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Chessington World of Adventures Resort

So I popped to chessie whilst down south yesterday for the last two hours. The park didn’t feel that busy, but as always queues were long and the usual suspects were down.

Does tiger rock ever work? I feel in the past few years it’s always broke. Or course yesterday we arrived and it was also broke, just running round empty with a back soon sign on the entrance.

However one of the strangest bits of the day, we did dragons fury at ride close, it then broke down and within seconds the staff member over the PA said it had broke down and can not be fixed. And we must all leave the queue line. However as a gesture of goodwill they would take us to mandrill (which for the record is riding rougher and bouncer than ever).

I also have to say the park looks very tired and run down in places, yeah some of the floor has been done, but it doesn’t seem like much else compared to Thorpe and towers
 
Tiger Rock gets dreadful queues in part because they send loads of boats out with just 2 people in them. Chessington need to break people out of the mindset that they're entitled to double the queue time just so they can buy the on ride photo without another group in it.
At EP they're constantly calling down the queue for groups of 2 to fill the boats & keep the queue moving as fast as possible.
 
Swear they used to do that years ago. Probably before they prioritised "experience" over throughput.

Chessie only ever gets enough budget to repaint things.
 
We were at Chessington yesterday and saw the new queue system on Tiger Rock and it made absolutely no difference to the queue. Unless I am missing something I don't get the new system, we saw them multiple times send a boat of two and then a boat of three - surely the point of the system is that the three and two go together. Just to top it off they were taking guests from the groups of 3 or less line more frequently than the other line - so for example they would send a boat of 3, then a 2, then a 3 and then take from the 4 or more queue. So three or sometimes four boats would go with threes or twos in it before a bigger group got their turn.

On another note, ride availability yesterday was poor - so poor in fact that they activated the free return policy. Mandrill Mayhem and Dragons Fury were down all day. At one point, those two along with Blue Barnacle, Ostrich Stampede, Rattlesnake and Tiger Rock were all down at the same time. Vampire almost got through the day but went down towards the end as well. This was on top of Monkey Swinger and Tomb Blaster being closed all day as well. It was not good.
 
Bowser said:
Yikes. What’s going on with Merlin this year? I’m sure things weren’t this bad last Easter.
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Easter was later last year, so they had a bit more time to get the park in order.

Easter Saturday last year wasn't great actually. Mandrill hadn't opened yet, Fury had a 90+ minute queue all day and Rattlesnake was having issues running more than one train so getting throughputs of 160pph!
 
So today Chessington has the following closed all day;

- Mandrill Mayhem
- Rattlesnake
- Tiger Rock
- Zufari
- Tomb Blaster
- Tiny Truckers
- Seastorm
- Monkey Swinger
- Scorpion Express

Dragons Fury has operated for 1 hour so far today and is currently closed.

What an absolute shambles. I swear this is getting worse every year. I feel like Thorpe and Towers have both turned a corner and are making the right decisions and investments. The same can't be said for Chessington unfortunately...

EDIT: Rattlesnake seems to have opened late afternoon, but at the time of posting it showed 'Closed all day' on the app
 
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Call_um said:
So today Chessington has the following closed all day;

- Mandrill Mayhem
- Rattlesnake
- Tiger Rock
- Zufari
- Tomb Blaster
- Tiny Truckers
- Seastorm
- Monkey Swinger
- Scorpion Express

Dragons Fury has operated for 1 hour so far today and is currently closed.

What an absolute shambles. I swear this is getting worse every year. I feel like Thorpe and Towers have both turned a corner and are making the right decisions and investments. The same can't be said for Chessington unfortunately...
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Alton is plagued with similar ride closures and capacity issues currently. I think the cut runs deeper than just one park. We’ve seen a lot of promise and talk, but no action.

At least Vampire is still going strong.
 
Blackhole_Sun said:
Alton is plagued with similar ride closures and capacity issues currently. I think the cut runs deeper than just one park. We’ve seen a lot of promise and talk, but no action.

At least Vampire is still going strong.
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I do agree Altons ride availability has been far from perfect so far this season, but Chessingtons is on another level. 9 rides scheduled to be closed all day, quite a few of them being major rides.

1/5 of their coasters currently available. 2/5 for 1 hour of the day so far.
 
Relife said:
Chessington does appear to be the worst run of all the Merlin UK parks. I don't understand how a simple log flume can have so many technical difficulties. Do the have enough engineers at this park?
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From LH&T's recent vlog, it broke down when they were on it and the boats rode up the one in front...

flume1.png
flume2.png


Is it supposed to do that? Wouldn't want to be in the back seat lol.
(Ignore the clickbait title)
 
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