Drayton Manor Park

[Bowser]

How can Plopsaland Belgium have a start day of new season when they’re open every weekend of the year? They are not a seasonal theme park anymore, so to compare them to Drayton Manor is not a fair comparison.

Plopsaland Belgium closes for all of January after Christmas and reopens for weekends and select weekdays from mid February. This has been the case since the start of the 2025 so technically one could consider Feb 14th the start of their season this year... but then Drayton Manor were technically open in February half term too.

Plopsaland themselves promoted March 21st as the Grand Opening day of the season as per the link below.

I'm not sure when Plopsaland began offering a full ride line-up but i'd be surprised if all rides were operating in February, though that would be as much down to the weather affecting availability. The ride closure calendar isn't accessible retrospectively but certainly everything seemed ready by their stated Grand Opening date, which was not the case at Drayton.

It's a relatively short window where they are fully closed but from September till March they're rarely open all week, so they're arguably more comparable to Paultons or Legoland in the UK but the calendar does now seem broadly similar to Drayton Manor.

Plopsaland opens new season with Grand Opening and looks ambitiously to the future | Plopsa News

www.plopsanews.com

 

[Themeparksandy1981]

The problem Drayton put on themselves was closing for 3 weeks after the main season to get the park ready for the Christmas event. Then the park was open to the 3rd Jan. Usually by then the Maintenance staff will have worked on the Adventure Cove rides and the other rides not open for the Christmas event. Then the park gave all members of staff 2 weeks off so they only had 4 weeks to get the rides open for the Feb half term event and the 3 rides in the main park so they only been working on the main park rides for the past 6 weeks and thats the reason they fallen behind in the maintenance schedule. They need to look at how Paulton’s do there maintenance schedule with 3 rides closed at a time so the maintenance is done all year and you still can offer an excellent ride lineup.
As for future plans currently the Excalibur lake has been totally been drained. You can see all the turntables is still in place. Now I know the ride wont ever come back as they make a fortune out of the Halloween and Christmas event but they could be planning on removing the old theming.
Other improvements the Haunting got new speakers in the trailer so you can hear the Pre show video clearly now. The library room has also had a new smoke machine installed in the room so the room was full of smoke. They also added new lightening and the Projector is now 4K.