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Chessington World of Adventures Resort

So, this weekend the Azteca Hotel had it's grand opening! The event has seemed to slip under the radar (Suggesting a questionable use of the word 'grand'.)

There's some photos floating about on twitter under #AztecaHotel. I'm on my phone so can't link to them directly. Looks to be some decent 3D theme work, alas it comes along with a metric tonne of vinyls and leagues of white emulsion.
 
Each to their own, but from the photos I think it looks pretty pants. I certainly think calling it a themed hotel is stretching the term; it looks like a bog-standard hotel covered in flat printed vinyl, and flat printed vinyl is not a substitute for theming. Safari Hotel isn't exactly themed either, I realise, but it is at least stylish!
 
I agree with Cheese.

The vinyl look kind of works at Legoland's Hotel (the first I believe they used it on) but here it really comes across as a cheap excuse for proper themeing. Makes me rather worried for Alton's new lodges as they look set to continue the trend.
 
The new lodges do have one wall of vinyls in the bedroom at the back, and it does look a bit naff. Years back it would have been painted on, but irs much cheaper to just print it.
 
What ever happened to good old quality craftmanship?

These cheap made-to-order vinyls are just lazy.

The rooms in Azteca look OK, but nothing more.
 
To get an artist to hand paint a mural in every room with anything close to the same level of detail as the vinyl graphics would be incredibly expense. They would never have done it for each room at any of the other resorts either. Look at AT hotel and SplashLandings, all the original rooms had was framed art and the walls painted in a standard colour.
Also painted walls are no more likely to stand up to wear and tear than vinyl.

I think the new rooms look great, but are still expensive for what is actually offered.
 
New queue system seems to be going live at Chessie.

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Images above from Chessie Buzz.
 
Some of the queue times in the first picture are a fair summary of my issues with Chessington. 35 minutes for Sea Storm?!?
 
That's weird in that they've gone towers style (they have the same info boards around park and those entrance boards are the same as the ones in cbeebies) yet the one pictured in market square is a large LED board.

Good to see they're investing though.
 
Some of the queue times in the first picture are a fair summary of my issues with Chessington. 35 minutes for Sea Storm?!?

Popular ride though mate, me and mini me usually ended up queuing for that Halloween times, it's summer holidays in London I'm not surprised it's full, I take your point, but kids rides are usually crappy throughput and during big holidays it's nothing new to queue. It just takes so much longer to do everything with kids!
 
Considering I've seen Tiny Truckers on 2 hours, I'd say those queue times aren't too bad! ;)
 
One thing that's annoying me about using the CBeebies LEDs is that they've just been placed there with no explanation. A themed sign surround for them saying 'The current queue time is' would be better and would fill the pre made gap for the old LED scrollers.

Of course maybe that's still to come but it just lacks a bit of professionalism :)
 
Slight off topic, but my dad found some old ride photos of me and my family yesterday, there are a couple of Chessie on Dragon Falls, turns out in 1994 it was £7.50 for 2 photos, and you could request them up till the end of the season by sending a cheque and your photo number.

Here is 1991:
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And 1994:
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