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Food & Beverage: The Aramark Era begins

djtruefitt said:
Merlin removed full fat coke from pizza pasta a good few years ago, pretty sure when the sugar tax came in, and that was before Aramark.

So there is no excuse to remove fizzy drinks except for pure cost cutting and more profit.

A few other F&B updates, waffles have gone from mutiny bay to be replaced by jacket potatoes. The hot dog and nachos windows have been blocked up and now replaced by self service screens.

However these screens don’t allow annual pass discount (I believe other machines elsewhere still alloy it) so you have to order at the till.
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The jacket potatoes are more like large new potatoes. Very, very small. Unfortunate as the fillings were of reasonable flavour.
 
The pass discount situation is so daft now all over the resort.

Tavern? Walk up to the bar, order in person and show your pass. Nice and easy.

On park kiosk places? Can’t use those and have to queue and order in person.

Oak in Chains for a simple drink? Queue at the bar, be handed an order screen, put in what you want and tell the staff the exact same thing who will start pouring the drinks. Hand the screen back, they enter the code (in between pouring drinks) and then they hand it back to you to pay. Absolutely ridiculous system that’s just putting more pressure on staff to stay on top of orders.

Crooked Spoon you order via QR code but you need to collar a server to get the discount code to enter yourself.

Just a bit of common sense is needed to have a consistent process across the resort. Merlin are still really pushing annual passes, and the subsequent retail/f&b discounts that come with it - stop making it such an effort to redeem them. We’ve been saying for years to just let people scan their pass to validate the discount, with all this investment in tech as part of the order process, put a bit of effort into the passholder experience.

Going back to Crooked Spoon, I’ll echo Dave’s comments that it was pretty good in there and quite enjoyable. The caveat to that is we were eating first thing when it opened at 5:30pm, so it remains to be seen if they’ll cope just as well when full and midway through service. The menu is pretty basic (wings, burgers, tenders and the half chicken probably being the most complex dish) but it all came out nicely presented and very quickly. It’s nice to have a quicker service place to get a sit down meal versus the chaos of the buffet in Splash or Secret Garden’s often lengthy waits. Being in and out of the place within the hour was really handy with a late opening park.

It’s good to see changes made to the breakfast layout in there too, with everything located in on end of the restaurant now instead of being squeezed in on multiple walls. Whether it makes a difference or not remains to be seen, but it’s nice to see some effort being put into trying to improve what is probably the most stressful of breakfasts on resort!
 
In RCR it had the same tablets as oak in chains, and of course every time you want to pay you have to grab a staff member to put the secret annual pass code on. Not great when there are four of you all paying separately for food and drink. You could tell the staff were annoyed they had to keep doing it as well.
 
Craig said:
Just a bit of common sense is needed to have a consistent process across the resort. Merlin are still really pushing annual passes, and the subsequent retail/f&b discounts that come with it - stop making it such an effort to redeem them. We’ve been saying for years to just let people scan their pass to validate the discount, with all this investment in tech as part of the order process, put a bit of effort into the passholder experience.
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The concern will be the sharing of barcodes / photos of barcodes with those who don't have a pass. The clever way to mitigate it is to only activate a pass for an eligible discount if it's been used to access a park that day, but that requires a little more technical plumbing than just a valid pass check and is unlikely to happen. It would still be open to abuse, of course, just not as much.

Frustratingly, I know that the Uniware systems they use have this sort of functionality built in. They just have to ask for it to be enabled and connected.

I'm sure the issue is likely finding a party to take responsibility for it, and with so many outsourced partners now involved, it makes it all the more trickier to navigate. Problems of their own doing, of course, and certainly not excusable.
 
GooseOnTheLoose said:
The concern will be the sharing of barcodes / photos of barcodes with those who don't have a pass. The clever way to mitigate it is to only activate a pass for an eligible discount if it's been used to access a park that day, but that requires a little more technical plumbing than just a valid pass check and is unlikely to happen. It would still be open to abuse, of course, just not as much.
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If they ever did introduce scanning the pass to validate the discount, I wonder if a simpler way to deal with pass fraud would just be a visual check at some point in the transaction. A bit like when a train conductor asks to see your railcard if you’ve used the discount.
 
Mi-Nigle said:
If they ever did introduce scanning the pass to validate the discount, I wonder if a simpler way to deal with pass fraud would just be a visual check at some point in the transaction. A bit like when a train conductor asks to see your railcard if you’ve used the discount.
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Possible, especially as all passes have photos on them. The other option would be NFC in the pass card, meaning it would have to be physically presented. You could even implement this with Google and Apple wallets, for those who don't have cards.
 
It’s really quite incredible how convoluted a system they require to obtain said discount. I’m sure discounts are probably abused to some extent, but it’s not like anyone’s getting free food - they’re just not making quite as much on the already exorbitantly priced food.

Even Pleasure Beach have managed to design a system that scans your pass for a discount and doing so will also benefit them via the data points they’ll gather.

It’s a mad approach, but perhaps not surprising from a company who charges £10 for a hot dog.
 
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