Do UK parks have the worst queue times in Europe?

[owenstreet7]

For comparison:

One day at Europa costs €52.
Phantasialand is €68 (it's ALWAYS been stupid expensive).
Asterix is €54.
Efteling caps at €53.

It's not about the ticket price, it's about the value for money and how the parks approach the management. Merlin's "sell them low" method has been a potential pitfall for years, and knocking up the cost to £100 for entry alone will not solve the issue. Especially given the amount of BOGOF and MAP users.

With Phantasialand, they tend to do deals where it's more than half price depending on how far in advance you book.

I don't think they're selling 2025 tickets yet so it's showing as the highest price it would charge.

 

[Matt N]

If anyone's interested, I decided to take on board the suggestion of @GooseOnTheLoose and try to answer some of the questions raised in this thread empirically. Buckle up, folks, because it's about to get statistical in here! (Don't say I didn't warn you...)

In terms of the method I decided to use; I decided to go with a methodology something along the lines of the following:

• I decided to look at the parks index on queue-times.com as my source for queue time data: https://queue-times.com/parks
• From there, I decided to scan every listed park from every European country on the site and take its top 10 queue times for both "average queue time" and "average maximum queue time". Where the park did not have 10 queue times, I just took all of them.
• To reflect the current permanent offering, I tried to exclude things that are "Archived" on the site or that I know to not currently be permanently extant at the park in some capacity. This includes seasonal Halloween/Christmas attractions and past attractions. The one exception to this is where everything in the park was archived and/or some things that I know to be operating were considered "Archived" and there was no obvious non-archived alternative average (for example, Helix was strangely "Archived" at Liseberg even though I know very well that it's still operating).

This methodology brought out the following numbers of parks and attractions for the following European countries:

• Austria (1 park/10 queue times)
• Belgium (4 parks/40 queue times)
• Denmark (3 parks/30 queue times)
• France (9 parks/80 queue times)
• Germany (7 parks/70 queue times)
• Italy (1 park/10 queue times)
• Netherlands (4 parks/36 queue times)
• Poland (1 park/10 queue times)
• Spain (4 parks/40 queue times)
• Sweden (2 parks/20 queue times)
• United Kingdom (6 parks/60 queue times)

And in terms of operators, the numbers were as follows:

• Compagnie des Alpes (7 parks/70 queue times)
• Disney (3 parks/21 queue times)
• Looping Group (1 park/6 queue times)
• Mack Rides (2 parks/20 queue times)
• Merlin (8 parks/80 queue times)
• Other (13 parks/129 queue times)
• Parques Reunidos (4 parks/40 queue times)
• Plopsa (2 parks/20 queue times)
• PortAventura World (2 parks/20 queue times)

I would also like to raise a few caveats about this method:

• Of course, these queue times are advertised, and derived from park apps and such. Whether actual queue times reflect these at all times is unknown (I'd say it's unlikely, in all honesty, and accuracy varies between parks/operators).
• This method also only encompasses the scope of parks covered by queue-times.com in a given country. This means that some countries will have a greater sample size than others.
• The average and maximum queue times are all time averages, as this is the only level of granularity at which queue-times.com shows queue time averages.
• Parks of course have different operating calendars, which may also affect the averages shown.
• As stated above, I was unsure about which "Archived" attractions to exclude and which to keep in some cases. I did a scan of the park website where I was unsure, and if I couldn't find it there, I excluded it. This is of course prone to human error, so do bear this in mind.

Now we've got the methodology and caveats out of the way, let's dive into some data!

So, the first question this thread initially posed is; do UK parks have longer queue times than those of other European countries?
To answer this question at a basic level, we could do some boxplots and look at the means (calculated average) and medians (middle value) for each European country in terms of both average and maximum queue times. In terms of average queue time, the boxplot and figures per country are as follows (for clarity, the boxplot shows the complete spread of queue times for a country, with the dots denoting outliers that fall outside of the "typical" range, the whiskers denoting the range of the non-anomalous data, the coloured box denoting the interquartile range between the 25th and 75th percentiles, and the line in the middle denoting the median/50th percentile/central value):

Country	Mean (1dp)	Median (1dp)
Austria	13.5	12.5
Belgium	18.2	17.5
Denmark	12.6	12.5
France	24.9	23
Germany	19.6	20
Italy	22.1	19
Netherlands	20.9	21
Poland	22.7	16
Spain	28.9	27.5
Sweden	20.2	18
United Kingdom	27.3	26

And in terms of average maximum queue time, the boxplot and figures per country are as follows:

Country	Mean (1dp)	Median (1dp)
Austria	19.1	18.5
Belgium	34.6	30.5
Denmark	23.8	23
France	41.5	40.5
Germany	30.6	31
Italy	37.2	33.5
Netherlands	35	31.5
Poland	30.4	26.5
Spain	44.1	41.5
Sweden	33.5	30
United Kingdom	42.6	42

Based on this, I think it's probably fair to conclude that the United Kingdom is one of the countries with the highest average queue times in Europe. Out of the 11 countries studied, the UK had the second highest mean and median average queue time behind only Spain, the second highest mean average maximum queue time behind only Spain, and the highest median average maximum queue time. If you look at the boxplots, we can see that the UK's upper quartile is not quite as high as France's or Spain's, and interestingly roughly level with or slightly lower than that of the Netherlands, but that lower quartile and minimum value is stubbornly higher than that of any of those countries, perhaps indicating generally longer queue times across the board.

But we don't want to stop there, do we? To truly empirically conclude whether the UK has longer average queue times than the rest of Europe, we need to determine if the difference between the UK and the rest of Europe is statistically significant. In order to do this, we can wheel out a good old tool from the statistical toolbox known as hypothesis testing! In essence, what you do in hypothesis testing is declare a null hypothesis (a "status quo" that you're trying to disprove) and an alternative hypothesis (the thing you're trying to prove), and sort of prove your alternative hypothesis by trying to reject the null. It's kind of a "proof by contradiction" sort of affair. In terms of how we determine whether the outcome is statistically significant; statistical significance is a slightly hand-wavey concept, but we determine the degree of statistical significance by calculating the test statistic and p-value (the probability of attaining a test statistic at least as extreme as that attained if the null hypothesis is true). The general gold standard of statistical significance is a p-value of 0.05 or lower, but this can vary (some might go for, say, 0.01 or lower if you want strong confidence). I'll go with a critical p-value of 0.05 here, for ease.

