• ℹ️ Heads up...

    This is a popular topic that is fast moving Guest - before posting, please ensure that you check out the first post in the topic for a quick reminder of guidelines, and importantly a summary of the known facts and information so far. Thanks.

Europa Park introduces paid priority queues :-(

PhantaDad2017

TS Member
The German language website parkerlebnis.de reported that EP is going to introduce fast access, for their Coastiality VR option, for an upcharge:

https://www.parkerlebnis.de/europa-park-wartezeit-verkuerzen-coastiality-plus_58766.html

For now, they want to add a fast access to their Alpenexpress Coastiality seats for 7€; the VR option normally costs a 2€ upcharge. It is not mentioned if the upcoming CanCanCoaster (formerly Eurosat) Coastiality option will also have a paid fast queue.

Europa Park is one of the few big parks, that did not yet have separate peasants vs. nobility queues, in my opinion, an important feature that helps qualifiy it as the best park. They also tried a scheduling system without upcharge, similar to Disney's Fast Pass, for their new Voletarium.

I understand that EP charges extra for VR, because it is much slower and requires more staff. But with a paid priority queue, they enter the slippery slope, with all the negative implications that come with premium priority queues:

  • taking ride time away from regular visitors (often without lowering regular admission price adequately)
  • offensive hierarchy, making regular visitors feel like inferior second-class citizens, being forced to tolerate queue jumping by a "nobility"
  • an incentive to operate rides under their capacity, to deliberately generate queues and push visitors towards purchasing fast "upgrades"
I hope EP seriously reconsiders this. For now, they only plan it for their VR option, and the priority price is much higher than the regular (so hopefully only few push in front). But there's a serious risk that they will not stop here, once they've started.
 
:eek: ... EP VIP PASS ... :D

VIP Pass doesn't hurt regular visitors. It's just a separate park gate and extra ride time, outside regular opening times, for hotel guests. Not first class visitors pushing in front of regular visitors, to lengthen their wait times and take away rides from them.
 
Hopefully EP will get a decent backlash on this, before they introduce it everywhere, like so many other parks did. Until now, they decided to put long term visitor experience over quick money, and I think it is an important point to rate EP best.

One thing I noticed, when it came to online debates over priority queues, is often a completely unnatural aggression towards people who criticize them. I experienced it myself at phantafriends.de, and I saw it in other forums and older debates,too.

Just a very rational question: whose interest is it to slam critics of paid priority queues, possibly to suppress criticism? For 90 percent of park visitors, they are a nuisance, humiliation and an impairment of their park experience. For those "power users" who might use them, they are simply a paid extra service, which might be helpful for them, but I can see no reason for them to defend them aggressively, to lash out at critics, and to preach that people have to live with offensive hierarchies anyway.

For these reasons, I think that aggressive defense of these business practices, or hostility towards critics, is not natural for any park visitor and has other origins.
 
To be honest, as long as it is just for coastiality, fine... EP have self acknowledged that VR is hammering throughput and that people are paying an upcharge to increase there wait time so are offering the priority queue jump to reduce the extended queuing time for those that want to VR experience without waiting VR queue times.

More information on the EP website:

Alpenexpress Coastiality+ Pass
When purchasing the Alpenexpress Coastiality + Pass, you can skip the Alpenexpress Coastiality queue at and reduce the waiting time.
To make use of this offer you will need an additional ticket, which is charged at €7 per ride and person.

Alpenexpress Coastiality+ Pass tickets are available at the following locations:

  • Main Entrance
  • at all information offices in Europa-Park
  • Directly in the Coastiality app (available in the App Store, Google Play Store, for GearVR and Daydream). When buying your ticket in the app you will get free access to the corresponding 360° video in the Coastiality app.
 
As @KingNemesis has said, I have no issues as long as it stays exclusive to the Coastiality queues. In the whole grand scheme of things, people will probably use VR once or twice, if not at all, during a day at EP, and the queues are never *that* long anyway really. This won't affect the main queues at all. I just hope they don't start rolling it out across any of the main queues.
 
They have offered fastrack at Horror Nights for years and it has not spread.

EP will never add paid fastrack across the park as they need guests in queue lines for the park to cope with the 55,000 guests they get on the busiest days.
 
