Chessington World of Adventures Resort

[Benjsh]

Certainly build lower capacity rides at the family orientated parks more than the thrill ones.

Legoland and Chessington have had an awful lot of poor throughput rides added over the years so you can sort of understand why people think that way.

 

[Funcone]

It says this is going to have the biggest Minecraft shop ever. For reference, I just asked Google AI where the biggest Minecraft shop currently is, and it said Target or B&M Bargains.

Although I did then manage to find this on Reddit:


From: https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/16t65m0/officially_licensed_minecraft_outlet_store/

 

[spotweld]

Got a lot to say, not much positive but I'll hold back. This goes so much deeper for me.

This is just going to be used as an anchor point to lock in Mojang's stupid Minecraft 'house code' (like a fashion house such as Gucci would have).

That's all for now.

 

[Hid]

Is Vampire still Chessington's highest capacity ride despite not running 3 trains which it can do. Maybe Gruffalo but its crazy if Vampire still is after 35 years of operation

 

[Matt N]

Is Vampire still Chessington's highest capacity ride despite not running 3 trains which it can do. Maybe Gruffalo but its crazy if Vampire still is after 35 years of operation

It wasn't when I went. I would actually have said Mandrill was their highest capacity coaster when I last visited, which I found surprising!

Vampire, on my last visit, was taking nearly 4 minutes between dispatches of a 24-rider train and only attaining around 400pph. Mandrill was taking around 3 minutes to dispatch a 28-rider train, leading to somewhere in the ballpark of 550-600pph.

I don't know if this was a particularly bad day, but those Vampire ops were probably some of the worst I've ever seen in a Merlin park. The platform was utterly understaffed, with only 2 poor staff members running the entire show of batching, checking restraints and dispatching.

Understaffing was a theme at Chessington that day, with 1 poor man also running the entire show on Tomb Blaster on his own. That ride, which I would argue should be relatively simple to get a good throughput on with large trains and a simple lap bar restraint, was resultantly taking 3+ minutes to dispatch.

From my (admittedly only one) recent experience there, Chessington is definitely Merlin's weakest link operationally. If operations and throughputs there are still anything like they were when I went in 2023, where many, if not most, major rides were getting 1 hour+ queues on a not excessively busy Sunday in September, they need a serious rocket up their backside prior to the arrival of Minecraft!