So how am I going to work out if the UK has higher queue times than the rest of Europe to a statistically significant degree? Well, I'm going to carry out a two-sample z-test, with the United Kingdom queue times put into one sample and those of the rest of Europe amalgamated in the other. My hypotheses are as follows:

• Null hypothesis (H0): Mean average queue time in the UK is less than or equal to average queue time in the rest of Europe
• Alternative hypothesis (H1): Mean average queue time in the UK is greater than average queue time in the rest of Europe (As we're only interested in seeing whether the UK is higher, we perform a right-tailed test here)

My critical p-value to reject the null hypothesis is 0.05 or lower, and according to statistical tables, the critical region for the test statistic is 1.64 or higher in order to attain that. The test statistic must fall within the critical region if I want to reject the null hypothesis and prove our hypothesis that UK queue times are longer than those of the rest of Europe.

When performing a two-sample z-test on the average queue time data we have, the outcome is as follows:

Metric	Value
Test Statistic (Z-Score)	3.75 (2dp)
p-value	0.000086 (2sf)
Retain or Reject H0?	Reject

And when replicating the same process upon the average maximum queue time data we have, the outcome is as follows:

Metric	Value
Test Statistic (Z-Score)	2.98 (2dp)
p-value	0.0014 (2sf)
Retain or Reject H0?	Reject

Based on the fact that the null hypothesis was rejected in both tests, we can safely conclude that UK queue times are higher than those in the rest of Europe to a statistically significant degree on average. The difference is more statistically significant for average queue time than for average maximum queue time, but nonetheless, both returned p-values of below 0.01, providing very strong evidence in favour of rejecting the null hypothesis in favour of the alternative.

So I think we can conclude that the UK does indeed have some of the longest queue times in Europe on average. With descriptive statistics and boxplots showing that its average and maximum queue times put it right up there as one of the longest queue time countries on average (only narrowly beaten by Spain in most metrics and even on top in terms of median average maximum queue time) and our hypothesis tests proving that queue times in the UK are longer than those of the rest of Europe on average to a statistically significant extent, it seems as though the initial hypothesis of @Bowser when creating this thread was correct.

But that is not the only question I'm answering today. I noticed that conversation drifted to our good old friends Merlin as the thread progressed, so I'm also going to try and answer a different question; do Merlin parks in Europe have longer queue times than those of other European operators?
Let's repeat a similar process to what we did above, but for operators rather than countries.

At a basic level, we can once again look at boxplots, means and medians. For average queue time, the boxplots and figures by operator are as follows:

Operator	Mean (1dp)	Median (1dp)
Compagnie des Alpes	22.5	21
Disney	34.9	34
Looping Group	11.7	10
Mack Rides	18.3	20
Merlin	26.3	25
Other	18.1	17
Parques Reunidos	20.9	19
Plopsa	15.3	14.5
PortAventura World	33.7	33.5

And for average maximum queue time, the boxplots and figures by operator are as follows:

Operator	Mean (1dp)	Median (1dp)
Compagnie des Alpes	41.7	42
Disney	57.7	54
Looping Group	19.2	17.5
Mack Rides	28.6	31.5
Merlin	42.3	41.5
Other	28.2	27
Parques Reunidos	35.8	34
Plopsa	21.3	22
PortAventura World	49.1	50.5

So based on this, I think we can conclude that Merlin is potentially on the higher end of European operators in terms of average queue times, but definitely not the highest of the 9 operators tested, with Disney and PortAventura World both quite noticeably higher in terms of both average queue time and average maximum queue time than Merlin. In terms of average maximum queue time, Compagnie des Alpes also roughly matches Merlin, with Merlin's mean being fractionally higher than CdA's, but CdA's median being fractionally higher than Merlin's. If you look at the boxplots for maximum queue time, you can see that Disney is notably above Merlin, with Disney's lower quartile being on par with Merlin's upper quartile, and PortAventura World is also notably higher than Merlin, albeit much more variable with a slightly lower lower whisker. The interquartile ranges of CdA and Merlin are actually very similar, albeit CdA exhibits more variation beyond the interquartile range area, with a higher upper whisker and a lower lower whisker.

Now let's try and prove if Merlin's queue times are higher than those of other European operators to a statistically significant degree. As I did before, I'm going to perform a two-sample z-test to determine this, with Merlin parks being in one sample and the parks of all other European operators being amalgamated within the other. I declare my hypotheses as the following:

• Null hypothesis (H0): Mean average queue time in European Merlin parks is less than or equal to average queue time in the European parks of other operators
• Alternative hypothesis (H1): Mean average queue time in European Merlin parks is greater than average queue time in the European parks of other operators (As we're only interested in seeing whether Merlin is higher, we perform a right-tailed test here)

Similarly to above, I'm going to declare the critical p-value for rejection of the null hypothesis as 0.05 or lower, and the critical test statistic region for rejection of the null hypothesis as 1.64 or higher.

When performing a two-sample z-test on the average queue time data we have, the outcome is as follows:

Metric	Value
Test Statistic (Z-Score)	3.81 (2dp)
p-value	0.000068 (2sf)
Retain or Reject H0?	Reject

And when replicating the same process upon the average maximum queue time data we have, the outcome is as follows:

Metric	Value
Test Statistic (Z-Score)	3.84 (2dp)
p-value	0.000060 (2sf)
Retain or Reject H0?	Reject

Based on the rejection of the null hypothesis in both tests, we can conclude that average queue times in European Merlin parks are higher than those in the European parks of other operators to a statistically significant degree. With a p-value below 0.0001 in both cases, this suggests that there is extremely strong evidence in favour of rejecting the null hypothesis in favour of the alternative hypothesis.

So based on all of that, I think we can safely conclude that Merlin is on the higher end of European operators in terms of average queue time length. The boxplots and descriptive statistics showed that they were beaten only by Disney and PortAventura World in terms of both average and maximum queue time among the 9 operators, albeit Compagnie des Alpes did roughly match them in terms of average maximum queue time.

Let's now wrap up and summarise our findings...
So, in conclusion...
In conclusion, these experiments found that the hypotheses behind the creation of and discussion within this thread were true, for the most part.

When looking at whether the UK has higher average queue times than other European countries, boxplots and descriptive statistics showed that the UK is right up there for queue time length, only being narrowly beaten by Spain in most metrics. The hypothesis tests also provided statistically significant evidence to suggest that UK queue times are higher than those of parks in other European countries on average.

When looking at whether European Merlin parks have higher average queue times than those of European parks of other operators, boxplots and descriptive statistics showed that Merlin are on the higher end of European operators for queue time length, albeit not quite the very highest (Disney takes that particular crown). Hypothesis tests provided statistically significant evidence to suggest that Merlin queue times are higher than those of other European operators on average.

