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Food & Beverage: The Aramark Era begins

djtruefitt said:
But as the head of F&B for Aramark at towers said to is “it’s the future and it won’t be going away” with his attitude it’s no wonder Aramark is such a state on park. His answer for a large group was to just ask for more tablets next time we want to order.
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My personal favourite from him was the suggestion that for speed, one person pay vs doing everything individually.
I don't think a single person in the world could be paid enough to foot the bill with the size of our group, not at £19 a burger 😂
 
Right, F&B, where to start!

Woodcutters/Not-Woodcutter/The Oak Dressed in Some Chains or Whatever
  • Ordering for us as a large group who all wanted to pay separately and required discount was a farce. I get that is not the typical demographic of those who are going to be there but they have taken something that was really simple (order via your phone) and made it over complicated. But hey ho, the head of Aramark for Alton Towers claims it is the future. Can't wait to see major national chains like Wetherspoon and Nandos follow suit!
  • The food I has was actually really good. The tandoori chicken skewer with a side of hummus. Could have done with a little more chicken but everything was really tasty
  • Not a fan of the donut burgers, they smelt disgusting
  • Scanning a QR code to be able to see allergens online is an improvement. But not being able to get a gluten free meal at one of the park's main restaurants is concerning
  • Service was very slow, but the staff were trying their best and very friendly. I felt for the woman who had to spend 30 minutes taking orders from us all
Coffee Shops
  • Why oh why do these now have touch screen order points? Boarding up where the fridges and parts of the counters were just looks stupid. We bailed on trying to get a coffee from Corner Coffee in the morning as could see what looked like 30 people waiting to collect drinks and not many coming out
  • You can now no longer just get a bottle of beer from Coffee Lounge or whatever it is called these days in FV!!
Secret Garden
  • Ended up doing this when we were told there would be no pizzas at Margs (not sure if this is temporary or permanent)
  • Food was good, staff were friendly, but it was a little slow
So a bit of a mixed bag all round from my experiences. No complaints with the quality of any of my food, but they need to look at these new ordering systems.
 
Katy said:
Allow both, it's not beyond the wit of man to allow people to order in person and also via an app, plenty of other eateries manage it. There's also no excuse for not allowing AP discount to be entered on the app, even if it is due to Aramark not having access to the Merlin card database, there should be some way of checking (eg an API to look up simply "is this card valid, what tier is it" would get around any potential GDPR issues although I don't believe there would be any since Aramark is under contract with Merlin so they can simply be a data processor on their behalf)
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Gone are the days of entering MAP20 on the self service machines for the discount then I guess?

Don't think I have ever been checked once at AT or Chessington on the self service ones

So a bit of a mixed bag all round from my experiences. No complaints with the quality of any of my food, but they need to look at these new ordering systems.
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This I just don't understand. POS systems have been around for decades in the leisure industry, it's really not reinventing the wheel.
 
Just to demonstrate show farcical the MAP discount process is, Pleasure Beach’s new QR system for ordering in Coasters takes you to an ordering site on your phone, which automatically recognises you hold an annual pass and applies your discount.

If Pleasure Beach can adopt a user-friendly system like this, how on Earth do a massive conglomerate like Aramark believe tablets are the future?
 
@Rob - re: gluten-free, it's just because of cross-contamination, so easier to say "no" than to say "may contain gluten" when in fact none of the ingredients do. Lazy, basically.

The purpose of a server in a "restaurant" is to:
- get you seated and ordered as quickly as possible (turn tables quickly)
- up-sell sides/drinks, etc.
- sell additional drinks, desserts etc.

Good service should be a revenue-generator, not a cost. It sounds farcical if only one person can read the menu/order at once. They'll figure it out, but not before they've blamed the staff for poor metrics. I can't wait to go - I'll be paying with a dark blue rectangular magical card, made out of plastic with an alien-like chip embedded in it, and printed with the name of the wizard upon it - and with a swift enchantment and a flourish of the hand will pay the tariff due.
 
Smiley said:
@Rob - re: gluten-free, it's just because of cross-contamination, so easier to say "no" than to say "may contain gluten" when in fact none of the ingredients do. Lazy, basically.
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It's not laziness, it's fear of litigiousness. They don't trust their staff, or the environment their staff work in, to be able to handle allergens, intolerances and dietary requirements correctly. They don't even trust them to take payments or handle cash.
 
I would also say the job of a server is to know the menu and what someone with allergies could eat and off they don’t know, to go and ask someone and come back with that information.

