Mandrill seems to have a lot of downtime lately - general Merlin reliability issues or more serious gremlins with the B&M?
On the train back to Manchester and of course it's back up
Probably not broken if it was raised, more likely just unstaffed, both at the barrier and the other end of the intercom (hence leaving raised, so as not to leave people trapped if there's an issue). Done quite often at the southern parks :-/
It was being worked on as I drove past.
While it is not exciting, the whole park needs a massive cleanup. Just look at the cobwebs in the background of that Tiger Rock picture, I wish we could say they were there for Halloween, but alas they are not and I am pretty sure that is a multi year build up. Is it really that difficult to give all the buildings a good clean once a year or something?Went to CWOA for the first time in about five years today and the place is feeling just a bit…sad. A lot of the rides and buildings are creaking with age and even the newer stuff is very much of the Merlin “don’t spend a penny more than you have to” quality. Case in point - this queueline theming for Mandrill where most letters had rubbed off to the point of being illegible:
Basic maintenance and cleaning is also lacking in some areas - look at the thick dust on this lamp in Tiger Rock’s station:
Tomb Blaster might as well have had all the effects turned off so few were working and inevitably Croc Drop’s spinning mechanism was bust again. The park wasn’t packed today (half-term is next week locally) but there were still 45 minute queues all day for Dragons Fury (which repeatedly went down) and Vampire (which my partner said was so rough now they’d reconsider riding a second time). Trail of the Kings was abjectly depressing, zig-zagging between tired empty enclosures and animals who really didn’t look like they were happy to be there. We also had a very average lunch in the Burger Kitchen - two meals for £27 is pushing it.
On the plus side, Mandrill is good fun and the best ride in the park (didn’t notice the B&M rattle either) and Rattlesnake had a short queue. But no-one on park today *looked* like they were having an amazing time; everything was sort of just about OK and tolerable. I’m old enough to remember CWOA in its 90s heyday and have very fond memories of the vibe then; it’s a long way from that now.
Finally, I very much enjoyed paying £6 for parking only for the barrier to be broken and no-one checking tickets.
It should be expected and things should be built to resist sticky fingers really though; see also the giant wicker basket thing in the mamba strike queue that was reduced to atoms on the first week it opened.
How long have Merlin been in the industry? Why don't they factor guest behaviour in their designs?
The one thing that Chessington are consistently really bad at, is the accuracy of queue times.
On my visit last September, Chessington was the home of what was possibly one of the most mind-bogglingly wrong queue time estimates I’ve ever seen.
This is bad even by Chessington’s standards. I’m often surprised when I visit some (not all) other parks, how accurate the queue time are. Chessington’s system of operators just guessing based roughly on where the queue is positioned, clearly doesn’t work, and hasn’t worked for years. Yet it continues.On my visit last September, Chessington was the home of what was possibly one of the most mind-bogglingly wrong queue time estimates I’ve ever seen.
Vampire was advertised at 5 minutes when I joined it, but quite clearly had people queueing right to the entrance (picture for evidence):
I joined it (despite it quite clearly not being 5 minutes long, it was still my best bet versus a 100 minute advertised queue for Dragon’s Fury), and it ended up taking 60 minutes…
I get that it’s rare to have fully accurate queue times, but I think most people could see that that wasn’t going to be a 5 minute queue… even on the 1,700pph Silver Star, that wouldn’t have been a 5 minute queue, and Vampire was only getting around 400pph and averaging near 4 minute dispatches on this day.
With that being said, the other queues generally weren’t too bad accuracy-wise, by my reckoning.
I’ve certainly been to worse parks for queue time accuracy than Chessington, anyhow. At the SeaWorld parks in Florida, I found quite frequently that the app and the queue time board didn’t even agree with each other… a lot of the time, the app would say one thing, the queue time board would say another and the actual queue time would be a wildly different number again! There were even instances where the app would say something was open and the ride was actually closed, and vice versa… at least things usually tend to agree with each other in the Merlin parks!
This quite often happens when a ride reopens after downtime, it will reopen on something stupid like 5 mins and within minutes it has gone up to 60 minutes.
It kind of is a guess but there is more to it, they have a map of the different queue layouts, and where the back of the queue represents in terms of queue time (so for instance if it was outside the curse at Alton manors it would be marked as 10 mins (don't know if that is correct, just an example))
That was only my second ride of the day after a single rider queue go on Mandrill Mayhem, and I arrived in the park at around 10:30am-11am that morning. I don’t think it had gone down at all, from memory; it was just listed at 5 minutes!
That was a 5 minute queue time just to get into the original queue.On my visit last September, Chessington was the home of what was possibly one of the most mind-bogglingly wrong queue time estimates I’ve ever seen.
Vampire was advertised at 5 minutes when I joined it, but quite clearly had people queueing right to the entrance (picture for evidence):
I joined it (despite it quite clearly not being 5 minutes long, it was still my best bet versus a 100 minute advertised queue for Dragon’s Fury), and it ended up taking 60 minutes…
I get that it’s rare to have fully accurate queue times, but I think most people could see that that wasn’t going to be a 5 minute queue… even on the 1,700pph Silver Star, that wouldn’t have been a 5 minute queue, and Vampire was only getting around 400pph and averaging near 4 minute dispatches on this day.
With that being said, the other queues generally weren’t too bad accuracy-wise, by my reckoning.
I’ve certainly been to worse parks for queue time accuracy than Chessington, anyhow. At the SeaWorld parks in Florida, I found quite frequently that the app and the queue time board didn’t even agree with each other… a lot of the time, the app would say one thing, the queue time board would say another and the actual queue time would be a wildly different number again! There were even instances where the app would say something was open and the ride was actually closed, and vice versa… at least things usually tend to agree with each other in the Merlin parks!