Thanks for reading; I hope you found my analysis interesting! Just for transparency, here is the spreadsheet with all of the queue times used in it (this includes queue times from other continents, for some more global queue time analysis I'm pondering doing):

From: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Bd9XJM_8LDhWSUePkIjbKMBtPtvoW8DLv80apQvsQtk/edit?usp=sharing

TL;DR: I decided to empirically test out some of the hypotheses declared in this thread. When I tested out whether UK parks have higher queue times than parks in other European countries, boxplots and descriptive analytics found that the UK was right up there for queue time length, being only narrowly beaten by Spain in most metrics and even topping the charts in terms of median average maximum queue time. Hypothesis testing unearthed statistically significant evidence to suggest that UK parks have longer queues than those of other European countries on average. When I tested out whether European Merlin parks have higher queue times than European parks operated by other operators, boxplots and descriptive statistics found that Merlin was on the higher end of European operators for queue length on average, albeit Disney and PortAventura World came out higher. Hypothesis testing unearthed statistically significant evidence to suggest that European Merlin parks have longer queues than those of other European operators on average.

 

[sock]

TL;DR: I decided to empirically test out some of the hypotheses declared in this thread. When I tested out whether UK parks have higher queue times than parks in other European countries, boxplots and descriptive analytics found that the UK was right up there for queue time length, being only narrowly beaten by Spain in most metrics and even topping the charts in terms of median average maximum queue time. Hypothesis testing unearthed statistically significant evidence to suggest that UK parks have longer queues than those of other European countries on average. When I tested out whether European Merlin parks have higher queue times than European parks operated by other operators, boxplots and descriptive statistics found that Merlin was on the higher end of European operators for queue length on average, albeit Disney and PortAventura World came out higher. Hypothesis testing unearthed statistically significant evidence to suggest that European Merlin parks have longer queues than those of other European operators on average.

Wow, this was really interesting! The graphs make it really easy to understand. Thanks for working it all out!

 

[GooseOnTheLoose]

If anyone's interested, I decided to take on board the suggestion of @GooseOnTheLoose and try to answer some of the questions raised in this thread empirically. Buckle up, folks, because it's about to get statistical in here! (Don't say I didn't warn you...)

In terms of the method I decided to use; I decided to go with a methodology something along the lines of the following:

• I decided to look at the parks index on queue-times.com as my source for queue time data: https://queue-times.com/parks
• From there, I decided to scan every listed park from every European country on the site and take its top 10 queue times for both "average queue time" and "average maximum queue time". Where the park did not have 10 queue times, I just took all of them.
• To reflect the current permanent offering, I tried to exclude things that are "Archived" on the site or that I know to not currently be permanently extant at the park in some capacity. This includes seasonal Halloween/Christmas attractions and past attractions. The one exception to this is where everything in the park was archived and/or some things that I know to be operating were considered "Archived" and there was no obvious non-archived alternative average (for example, Helix was strangely "Archived" at Liseberg even though I know very well that it's still operating).

This methodology brought out the following numbers of parks and attractions for the following European countries:

• Austria (1 park/10 queue times)
• Belgium (4 parks/40 queue times)
• Denmark (3 parks/30 queue times)
• France (9 parks/80 queue times)
• Germany (7 parks/70 queue times)
• Italy (1 park/10 queue times)
• Netherlands (4 parks/36 queue times)
• Poland (1 park/10 queue times)
• Spain (4 parks/40 queue times)
• Sweden (2 parks/20 queue times)
• United Kingdom (6 parks/60 queue times)

And in terms of operators, the numbers were as follows:

• Compagnie des Alpes (7 parks/70 queue times)
• Disney (3 parks/21 queue times)
• Looping Group (1 park/6 queue times)
• Mack Rides (2 parks/20 queue times)
• Merlin (8 parks/80 queue times)
• Other (13 parks/129 queue times)
• Parques Reunidos (4 parks/40 queue times)
• Plopsa (2 parks/20 queue times)
• PortAventura World (2 parks/20 queue times)

I would also like to raise a few caveats about this method:

• Of course, these queue times are advertised, and derived from park apps and such. Whether actual queue times reflect these at all times is unknown (I'd say it's unlikely, in all honesty, and accuracy varies between parks/operators).
• This method also only encompasses the scope of parks covered by queue-times.com in a given country. This means that some countries will have a greater sample size than others.
• The average and maximum queue times are all time averages, as this is the only level of granularity at which queue-times.com shows queue time averages.
• Parks of course have different operating calendars, which may also affect the averages shown.
• As stated above, I was unsure about which "Archived" attractions to exclude and which to keep in some cases. I did a scan of the park website where I was unsure, and if I couldn't find it there, I excluded it. This is of course prone to human error, so do bear this in mind.

Now we've got the methodology and caveats out of the way, let's dive into some data!

So, the first question this thread initially posed is; do UK parks have longer queue times than those of other European countries?
To answer this question at a basic level, we could do some boxplots and look at the means (calculated average) and medians (middle value) for each European country in terms of both average and maximum queue times. In terms of average queue time, the boxplot and figures per country are as follows (for clarity, the boxplot shows the complete spread of queue times for a country, with the dots denoting outliers that fall outside of the "typical" range, the whiskers denoting the range of the non-anomalous data, the coloured box denoting the interquartile range between the 25th and 75th percentiles, and the line in the middle denoting the median/50th percentile/central value):

Country	Mean (1dp)	Median (1dp)
Austria	13.5	12.5
Belgium	18.2	17.5
Denmark	12.6	12.5
France	24.9	23
Germany	19.6	20
Italy	22.1	19
Netherlands	20.9	21
Poland	22.7	16
Spain	28.9	27.5
Sweden	20.2	18
United Kingdom	27.3	26

And in terms of average maximum queue time, the boxplot and figures per country are as follows:

Country	Mean (1dp)	Median (1dp)
Austria	19.1	18.5
Belgium	34.6	30.5
Denmark	23.8	23
France	41.5	40.5
Germany	30.6	31
Italy	37.2	33.5
Netherlands	35	31.5
Poland	30.4	26.5
Spain	44.1	41.5
Sweden	33.5	30
United Kingdom	42.6	42

Based on this, I think it's probably fair to conclude that the United Kingdom is one of the countries with the highest average queue times in Europe. Out of the 11 countries studied, the UK had the second highest mean and median average queue time behind only Spain, the second highest mean average maximum queue time behind only Spain, and the highest median average maximum queue time. If you look at the boxplots, we can see that the UK's upper quartile is not quite as high as France's or Spain's, and interestingly roughly level with or slightly lower than that of the Netherlands, but that lower quartile and minimum value is stubbornly higher than that of any of those countries, perhaps indicating generally longer queue times across the board.

