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Chessington World of Adventures Resort

Dragon Falls/Tiger Rock probably did about 900 guests an hour when it was new, but boats have been removed over the years. It’s not a continuous line of boats going through the station now.

I think the theory is that if you have ‘too many’ boats, then as soon as you stop the station (e.g. if someone slips climbing out of a boat) they start stacking up before the station. At least in theory they reduced the number of boats to make it less likely that lots of boats would stack up before the station. When the boats stack up before the station, boats crash into the back of the stack, which can cause accidents. I don’t think it works that well in reality though, because the system’s designed for more boats, so the spacing isn’t even. You tend to have a continuous line of boats going through the station for a while, and then a big gap with no boats.

People are also more likely to kick off about being asked to share a boat now.

I don’t think Chessington has any rides that do more than about 600 guests an hour?
 
I’ve taken a look at the app, and queues are looking good for a Saturday in July; nothing above 45 minutes, and some things as low as 10-15 minutes! So they’re clearly doing OK today!
 
The next two weeks are the ‘surprisingly quiet’ weeks at all parks. Everyone is in the queue at Dover trying to get to France.

Things will pick up significantly in August when lots of people are back from their holidays and need to do something to keep the kids entertained.
 
Matt N said:
I’ve taken a look at the app, and queues are looking good for a Saturday in July; nothing above 45 minutes, and some things as low as 10-15 minutes! So they’re clearly doing OK today!
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And about 10 years ago that was the standard rather than the exception.

Vamps on 2 trains was about 600-700pph when I worked then. 3 trains got you 900 odd with a good team (I.e. minimal stacking on lift 2).

Can't remember Bubbles throughput, think around the same as only 4 to a boat.

Of course since 2009 numerous decisions have been made at the loss of throughput. More interaction, more focus on H&S due to incidents, poorer staff retention and therefore training. Reducing train numbers (Vamps hasn't run 3 trains in a LONG time) and the increase of RAP and Fastrack usage across the park (adding Seastorm and Truckers Fastrack is AWFUL on things that get barely 400 and 200pph respectively).

Used to be 90 minute queues for things were on those rare 15k+ days. And even then those were only on the big 6 as it were (Vamps, Fury, Falls, Tomb etc).

But then nowadays you'd have 30-45 minute queues on things like Buccaneer/Barnacle and Seastorm. Those just weren't a thing when I worked there. Hell if Buccaneer had a queue something was going seriously wrong or they were just letting everyone wait for the back rows rather than filling up so the queue gets reduced faster.
 
I suppose there are two ways of looking at this. One is to look at the throughputs of individual rides. The other is to look at the capacity as a whole. Trip Advisor is full of complaints about the queues. It’s not that common for the daily attendance to go above 12,000.

Now think about how people spend their time. There are about 28 rides (a ratio of one ride for every 430 guests). There’s an extensive zoo with Trail of the Kings, Wanyma, Penguin Cove, Amazu, Lorikeet Lagoon, the Sea Lion show and various feeding times. There are costume character meet and greets. There are other live shows. There are often events on. Some people are queuing for rides. Some people are on rides. Some people are in the gift shops. Some people are eating. Some people are looking at their onride photo. Some people are in the arcade or playing a sideshow. Some people are walking around the park.

On paper you’d think that with 12,000 people in the park the queues would be negligible. A lot of them will be over an hour. Some of them will be 90 minutes. This tells you something about the throughputs. Even if there were only 3 rides with a throughput of 1,000 an hour, that would have quite a big impact on the waiting times.

Clearly it’s not just about the throughputs. The Fast Tracks, the Priority Passes, the Ride Access Passes also make a significant difference to the waiting times.

In terms of the flat rides like Sea Storm, the Fast Tracks etc clearly make a big difference. But also the queues for the smaller rides are dictated by the bigger rides. If you could ride Vampire with a 30 minute wait, why would you wait 40 minutes to ride Sea Storm? But if Vampire’s queue is 2.5 hours, you might consider the 40 minute wait for Sea Storm.

There probably are ways to improve the throughputs on the flat rides, but I don’t know if that would be my priority. If you’ve got a flat ride that does 200 guests an hour and you increase the throughput by 10%, that’s an extra 20 guests an hour. If you do the same thing on a roller coaster with a throughput of 600 guests an hour, that’s an extra 60 guests an hour. If Chessington wants to reduce their queues, they’d probably be better off looking at the highest capacity rides, not the lowest capacity ones.
 
Hopefully the RAP changes should ease the queues slightly, as I was led to believe that much of Chessington’s capacity problems are/were caused by their higher levels of RAP usage compared to other Merlin parks. Now that the system has been changed, that should hopefully solve Chessington’s issues.

As for the new coaster; the planning document revealed it to have a throughput of 720 riders per hour, or a 24 rider train every 2 minutes (30 trains per hour), assuming a ride duration of 1 minute and a park time of 1 minute. Seeing as I’ve seen Swarm parked for only just over a minute with 4 more riders per train (Swarm has 28, while Amazon will have 24), I think that’s quite attainable, and this will make the ride quite the queue muncher compared to Chessington’s others; by the sounds of things, a 720pph throughput could be really high within the sphere of Chessington, which should certainly help!

Remember that the area will also contain supporting flats to help ease the queues as well.
 
At least in theory it should help, because it’s an expansion onto land that wasn’t previously developed. Although being the first major new roller coaster in a long time, it could push attendance up, negating the benefit from any extra capacity. But yes, the new flat rides this year and the new area/roller coaster should all help. Of course, in recent years they’ve lost Safari Skyway, Peeking Heights and The Jungle Bus, but they have expanded the footprint of the park. It should all help, to some degree.
 
The throughputs of Peeking and Jungle Bus were crap anyway.

Theoretical throughput means nothing. It's still 1 train operation, will be heavily affected by Fastrack and operations won't be that quick initially. Its not what the park needed but Merlin gotta get them IPs in.
 
Undeniably the additional capacity will help the park overall. But it won't make any difference for the poor people that choose to ride this ride. Based on its likely popularity I'm sure it'll have a 2+ hour queue all the time.
For a similar example when the Jungle Coaster closed at Legoland they actually had a rise in positive guest feedback. You'd think the closure of a major coaster would have a negative effect but they found that on average people were getting on more rides because there wasn't a large percentage of guests spending 1/4 of their day in a single queue.
 
jon81uk said:
In other Chessington news, the shed/cave has some disco lights

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MMM be like.

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