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Chessington World of Adventures Resort

Fuct said:
In fairness they could have gone with "We nearly got DECAPITATED on a DANGEROUS water ride!"
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You can just see the glee and pound signs rolling in the reflection of his eyes as he realises he can clickbait the hell out of this. "THIS IS GOING TO GET SO MANY VIEWS!"

flume1.jpg

Ought to be careful though, if I were Merlin's lawyers I'd be taking this as an admission and suing him for damage to private property, anything for a quick buck and might even result in Chessington having some capital to spend!
 
The park is in such a strange state of affairs. Most of the park cosmetically looks better, but the park seems to have even more reliability issues than Thorpe and Towers nowadays.

Rides running on lower capacities and at least half the rides either on their last legs (without major refurbishments) or on the cheap queue dribblers. It’s a bit embarrassing in a way.
 
Benzin said:
Engineering Manager at £55k and Ride Engineer at £46k (after probation) is probably why the maintenance is piss poor atm.
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I was wondering this, as someone who has no experience within the engineering world I just saw big number but my first thoughts were 'What's the Industry Average?'. What sort of wages would be appropriate for the role once you remove the novelty factor of working for a theme park?
 
Benzin said:
Swear they used to do that years ago. Probably before they prioritised "experience" over throughput.

Chessie only ever gets enough budget to repaint things.
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Possibly. I think part of the problem with Merlin is that they have high staff turnover, even in management. Whilst certain types of safety issue are well documented, I suspect decisions around throughputs often aren’t. Although if guests were being aggressive towards staff when they were asked to share a boat, this is a safety issue and theoretically employers are supposed to be managing the risk of aggression towards staff.

The manager who made the decision to get rid of the batching system was probably gone and another manager has probably decided to bring it back without necessarily knowing why the previous decision to get rid of it before was made.

On one hand you do get poor decision making. On the other hand, if you don’t know why a decision was made, and what evidence it was based on, it’s difficult to make that judgement.

You can find at Merlin that things go round in circles, as managers rediscover why a previous manager made a certain decision.

Not making guests share boats might have been a ploy to sell more onride photos, or it could have been in response to multiple assaults on staff when they tried to encourage guests to share boats. As enthusiasts we’re not expected to know what the reason was. But often the managers don’t either which is where the problems come in.
 
You just need to make it clear prior to boarding that boats will be filled. Put signs at the queue split, announcements, etc. Say that it's to reduce wait times and don't give the option not to share unless there's pretty much no queue.

It's really not difficult to do it properly, though I guess this is Chessington we're dealing with here.
 
Bert2theSpark said:
I was wondering this, as someone who has no experience within the engineering world I just saw big number but my first thoughts were 'What's the Industry Average?'. What sort of wages would be appropriate for the role once you remove the novelty factor of working for a theme park?
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Probation 46k, fully qualified 55k, manager 65k would be reasonable for a mechanical engineer with experience.

Even then 55k is not necessarily what you'd call highly paid for someone with a few years under their belt especially so close to London. Mech Eng grad schemes were paying 40k starting when I finished uni back in 2008.
 
John said:
You just need to make it clear prior to boarding that boats will be filled. Put signs at the queue split, announcements, etc. Say that it's to reduce wait times and don't give the option not to share unless there's pretty much no queue.

It's really not difficult to do it properly, though I guess this is Chessington we're dealing with here.
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Towers used to put groups together on the Flume (RIP), so as you say Chessy just need to explicitly state outside the entrance that groups will have to share during busy times. I do understand people not wanting strangers in their photos but tough luck. Surely sharing a boat is better than longer waiting times?

The boats are very spacious too, last year my group of 5 adults managed to ride comfortably together with two large rucksacks.
 
It really wouldn't take much imagination or technical skill to implement a system that solves the photo problem.

But you solve that, and then you get to the actual issue, which always cropped up on Congo and The Flume too. It's just super awkward for a lot of people.
 
Funcone said:
The manager who made the decision to get rid of the batching system was probably gone and another manager has probably decided to bring it back without necessarily knowing why the previous decision to get rid of it before was made.
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They told staff at rock to make boat sharing mandatory to fill the boats, but there's a rule about heights and where the person sits. Because the onload attendants are focusing on filling boats, people would switch places without the attendant knowing, which would result in the operator having to stop the ride and the attendant loosing the ability to do that position until they were retrained.

Basically, everyone lost the skill and management decided to reneg the fill the boat policy.
 
GooseOnTheLoose said:
You can just see the glee and pound signs rolling in the reflection of his eyes as he realises he can clickbait the hell out of this. "THIS IS GOING TO GET SO MANY VIEWS!"

flume1.jpg

Ought to be careful though, if I were Merlin's lawyers I'd be taking this as an admission and suing him for damage to private property, anything for a quick buck and might even result in Chessington having some capital to spend!
Click to expand...

In all fairness I have managed to break a ride at Chessington. It wasn't exactly hard to defeat the mighty SBF Visa quality manufacturing of Ostrich Stampede....
 
Anyone who has visited Chessington so far this season - has the Smokehouse Grill been open at all? Just wondering following its zero food hygiene rating over the winter.

It looks like it might have been removed from the app, so I am presuming its closed for now at least?
 
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We were there at the weekend and it looked closed from the entrance in the main square, but the doors opposite the reindeer were open and people were going in. Not 100% sure what was going on, thought it might just be the bar open but some people were sat outside those same doors with what looked like baskets of food. The food could have come from somewhere else I suppose.
 
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