But we don't want to stop there, do we? To truly empirically conclude whether the UK has longer average queue times than the rest of Europe, we need to determine if the difference between the UK and the rest of Europe is statistically significant. In order to do this, we can wheel out a good old tool from the statistical toolbox known as hypothesis testing! In essence, what you do in hypothesis testing is declare a null hypothesis (a "status quo" that you're trying to disprove) and an alternative hypothesis (the thing you're trying to prove), and sort of prove your alternative hypothesis by trying to reject the null. It's kind of a "proof by contradiction" sort of affair. In terms of how we determine whether the outcome is statistically significant; statistical significance is a slightly hand-wavey concept, but we determine the degree of statistical significance by calculating the test statistic and p-value (the probability of attaining a test statistic at least as extreme as that attained if the null hypothesis is true). The general gold standard of statistical significance is a p-value of 0.05 or lower, but this can vary (some might go for, say, 0.01 or lower if you want strong confidence). I'll go with a critical p-value of 0.05 here, for ease.

So how am I going to work out if the UK has higher queue times than the rest of Europe to a statistically significant degree? Well, I'm going to carry out a two-sample z-test, with the United Kingdom queue times put into one sample and those of the rest of Europe amalgamated in the other. My hypotheses are as follows:

• Null hypothesis (H0): Mean average queue time in the UK is less than or equal to average queue time in the rest of Europe
• Alternative hypothesis (H1): Mean average queue time in the UK is greater than average queue time in the rest of Europe (As we're only interested in seeing whether the UK is higher, we perform a right-tailed test here)

My critical p-value to reject the null hypothesis is 0.05 or lower, and according to statistical tables, the critical region for the test statistic is 1.64 or higher in order to attain that. The test statistic must fall within the critical region if I want to reject the null hypothesis and prove our hypothesis that UK queue times are longer than those of the rest of Europe.

When performing a two-sample z-test on the average queue time data we have, the outcome is as follows:

Metric	Value
Test Statistic (Z-Score)	3.75 (2dp)
p-value	0.000086 (2sf)
Retain or Reject H0?	Reject

And when replicating the same process upon the average maximum queue time data we have, the outcome is as follows:

Metric	Value
Test Statistic (Z-Score)	2.98 (2dp)
p-value	0.0014 (2sf)
Retain or Reject H0?	Reject

Based on the fact that the null hypothesis was rejected in both tests, we can safely conclude that UK queue times are higher than those in the rest of Europe to a statistically significant degree on average. The difference is more statistically significant for average queue time than for average maximum queue time, but nonetheless, both returned p-values of below 0.01, providing very strong evidence in favour of rejecting the null hypothesis in favour of the alternative.

So I think we can conclude that the UK does indeed have some of the longest queue times in Europe on average. With descriptive statistics and boxplots showing that its average and maximum queue times put it right up there as one of the longest queue time countries on average (only narrowly beaten by Spain in most metrics and even on top in terms of median average maximum queue time) and our hypothesis tests proving that queue times in the UK are longer than those of the rest of Europe on average to a statistically significant extent, it seems as though the initial hypothesis of @Bowser when creating this thread was correct.

But that is not the only question I'm answering today. I noticed that conversation drifted to our good old friends Merlin as the thread progressed, so I'm also going to try and answer a different question; do Merlin parks in Europe have longer queue times than those of other European operators?
Let's repeat a similar process to what we did above, but for operators rather than countries.

At a basic level, we can once again look at boxplots, means and medians. For average queue time, the boxplots and figures by operator are as follows:

Operator	Mean (1dp)	Median (1dp)
Compagnie des Alpes	22.5	21
Disney	34.9	34
Looping Group	11.7	10
Mack Rides	18.3	20
Merlin	26.3	25
Other	18.1	17
Parques Reunidos	20.9	19
Plopsa	15.3	14.5
PortAventura World	33.7	33.5

And for average maximum queue time, the boxplots and figures by operator are as follows:

Operator	Mean (1dp)	Median (1dp)
Compagnie des Alpes	41.7	42
Disney	57.7	54
Looping Group	19.2	17.5
Mack Rides	28.6	31.5
Merlin	42.3	41.5
Other	28.2	27
Parques Reunidos	35.8	34
Plopsa	21.3	22
PortAventura World	49.1	50.5

So based on this, I think we can conclude that Merlin is potentially on the higher end of European operators in terms of average queue times, but definitely not the highest of the 9 operators tested, with Disney and PortAventura World both quite noticeably higher in terms of both average queue time and average maximum queue time than Merlin. In terms of average maximum queue time, Compagnie des Alpes also roughly matches Merlin, with Merlin's mean being fractionally higher than CdA's, but CdA's median being fractionally higher than Merlin's. If you look at the boxplots for maximum queue time, you can see that Disney is notably above Merlin, with Disney's lower quartile being on par with Merlin's upper quartile, and PortAventura World is also notably higher than Merlin, albeit much more variable with a slightly lower lower whisker. The interquartile ranges of CdA and Merlin are actually very similar, albeit CdA exhibits more variation beyond the interquartile range area, with a higher upper whisker and a lower lower whisker.

Now let's try and prove if Merlin's queue times are higher than those of other European operators to a statistically significant degree. As I did before, I'm going to perform a two-sample z-test to determine this, with Merlin parks being in one sample and the parks of all other European operators being amalgamated within the other. I declare my hypotheses as the following:

• Null hypothesis (H0): Mean average queue time in European Merlin parks is less than or equal to average queue time in the European parks of other operators
• Alternative hypothesis (H1): Mean average queue time in European Merlin parks is greater than average queue time in the European parks of other operators (As we're only interested in seeing whether Merlin is higher, we perform a right-tailed test here)

Similarly to above, I'm going to declare the critical p-value for rejection of the null hypothesis as 0.05 or lower, and the critical test statistic region for rejection of the null hypothesis as 1.64 or higher.

When performing a two-sample z-test on the average queue time data we have, the outcome is as follows:

Metric	Value
Test Statistic (Z-Score)	3.81 (2dp)
p-value	0.000068 (2sf)
Retain or Reject H0?	Reject

And when replicating the same process upon the average maximum queue time data we have, the outcome is as follows:

Metric	Value
Test Statistic (Z-Score)	3.84 (2dp)
p-value	0.000060 (2sf)
Retain or Reject H0?	Reject

Based on the rejection of the null hypothesis in both tests, we can conclude that average queue times in European Merlin parks are higher than those in the European parks of other operators to a statistically significant degree. With a p-value below 0.0001 in both cases, this suggests that there is extremely strong evidence in favour of rejecting the null hypothesis in favour of the alternative hypothesis.

