budget to put money elsewhere.
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That's definitely not confirmed.

Zufari's budget has apparently been cut by £4 million.

Chessington are apparently spending £5 million on improvements, though whether that's above and beyond what they'd normally spend is unconfirmed.

The two facts could very well be linked, but they needn't necessarily be, and it isn't confirmed that they are.
 
Islander said:
Dave said:
So has Zufari been cut back to refurb other rides?

I'm not having a go, but a few pages ago Merlin where getting a slapping for cutting budgets.... but now it reads there that Chessington cut the budget to put money elsewhere.
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That's definitely not confirmed.

Zufari's budget has apparently been cut by £4 million.

Chessington are apparently spending £5 million on improvements, though whether that's above and beyond what they'd normally spend is unconfirmed.

The two facts could very well be linked, but they needn't necessarily be, and it isn't confirmed that they are.
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Fair enough, that was just what Jarads post suggested.
 
By the sounds of the last few years at Chessie, any number reading 'millions' seems to be way above and beyond standard yearly investment... :(


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk.
 
It is great to see Chessington getting some refurb done on some of the old rides, and I'll have a little geek at it if I can tomorrow when I visit. It would be a shame if they did cut some of Zufari's budget to fund this refurb, but they clearly want to sort out some of their older rides (aside from Peeking Heights :p) Runaway Train was in desperate need of a refurb, especially when there was a gaping hole in the rock work the last time I rode it.
 
Could it be simply the timing of the investment approval? Possibly there had been a request for £5m to renovate certian rides, but the "sign-off" wasn't granted until just recently, meaning that the works could not have been started during the close period.

That might explain some of the disruption at the start of the season, if Chessington are getting going with the works as soon as they had the green light?
 
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