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Chessington World of Adventures Resort

BenBowser said:
The key purpose for human life is to reproduce, that doesn't mean we don't do other things.

The same can be said for the shop. My point is that although the shop will make money. It will also help disperse the massive traffic queues created at closing time.
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So let's take a day with 10,000 people on park, we will assume 5,000 leave from that exit.

We will then assume the shop can hold around 50 people and each person stays for 5 minutes. We have delayed 600 people by 5 minutes.

But even assuming the shop can hold all 5,000 people in the 2 hours people generally leave how long are people going to spend in a shop?

This will have no impact on the numbers of people leaving.
 
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Current scenes from ride close
 
For the main coasters yes but in Chessington's defence we had a perfectly good time just strolling around the animal exhibits. The only queue that was truly horrendous was Dragons Fury. We breezed through Zufari's queue in 15 minutes and watched the Madagascar show all while everyone else was faffing around moaning about queues. But that's for another topic.
 
Tim said:
For the main coasters yes but in Chessington's defence we had a perfectly good time just strolling around the animal exhibits. The only queue that was truly horrendous was Dragons Fury. We breezed through Zufari's queue in 15 minutes and watched the Madagascar show all while everyone else was faffing around moaning about queues. But that's for another topic.
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Shouldn't all rides and attractions be operating efficiently? I mean if Towers operated their rides badly you could have a pleasant hour in the gardens but you would still be pee'd off!
 
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Quite true. But my point was besides Dragon Fury I didn't find anything that unexpected for a half-term visit.

But maybe that's because I'm used to 1 hour + queues at Legolands old Boating School being the standard. It's not acceptable but is what we've come to expect.

Plus I'd say the Animals make up half of Chessington's experience while very few people visit Alton because they have any interest in the gardens, sad as that may be.
 
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Chessington is the worst run Merlin park in the UK by some considerable distance, resulting in unacceptably long queues for mediocre attractions, even on only moderately busy days. It will be a long time before I return.
 
I agree that I haven't any intention of spending another day at Chessington until their next big ride.

They urgently need:

- to drill staff about throughputs, especially on busier days

- cut fastrack allocations

- stop removing theming and replace it directly (I was appalled with Ramses and we've already had Dragon Falls and others)

- install a ride capable of over 1000pph as a matter of urgency.

The Chessington management team need to fight for budgets to add a good ride with everything they've got.
 
The sad thing is there appears to be no intention to add any rides in the near future. I get that a lot of the funding is going on animal attractions, but at its heart Chessington is a theme park, new rides are sorely needed.
 
Sadly - at its heart chessington is a zoo. it started off as one and it seems M£rlin are heading that way still. Due to them attracting kids now - it's a place for education, animals and some thrills. It's much better quality than London Zoo and offers the thrills and a much more immersive experience.

I think if you get chessington on a quiet day, it's incredibly relaxing and the children seem to love all the animals. It's a shame they don't redo the tomb blaster as, with an omnimover system, that'd be a real people eater.
 
Chessington is a theme park. It is in Merlin's 'Theme Park Resorts' division. Merlin need to decide what they want to do with the park. If they want it to remain a theme park then they urgently need to invest in new rides as well as infrastructure.

However if they want to continue down the route they seemingly are doing with only investing in the animal side of things then they would be better off just removing all of the current rides full stop. Then they can market it a proper adverturers zoo with a few more unique attractions such as Zufari. You then wouldn't get tonnes of disappointed guests waiting miserably in queues for hours. You shouldn't have to visit on a quiet day to be able to have a good time.

Saturday was quite frankly one of my worst theme park experience ever. And it's not as if it was just us lot over reacting to it all - I have never seen so many unhappy guests as well as staff in a theme park. I actually felt sorry for the frontline staff, they take much of the abuse whilst those responsible hide away in their offices. Staff members said to us they were having awful days.

Dragon's Fury was the first farce. It opened late due to technical issues but we joined the queue waiting for it to open. I actually thought it was a good idea as it didn't look like there were any more than 100 people in front of us, I fully expected to get on in around 20 minutes. Once it opened we queued from where the shop is. It took us just over 1 hour. The main queue can't have been getting much more than 100pph which is pathetic for any theme park, let alone a major Merlin owned park. This was a result of reduced capacity, a poor loading procedure and a long fastrack queue. There was also a substantial number of people queuing at the ride's exit. A perfect example of how not to operate a theme park attraction.

Vampire was almost as bad. We used our Premium MAP fastrack vouchers to purchase a fastrack for it as the queue was advertised at 75 minutes. When we went to ride we wating around 15-20 minutes in the fastrack queue as the ride was up and down. We eventually got sent through to the station where the ride broke down yet again. After about another 10-15 minutes of waiting they decided to evacuate the station. Upon exit we were all given a fastrack to use later in the day, rendering our fastack a complete waste of money as we'd given it up without actually getting on the ride.

We got another fastrack following a complaint about the day at guest services which thankully we were able to use on Scorpian Express to save an hours long queue for a ride that is barely worth a 20 minute queue.

We were at the park from 9.30am until 2.30pm. In this time we got on 5 rides; one of these was with fastrack and another was Vampire straight after it re-opned following a breakdown meaning there was no queue. After we went to Legoland we got on the same number of rides in just 2 hours.

Chessington - sort it out.

:)
 
Moan about needing fastrack... Buy fastrack anyway making the problem worse... Get given more fastrack after breakdown... Complain at GS about fastrack... Get given more fastrack.......

Last time Thorpe tried to fob me off with free fastrack, I refused, reminding them that it was fastrack overselling that I was complaining about in the first place. This completely threw the woman at GS because she was only trained to throw FT tickets at people rather than solve problems.
 
Chessington's North car park has now been repurposed as hotel and priority only, and is £10 per car. All other guests will use the South (grass) car park, at £3. Premium MAP holders still get free parking, but only on the grass.
 
John said:
Chessington's North car park has now been repurposed as hotel and priority only, and is £10 per car. All other guests will use the South (grass) car park, at £3. Premium MAP holders still get free parking, but only on the grass.
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I must be reading this wrong; Premium pass holders can only park on the grass now?

Surely that whole tarmac car park can't be hotel and priority only.
 
Anything's possible at Chessington.

It's this paragraph in the info that really kicks the teeth:
"This change is good news for Premium Wizards: fairer parking, bigger smiles and much more FUN! See you soon!"
 
Cakey said:
Anything's possible at Chessington.

It's this paragraph in the info that really kicks the teeth:
"This change is good news for Premium Wizards: fairer parking, bigger smiles and much more FUN! See you soon!"
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No words.
 
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