So based on all of that, I think we can safely conclude that Merlin is on the higher end of European operators in terms of average queue time length. The boxplots and descriptive statistics showed that they were beaten only by Disney and PortAventura World in terms of both average and maximum queue time among the 9 operators, albeit Compagnie des Alpes did roughly match them in terms of average maximum queue time.

Let's now wrap up and summarise our findings...
So, in conclusion...
In conclusion, these experiments found that the hypotheses behind the creation of and discussion within this thread were true, for the most part.

When looking at whether the UK has higher average queue times than other European countries, boxplots and descriptive statistics showed that the UK is right up there for queue time length, only being narrowly beaten by Spain in most metrics. The hypothesis tests also provided statistically significant evidence to suggest that UK queue times are higher than those of parks in other European countries on average.

When looking at whether European Merlin parks have higher average queue times than those of European parks of other operators, boxplots and descriptive statistics showed that Merlin are on the higher end of European operators for queue time length, albeit not quite the very highest (Disney takes that particular crown). Hypothesis tests provided statistically significant evidence to suggest that Merlin queue times are higher than those of other European operators on average.

Thanks for reading; I hope you found my analysis interesting! Just for transparency, here is the spreadsheet with all of the queue times used in it (this includes queue times from other continents, for some more global queue time analysis I'm pondering doing):

From: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Bd9XJM_8LDhWSUePkIjbKMBtPtvoW8DLv80apQvsQtk/edit?usp=sharing

TL;DR: I decided to empirically test out some of the hypotheses declared in this thread. When I tested out whether UK parks have higher queue times than parks in other European countries, boxplots and descriptive analytics found that the UK was right up there for queue time length, being only narrowly beaten by Spain in most metrics and even topping the charts in terms of median average maximum queue time. Hypothesis testing unearthed statistically significant evidence to suggest that UK parks have longer queues than those of other European countries on average. When I tested out whether European Merlin parks have higher queue times than European parks operated by other operators, boxplots and descriptive statistics found that Merlin was on the higher end of European operators for queue length on average, albeit Disney and PortAventura World came out higher. Hypothesis testing unearthed statistically significant evidence to suggest that European Merlin parks have longer queues than those of other European operators on average.

I have so much love, time and respect for you. Well done on this one!

 

[rob666]

You are getting into deep water when the tldr runs to a lengthy paragraph though mate!

 

[Bowser]

TL;DR: I decided to empirically test out some of the hypotheses declared in this thread. When I tested out whether UK parks have higher queue times than parks in other European countries, boxplots and descriptive analytics found that the UK was right up there for queue time length, being only narrowly beaten by Spain in most metrics and even topping the charts in terms of median average maximum queue time. Hypothesis testing unearthed statistically significant evidence to suggest that UK parks have longer queues than those of other European countries on average. When I tested out whether European Merlin parks have higher queue times than European parks operated by other operators, boxplots and descriptive statistics found that Merlin was on the higher end of European operators for queue length on average, albeit Disney and PortAventura World came out higher. Hypothesis testing unearthed statistically significant evidence to suggest that European Merlin parks have longer queues than those of other European operators on average.

Fantastic work Matt and very interesting! Somewhat validating for the often discredited "gut instinct" theory too.

Quite deflating to see it written out though and only adds to my increasing envy of our European friends theme park choices.

 

[Skyscraper]

If anyone's interested, I decided to take on board the suggestion of @GooseOnTheLoose and try to answer some of the questions raised in this thread empirically. Buckle up, folks, because it's about to get statistical in here! (Don't say I didn't warn you...)

In terms of the method I decided to use; I decided to go with a methodology something along the lines of the following:

• I decided to look at the parks index on queue-times.com as my source for queue time data: https://queue-times.com/parks
• From there, I decided to scan every listed park from every European country on the site and take its top 10 queue times for both "average queue time" and "average maximum queue time". Where the park did not have 10 queue times, I just took all of them.
• To reflect the current permanent offering, I tried to exclude things that are "Archived" on the site or that I know to not currently be permanently extant at the park in some capacity. This includes seasonal Halloween/Christmas attractions and past attractions. The one exception to this is where everything in the park was archived and/or some things that I know to be operating were considered "Archived" and there was no obvious non-archived alternative average (for example, Helix was strangely "Archived" at Liseberg even though I know very well that it's still operating).

This methodology brought out the following numbers of parks and attractions for the following European countries:

• Austria (1 park/10 queue times)
• Belgium (4 parks/40 queue times)
• Denmark (3 parks/30 queue times)
• France (9 parks/80 queue times)
• Germany (7 parks/70 queue times)
• Italy (1 park/10 queue times)
• Netherlands (4 parks/36 queue times)
• Poland (1 park/10 queue times)
• Spain (4 parks/40 queue times)
• Sweden (2 parks/20 queue times)
• United Kingdom (6 parks/60 queue times)

And in terms of operators, the numbers were as follows:

• Compagnie des Alpes (7 parks/70 queue times)
• Disney (3 parks/21 queue times)
• Looping Group (1 park/6 queue times)
• Mack Rides (2 parks/20 queue times)
• Merlin (8 parks/80 queue times)
• Other (13 parks/129 queue times)
• Parques Reunidos (4 parks/40 queue times)
• Plopsa (2 parks/20 queue times)
• PortAventura World (2 parks/20 queue times)

I would also like to raise a few caveats about this method:

• Of course, these queue times are advertised, and derived from park apps and such. Whether actual queue times reflect these at all times is unknown (I'd say it's unlikely, in all honesty, and accuracy varies between parks/operators).
• This method also only encompasses the scope of parks covered by queue-times.com in a given country. This means that some countries will have a greater sample size than others.
• The average and maximum queue times are all time averages, as this is the only level of granularity at which queue-times.com shows queue time averages.
• Parks of course have different operating calendars, which may also affect the averages shown.
• As stated above, I was unsure about which "Archived" attractions to exclude and which to keep in some cases. I did a scan of the park website where I was unsure, and if I couldn't find it there, I excluded it. This is of course prone to human error, so do bear this in mind.

Now we've got the methodology and caveats out of the way, let's dive into some data!

