I was at the Passholder day yesterday too. We had a good day, I was worried as the previous day was a blue light day and I saw lots of complaints from people online who attended that and said it was busy, ride availability was poor, staff were rude etc. Fortunately that wasn’t the case on Sunday.
Chessington is far more bearable when it’s not completely rammed, we got Vampire and Mandrill done by half 10, did Dragons Fury later in the day and waited about 40minutes which was a nice change from the 1.5hour+ waits we usually have on a normal day there. Most things were walk on except for the coasters. Rattlesnake was evacuated at one point, saw people harnessed up and being led down the steps by staff, can’t imagine it has long left at the park.
Had my first ride on Mandrill, my verdict is that it’s okay, nothing to write home about. Going up the spike is a unique element. Just a shame they couldn’t fork out for a full circuit coaster that could run at least 2 trains. It does sort of lumber around its layout but we went on early in the day so maybe it warms up later on. Overall it’s a decent “my first inversion” coaster and I suppose it appeals to its target audience, although my two kids have already done the likes of Iron Gwazi and Velocicoaster so they were pretty underwhelmed. Chessington is crying out for a high capacity, low height requirement coaster. That seems to be what draws the crowds in. Didn’t think much of the Jumanji area overall, theming apart from the big cat centre piece which is impressive, looks very cheap. It might look better once all the plants have grown in a bit more.
We weren’t given any information about the giveaways/events they were putting on but I saw on the MAP groups on Facebook that they did some stuff in the stage area and a few prizes were given out so that’s nice although it would have been good to have some signage or something around to make people aware there was stuff going on. Some people were apparently given leaflets with this info on but we weren’t. To be honest though we were there for the rides more than anything.
They also didn’t check our pre-book either, just scanned our passes and let us in. Don’t think it was a sell out though although you’d think on days like that they would want to make sure everyone had booked.
