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!