So, the first question this thread initially posed is; do UK parks have longer queue times than those of other European countries?
To answer this question at a basic level, we could do some boxplots and look at the means (calculated average) and medians (middle value) for each European country in terms of both average and maximum queue times. In terms of average queue time, the boxplot and figures per country are as follows (for clarity, the boxplot shows the complete spread of queue times for a country, with the dots denoting outliers that fall outside of the "typical" range, the whiskers denoting the range of the non-anomalous data, the coloured box denoting the interquartile range between the 25th and 75th percentiles, and the line in the middle denoting the median/50th percentile/central value):

Country	Mean (1dp)	Median (1dp)
Austria	13.5	12.5
Belgium	18.2	17.5
Denmark	12.6	12.5
France	24.9	23
Germany	19.6	20
Italy	22.1	19
Netherlands	20.9	21
Poland	22.7	16
Spain	28.9	27.5
Sweden	20.2	18
United Kingdom	27.3	26

And in terms of average maximum queue time, the boxplot and figures per country are as follows:

Country	Mean (1dp)	Median (1dp)
Austria	19.1	18.5
Belgium	34.6	30.5
Denmark	23.8	23
France	41.5	40.5
Germany	30.6	31
Italy	37.2	33.5
Netherlands	35	31.5
Poland	30.4	26.5
Spain	44.1	41.5
Sweden	33.5	30
United Kingdom	42.6	42

Based on this, I think it's probably fair to conclude that the United Kingdom is one of the countries with the highest average queue times in Europe. Out of the 11 countries studied, the UK had the second highest mean and median average queue time behind only Spain, the second highest mean average maximum queue time behind only Spain, and the highest median average maximum queue time. If you look at the boxplots, we can see that the UK's upper quartile is not quite as high as France's or Spain's, and interestingly roughly level with or slightly lower than that of the Netherlands, but that lower quartile and minimum value is stubbornly higher than that of any of those countries, perhaps indicating generally longer queue times across the board.

But we don't want to stop there, do we? To truly empirically conclude whether the UK has longer average queue times than the rest of Europe, we need to determine if the difference between the UK and the rest of Europe is statistically significant. In order to do this, we can wheel out a good old tool from the statistical toolbox known as hypothesis testing! In essence, what you do in hypothesis testing is declare a null hypothesis (a "status quo" that you're trying to disprove) and an alternative hypothesis (the thing you're trying to prove), and sort of prove your alternative hypothesis by trying to reject the null. It's kind of a "proof by contradiction" sort of affair. In terms of how we determine whether the outcome is statistically significant; statistical significance is a slightly hand-wavey concept, but we determine the degree of statistical significance by calculating the test statistic and p-value (the probability of attaining a test statistic at least as extreme as that attained if the null hypothesis is true). The general gold standard of statistical significance is a p-value of 0.05 or lower, but this can vary (some might go for, say, 0.01 or lower if you want strong confidence). I'll go with a critical p-value of 0.05 here, for ease.

So how am I going to work out if the UK has higher queue times than the rest of Europe to a statistically significant degree? Well, I'm going to carry out a two-sample z-test, with the United Kingdom queue times put into one sample and those of the rest of Europe amalgamated in the other. My hypotheses are as follows:

• Null hypothesis (H0): Mean average queue time in the UK is less than or equal to average queue time in the rest of Europe
• Alternative hypothesis (H1): Mean average queue time in the UK is greater than average queue time in the rest of Europe (As we're only interested in seeing whether the UK is higher, we perform a right-tailed test here)

My critical p-value to reject the null hypothesis is 0.05 or lower, and according to statistical tables, the critical region for the test statistic is 1.64 or higher in order to attain that. The test statistic must fall within the critical region if I want to reject the null hypothesis and prove our hypothesis that UK queue times are longer than those of the rest of Europe.

When performing a two-sample z-test on the average queue time data we have, the outcome is as follows:

Metric	Value
Test Statistic (Z-Score)	3.75 (2dp)
p-value	0.000086 (2sf)
Retain or Reject H0?	Reject

And when replicating the same process upon the average maximum queue time data we have, the outcome is as follows:

Metric	Value
Test Statistic (Z-Score)	2.98 (2dp)
p-value	0.0014 (2sf)
Retain or Reject H0?	Reject

Based on the fact that the null hypothesis was rejected in both tests, we can safely conclude that UK queue times are higher than those in the rest of Europe to a statistically significant degree on average. The difference is more statistically significant for average queue time than for average maximum queue time, but nonetheless, both returned p-values of below 0.01, providing very strong evidence in favour of rejecting the null hypothesis in favour of the alternative.

So I think we can conclude that the UK does indeed have some of the longest queue times in Europe on average. With descriptive statistics and boxplots showing that its average and maximum queue times put it right up there as one of the longest queue time countries on average (only narrowly beaten by Spain in most metrics and even on top in terms of median average maximum queue time) and our hypothesis tests proving that queue times in the UK are longer than those of the rest of Europe on average to a statistically significant extent, it seems as though the initial hypothesis of @Bowser when creating this thread was correct.

But that is not the only question I'm answering today. I noticed that conversation drifted to our good old friends Merlin as the thread progressed, so I'm also going to try and answer a different question; do Merlin parks in Europe have longer queue times than those of other European operators?
Let's repeat a similar process to what we did above, but for operators rather than countries.

At a basic level, we can once again look at boxplots, means and medians. For average queue time, the boxplots and figures by operator are as follows:

Operator	Mean (1dp)	Median (1dp)
Compagnie des Alpes	22.5	21
Disney	34.9	34
Looping Group	11.7	10
Mack Rides	18.3	20
Merlin	26.3	25
Other	18.1	17
Parques Reunidos	20.9	19
Plopsa	15.3	14.5
PortAventura World	33.7	33.5

And for average maximum queue time, the boxplots and figures by operator are as follows:

Operator	Mean (1dp)	Median (1dp)
Compagnie des Alpes	41.7	42
Disney	57.7	54
Looping Group	19.2	17.5
Mack Rides	28.6	31.5
Merlin	42.3	41.5
Other	28.2	27
Parques Reunidos	35.8	34
Plopsa	21.3	22
PortAventura World	49.1	50.5

So based on this, I think we can conclude that Merlin is potentially on the higher end of European operators in terms of average queue times, but definitely not the highest of the 9 operators tested, with Disney and PortAventura World both quite noticeably higher in terms of both average queue time and average maximum queue time than Merlin. In terms of average maximum queue time, Compagnie des Alpes also roughly matches Merlin, with Merlin's mean being fractionally higher than CdA's, but CdA's median being fractionally higher than Merlin's. If you look at the boxplots for maximum queue time, you can see that Disney is notably above Merlin, with Disney's lower quartile being on par with Merlin's upper quartile, and PortAventura World is also notably higher than Merlin, albeit much more variable with a slightly lower lower whisker. The interquartile ranges of CdA and Merlin are actually very similar, albeit CdA exhibits more variation beyond the interquartile range area, with a higher upper whisker and a lower lower whisker.

