A few points to make on this. Firstly, in terms of vegan food, I understand the challenges. If an outlet only sells one vegan option, you want it to be something inoffensive with broad appeal. The vegan option often has the lowest sales, so things like food wastage are more of an issue. I also understand that at somewhere like Chessington there are big peak and troughs in demand, and if food preparation is too complicated you end up with long queues. But this vegan hotdog does sound a bit bland. There’s certainly more exciting vegan food out there.
I don’t think comparing prices to Wetherspoons is entirely fair, but the food does seem quite expensive now. A lot of theme parks have pushed annual passes hard. If you’re giving a big chunk of visitors 20% off on food, then you either have fairly thin profit on a big chunk of visitors, or you effectively inflate all the prices by 20% so the annual pass holders pay a sensible price and for everyone else the food comes out quite expensive. It’s like when some of the American parks did dining annual passes, where you got free food all year, and then the quality of the food had to be rock bottom.
500 guests an hour is about what I expected. The fact that Vampire only gets about 50 guests an hour more than a shuttle coaster that can’t load the platform until the train’s parked, does show how poor the throughputs are on Vampire these days. At the very least, it shows how long it takes for a Vampire train to come clattering around the bend and then stop, start, and park again in the station.