I think they will not keep this limited to one attraction or additional option. It's a test. Either they cancel it, or they do it everywhere. And it's also up to "active" visitors and fans, to help make them cancel it. The more complaints come in, the more they know people are not going to accept it. A resistance that has been missing or insufficient, when other parks introduced it long ago.

Also, Europa Park probably has a good number of visitors, who go there because they dislike hierarchies among visitors, or even being pushed to pay a second admission fee, if they want to enjoy their visit. Not having paid priority queues has been, and still mostly is, a quality feature of the park, that helped it to get the best ratings. And there are different markets and visitor groups: some just want their thrill rides and tolerate any harassment and ripoff for them. Others want a good overall experience, the classic "pay once and for all", and will stay away when it is tainted. I think the ripoff market is saturated, with more than enough parks doing so. EP should continue to serve the other market and customer group, even if they don't bring in so much money per capita.

It is unusual to have priority lanes on attractions, where people have to pay per ride. Coastiality is almost like a funfair attraction within the park. I have never seen priority queues at a funfair (admitted, I don't go there often). They could charge everybody 5€, if Coastiality is really so overrun. With the paid fast lane, the 2€ VR ride definitely becomes worth less, and people will experience less rides on other attractions, VR or not, due to longer waiting time.

Edit: didn't know about Horror Nights. Maybe they limit it, but I'm afraid they might not.
 
I think they will not keep this limited to one attraction or additional option. It's a test. Either they cancel it, or they do it everywhere. And it's also up to "active" visitors and fans, to help make them cancel it. The more complaints come in, the more they know people are not going to accept it. A resistance that has been missing or insufficient, when other parks introduced it long ago.

Also, Europa Park probably has a good number of visitors, who go there because they dislike hierarchies among visitors, or even being pushed to pay a second admission fee, if they want to enjoy their visit. Not having paid priority queues has been, and still mostly is, a quality feature of the park, that helped it to get the best ratings. And there are different markets and visitor groups: some just want their thrill rides and tolerate any harassment and ripoff for them. Others want a good overall experience, the classic "pay once and for all", and will stay away when it is tainted. I think the ripoff market is saturated, with more than enough parks doing so. EP should continue to serve the other market and customer group, even if they don't bring in so much money per capita.

It is unusual to have priority lanes on attractions, where people have to pay per ride. Coastiality is almost like a funfair attraction within the park. I have never seen priority queues at a funfair (admitted, I don't go there often). They could charge everybody 5€, if Coastiality is really so overrun. With the paid fast lane, the 2€ VR ride definitely becomes worth less, and people will experience less rides on other attractions, VR or not, due to longer waiting time.

Edit: didn't know about Horror Nights. Maybe they limit it, but I'm afraid they might not.

There are fast lanes at funfairs. Pay on your mobile phone and skip part of the line on Wilde Maus XXL or Olympia Looping.

You need to be pragmatic here. Europa-Park need queues. The park would simply not work if there were a few more thousand people every day not in queues because they had fastrack. The paths would be full. The shops rammed. The food outlets insufferable.

This is a ploy to get people to download and use the Coastiality app.
 
There are fast lanes at funfairs. Pay on your mobile phone and skip part of the line on Wilde Maus XXL or Olympia Looping.

[...]

Are they faster access for a higher price, or just skipping the ticket purchase for cash, by mobile payment? I found nothing on this topic, only that mobile payment is possible in some places, such as Oktoberfest.

I also noticed that reviews for EP Horror Nights/Traumatica are very mixed to poor at Google, with greatly increased waiting times, caused by fast (shoxter) pass visitors, being a common complaint. A stain on EP's otherwise great ratings.
 
Last edited:
Remember when even Towers used to offer some free fast-track tickets?
Remember when Disney would never do paid fast track experiences?

I think once a park starts is not an easy slope to stop going down.
 
I don't see EP introducing any form of fast pass on mass anytime soon. However I can imagine them bringing in some form of very limited premium fast pass product, costing more than it's probably worth, that will go largely unnoticed by all other guests. Similar to the new premium reserved parking area.

:)
 
Has anyone heard of EPs ‘Magic Key’ that gives access to certain rides via discreet doors? I believe they are given to journalists and VVIPs. The only door I know of is the one underneath the Wodan Station behind the statue at the front.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
 
Last edited:
Blue Fire also has one. The Voletarium VIP entrance is quite something, but as Jordan says, you do have to be escorted to use it and however many seats are required on the ride will be reserved via a control panel.

:)
 
Top