Now let's try and prove if Merlin's queue times are higher than those of other European operators to a statistically significant degree. As I did before, I'm going to perform a two-sample z-test to determine this, with Merlin parks being in one sample and the parks of all other European operators being amalgamated within the other. I declare my hypotheses as the following:

• Null hypothesis (H0): Mean average queue time in European Merlin parks is less than or equal to average queue time in the European parks of other operators
• Alternative hypothesis (H1): Mean average queue time in European Merlin parks is greater than average queue time in the European parks of other operators (As we're only interested in seeing whether Merlin is higher, we perform a right-tailed test here)

Similarly to above, I'm going to declare the critical p-value for rejection of the null hypothesis as 0.05 or lower, and the critical test statistic region for rejection of the null hypothesis as 1.64 or higher.

When performing a two-sample z-test on the average queue time data we have, the outcome is as follows:

Metric	Value
Test Statistic (Z-Score)	3.81 (2dp)
p-value	0.000068 (2sf)
Retain or Reject H0?	Reject

And when replicating the same process upon the average maximum queue time data we have, the outcome is as follows:

Metric	Value
Test Statistic (Z-Score)	3.84 (2dp)
p-value	0.000060 (2sf)
Retain or Reject H0?	Reject

Based on the rejection of the null hypothesis in both tests, we can conclude that average queue times in European Merlin parks are higher than those in the European parks of other operators to a statistically significant degree. With a p-value below 0.0001 in both cases, this suggests that there is extremely strong evidence in favour of rejecting the null hypothesis in favour of the alternative hypothesis.

So based on all of that, I think we can safely conclude that Merlin is on the higher end of European operators in terms of average queue time length. The boxplots and descriptive statistics showed that they were beaten only by Disney and PortAventura World in terms of both average and maximum queue time among the 9 operators, albeit Compagnie des Alpes did roughly match them in terms of average maximum queue time.

Let's now wrap up and summarise our findings...
So, in conclusion...
In conclusion, these experiments found that the hypotheses behind the creation of and discussion within this thread were true, for the most part.

When looking at whether the UK has higher average queue times than other European countries, boxplots and descriptive statistics showed that the UK is right up there for queue time length, only being narrowly beaten by Spain in most metrics. The hypothesis tests also provided statistically significant evidence to suggest that UK queue times are higher than those of parks in other European countries on average.

When looking at whether European Merlin parks have higher average queue times than those of European parks of other operators, boxplots and descriptive statistics showed that Merlin are on the higher end of European operators for queue time length, albeit not quite the very highest (Disney takes that particular crown). Hypothesis tests provided statistically significant evidence to suggest that Merlin queue times are higher than those of other European operators on average.

Thanks for reading; I hope you found my analysis interesting! Just for transparency, here is the spreadsheet with all of the queue times used in it (this includes queue times from other continents, for some more global queue time analysis I'm pondering doing):

From: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Bd9XJM_8LDhWSUePkIjbKMBtPtvoW8DLv80apQvsQtk/edit?usp=sharing

TL;DR: I decided to empirically test out some of the hypotheses declared in this thread. When I tested out whether UK parks have higher queue times than parks in other European countries, boxplots and descriptive analytics found that the UK was right up there for queue time length, being only narrowly beaten by Spain in most metrics and even topping the charts in terms of median average maximum queue time. Hypothesis testing unearthed statistically significant evidence to suggest that UK parks have longer queues than those of other European countries on average. When I tested out whether European Merlin parks have higher queue times than European parks operated by other operators, boxplots and descriptive statistics found that Merlin was on the higher end of European operators for queue length on average, albeit Disney and PortAventura World came out higher. Hypothesis testing unearthed statistically significant evidence to suggest that European Merlin parks have longer queues than those of other European operators on average.

My brain after reading your post...

Excellent job Matt!

 

[neil_wilson]

Wow, you’ve done a great job of crunching all those numbers there, @Matt N. It’s interesting that Spain came out as having the longest queues. People on here often complain about queue jumping at Spanish parks, so perhaps the long queues (and potentially slow moving queues) are a key part of why people have noticed that, rather than anything fundamentally different in the Spanish culture.

As you said, some parks have longer calendars than others. For example the Walibi parks in Belgium and the Netherlands are only open weekends and school holidays, which probably pushes their average waiting times up, compared to parks like Chessington which open on a lot of school days that bring their averages down.

Your analysis shows very clearly why Disney are so successful as a company. To have such long average waits across a 365 day a year business does feel like a licence to print money. Although I’m sure Disney would argue that their rides are worth queuing longer for, and certainly cost a lot more to build.

If you bring in the regional American parks, they typically have compressed seasons with a relatively small number of operating days, but typically fairly long opening hours on the days when they are open.

 

[Smiley]

Wow @Matt N - there's a PhD in there somewhere! Some serious number crunching and observations/conclusions. We've longed to visit PortAventura World, but always see complaints of long queues - having gone through your data we still won't be visiting.

But good business management and marketing is about offering propositions to all customers - not just the cheap entry price and then FP-gouge (because even those buying the FPs feel "cheated"). And let's not forget those with deep enough pockets for FPs also probably spend the most on food/drink/merch/photos etc.

So why not offer tickets for a few certain dates (esp in school holidays) where tickets are 2x the "base price" (MAP blackout days), park capacity is capped at 50% of usual. I'd be super-happy to pay £80 for a ticket if the queue time was 30mins instead of 60mins. Sure, not everyone can afford it - but then there's 90% of the other days to choose from!

 

[Bowser]

So why not offer tickets for a few certain dates (esp in school holidays) where tickets are 2x the "base price" (MAP blackout days), park capacity is capped at 50% of usual. I'd be super-happy to pay £80 for a ticket if the queue time was 30mins instead of 60mins. Sure, not everyone can afford it - but then there's 90% of the other days to choose from!

An interesting premise but it somewhat relies on the comparison point being a day when the park is at 100% capacity.

If you’re queuing for 60+ minutes on a day when the park is at say 60% capacity then paying double for 50% isn’t going to be effective, it only works if the price point directly results in the corresponding reduction in attendance so you’d have to be transparent with daily visitor numbers for people to make an informed decision.

 

[Smiley]

An interesting premise but it somewhat relies on the comparison point being a day when the park is at 100% capacity.

If you’re queuing for 60+ minutes on a day when the park is at say 60% capacity then paying double for 50% isn’t going to be effective, it only works if the price point directly results in the corresponding reduction in attendance so you’d have to be transparent with daily visitor numbers for people to make an informed decision.

Agreed. But they already have the data. Eg. Take the (expected) slowest day in the week, reduce the capacity and sell it for a premium. So all of a sudden the marketing is "capped at 1/3 of capacity, no need for FP, VIP experience, parking included, etc...". Now you can charge £80pp and make the park even more profitable.

Might not work, but worth a punt IMHO. As are other marketing ideas: "Spend £100 in a restaurant (e.g. At AT Woodcutter, RCR) and get 2x FP free)." Not only do you take people out of a queue at the busiest time, but chances are you are a party of 4+ so you might sell a few extra FPs for the rest of the party.

Instead we're all 241 and "offers" that keeps everything at the lowest price/common denominator.

 

[John]

Surely if they go out of their way to advertise particular days as being quiet it'll make those days busier than it would have been otherwise, undermining the whole "short queues" thing?

 

[Smiley]

No-one's advertising "quiet days". Use some of the quieter days to offer VIP access by restricting the "quiet days" even further by charging 2x the cost and offering/delivering a different proposition.

The whole UK theme park model is broken. £40 for a day out riding £20m rollercoasters. Sorry, does not compute. Somebody needs to start charging proper pricing for proper experiences (it's not like a competitor will pop up next door).

Oh, wait. Universal. £100 min (you can quote me on that). And they'll be queuing up out of the door. Except like Hyperia, there will be entertainment whilst you're queuing, along with a lot food/drink/merch for you to buy whilst you do it. Merlin haven't figured out how to nickel'n'dime guests - but they are good at pounding and pounding them!

 

[Bowser]

No-one's advertising "quiet days". Use some of the quieter days to offer VIP access by restricting the "quiet days" even further by charging 2x the cost and offering/delivering a different proposition.

If it's already a quiet day then there won't be queues so who is the target audience for your concept? It only really works if you're providing it at a desirable time.

Are you suggesting that on a day when it's estimated that park would be at say 50% capacity, they reduce it to 25% and charge double? That model relies on so many unpredictable variables.

As i say, there's a nugget of an idea there but i think the logistics make it unworkable when the simple solution is charge people more and provide a better experience. Unfortunately the reality is the majority of people will choose the lesser experience if they can have it more often and for cheaper. Quantity beats quality and you can't put Pandora back in the box once you give people a taste of that. See streaming for more details.

 

[Matt N]

The whole UK theme park model is broken. £40 for a day out riding £20m rollercoasters. Sorry, does not compute. Somebody needs to start charging proper pricing for proper experiences (it's not like a competitor will pop up next door).


Oh, wait. Universal. £100 min (you can quote me on that). And they'll be queuing up out of the door. Except like Hyperia, there will be entertainment whilst you're queuing, along with a lot food/drink/merch for you to buy whilst you do it. Merlin haven't figured out how to nickel'n'dime guests - but they are good at pounding and pounding them!

As I’ve said before, though, I think these £100 minimum prices you speak of would not be swallowed by the general public at Alton Towers.

People stomach £100 minimum day ticket prices at Universal Orlando because they often have multi-day tickets which are priced more competitively (more like £50 per day or less), and they also have the Universal IPs and brand prestige on their side. I’d also guess that a hypothetical UK park will not be as expensive as Orlando; I seem to remember hearing that the Singapore park, for example, is only around £50 for a day ticket.

I think £100+ would be a tough pill to swallow at a day trip park like Alton Towers for an average family. Ultimately, they have to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and frankly, I myself would prefer the pricing situation we have now to £100 ticket prices and somewhat shorter queues. I’d wager that many families across Britain feel that even more strongly than me.

I don’t think it is “broken”; no theme park other than the properly big names charge that much money for day tickets, and even these have a huge proportion of multi-day tickets that are more competitively priced on a per day basis. I also don’t think 60+ minute queues across the board is exactly an average day at a Merlin park, as you and others imply.

 

[flyingguitar]

No-one's advertising "quiet days". Use some of the quieter days to offer VIP access by restricting the "quiet days" even further by charging 2x the cost and offering/delivering a different proposition.

The whole UK theme park model is broken. £40 for a day out riding £20m rollercoasters. Sorry, does not compute. Somebody needs to start charging proper pricing for proper experiences (it's not like a competitor will pop up next door).

Oh, wait. Universal. £100 min (you can quote me on that). And they'll be queuing up out of the door. Except like Hyperia, there will be entertainment whilst you're queuing, along with a lot food/drink/merch for you to buy whilst you do it. Merlin haven't figured out how to nickel'n'dime guests - but they are good at pounding and pounding them!

whilst I am sure some people will buy it, there is often a massive drop off in customers when you start increasing prices you can't double the price and then halve the people count it is more exponential (technically reciprocal), it would probably be more like doubling the price and then quartering the attendance, you are making much less money.

Alton and merlin would have put a ton of market research into choosing the price of their tickets the number is chosen for a reason, where the increased profit from each ticket is outweighed by the reduced attendance the graph for price (x axis) vs profit (y axis) would probably look something like this one I found online:

that isn't saying alton could increase prices, higher prices could lead to a better experience and thus the value of the ticket increases to average guests (although that takes time) or if multiple refurbs are done such that the entire park is similar quality to FV, TCAAM and wicker man (as a lot of the park is quite tired) then that can increase the value of the ticket and allow prices to be increased without dramatically cutting profits.

 

[rob666]

No-one's advertising "quiet days".

The Beach has advertised quiet days on local radio.
Towers used to publicise Adrenaline Week at the end of the season, no queues, no filler, pure coasters...most side stuff shut, no queues advertised, and delivered, all week.

And dirt cheap season passes are killing the parks, not cheap day ticket prices.
Scrap all passes, charge reasonable entry prices according to the season, give the customer a decent experience.

Seven hours of queueing for seven minutes of thrills is not sustainable.
That's why it is better on the Beach for me, any old coaster will do for an elderly addict.

 

[Bowser]

I also don’t think 60+ minute queues across the board is exactly an average day at a Merlin park, as you and others imply.

That’s the other flaw, the people who fall victim to these days do so because they can only visit on peak days in the first place.

 

[Smiley]

As i say, there's a nugget of an idea there but i think the logistics make it unworkable when the simple solution is charge people more and provide a better experience.

It's a nugget (a golden one or a shit ) Look at other things in the UK - museums often have "after hours" or special events that are extra and booked out. BA do "members only" flights that are booked in minutes and have 100% loading factor. Even Merlin will rent out the park to corporates for enough money - there must be a middle ground.....

There's got to be a proposition somewhere between £35 and £135. I know if I go to AT and stay 2 nights (2 adult, 1 almost adult) that's £1000 by the time I'm done. I'm not spending that to queue, and I'm not paying another £600 for FP. Plenty of people are prepared to pay for a better experience. IMHO

 

[Enter Valhalla]

I think that Merlin do have a tendency to over estimate queue times, and I don’t think (as some have suggested) that this has anything to do with them wanting the queues to seem longer to sell more fastrack.

I think it’s more that the operators don’t want the stress of guests kicking off and also know that delays in loading can happen, so they tend to over estimate to try and keep everyone sweet. That’s my interpretation of it anyway.