Sadly, this self service poor service culture seems to becoming the norm in the UK. Showing my age but i recall going into Alton towers hotel where the concierge would welcome you and take your bags, a friendly person would check you in and book your restaurant/breakfast times for you, where staff would walk around the atrium taking drinks orders and bring them to your table and where staff in the restaurant would take your food orders, have a chat with their guests to check everything was ok and take payment at the end if things were satisfactory!

Not only that but if we insist on dealing with people rather than machines there might be more jobs available for people. Our local Tesco probably only has 5 manned checkouts now and 30 odd self service machines and one poor person running between them all like a headless chicken when something needs approval/goes wrong.

Personally I find it ludicrous that if I pay £500+ to stay in Alton hotel I have to check in myself. Maybe if businesses offered a discount for people using self service devices then fair enough!
 
GaryH said:
Sadly, this self service poor service culture seems to becoming the norm in the UK. Showing my age but i recall going into Alton towers hotel where the concierge would welcome you and take your bags, a friendly person would check you in and book your restaurant/breakfast times for you, where staff would walk around the atrium taking drinks orders and bring them to your table and where staff in the restaurant would take your food orders, have a chat with their guests to check everything was ok and take payment at the end if things were satisfactory!
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This exactly! I recall when I stayed in the Nemesis room for a birthday trip. It was great, I remember someone collecting bags and storing them. I recall them asking if we wanted to book a time for Secret Garden.

It felt really upscale and upmarket premium visit. It doesn't now at all.
 
rctneil said:
This exactly! I recall when I stayed in the Nemesis room for a birthday trip. It was great, I remember someone collecting bags and storing them. I recall them asking if we wanted to book a time for Secret Garden.
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This still happens. They can store bags and make bookings for breakfast.
 
jon81uk said:
This still happens. They can store bags and make bookings for breakfast.
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Difference is now that you have to go out of your way to do so. Rather than it be the norm.

I'm blasé about it. Doesn't really affect my experience too much in terms of hotel (my stay last year ended up being checked in by a human anyway due to random room upgrade) but it is now what you usually see at majority of leisure industry. Efteling have started to bring in self-service shops in the Danse Macabre area.

One tablet per table would for 90% of visitors be ok. However not having the capability of MAP discounts is a massive oversight.
 
To be fair I’m all for self service etc, I’ll rather use them in shops than have to deal with staff 😛 but there are times and places for self service and sometimes when there isn’t.

I feel they probably don’t work in a coffee shop, previously you had one or two staff on a till, who probably took orders just as quick as it took to make coffees.

Now you have 3 machines (and a till for those who have to use it) all taking orders, but the staff won’t be able to make the drinks any quicker. So it only takes a few minutes for a backlog to start.

And what you are left with is a big crowd of annoyed people waiting around a collection counter for a coffee.
 
Whereas with "real" service, you can see a massive queue and walk away...it's only a coffee!

I have yet to see a place with order screens without a massive crowd waiting for delivery of their paid for goods.

Fast food just isn't fast anymore...another service I now tend to avoid.
 
GooseOnTheLoose said:
It's not laziness, it's fear of litigiousness. They don't trust their staff, or the environment their staff work in, to be able to handle allergens, intolerances and dietary requirements correctly. They don't even trust them to take payments or handle cash.
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Allergen-free is difficult for all restaurants - separate prep/storage/cooking, etc. My wife is GF (intolerant), and most places can make a GF-burger, fries (usually cooked in the same fryer as gluten products), salads, pasta, etc. Even Domino's can make a GF pizza!

It's laziness, and it costs revenue and profit. Very few restaurants guarantee no cross-contamination, so there isn't any fear of litigation. The Secret Garden will bring a chef out to discuss - you only need one person per shift to be trained/intelligent.
 
The Woodcutters Bar & Grill rebrand was a good choice to make it fit better in the area. I don't understand all this doughnut burger nonsense; it seems a bit American and doesn't fit the restaurant's new name either. I can understand wanting the food to be better themed, but you do that with presentation - not serving beef within a doughnut.

It just needs to be a simple bar and grill, serving burgers, ribs, etc., with maybe stamping a picture of a tree or something onto the burger roll to theme it in.

There are so many issues with the other outlets, so why focus on Woodcutters, which was one of the better options? Surely, focus that later, once you have sorted out other food options in the park (looking at you burger kitchen or towers street hot dogs that no longer serves hot dogs).

It's wonderful having a new logo on woodcutters and new lighting around the park (to their credit, it looks great), but you're charging £15+ odd pounds for a takeaway burger meal that's appalling, which isn't even presented nicely in branded boxes etc..
 
It is a good question as to why Woodcutters was prioritised for a refresh above some other outlets that we know are even worse (not that Woodcutters hadn’t also gotten worse over recent years). But then perhaps we’re trying to ascribe logic to an organisation that drops tablet ordering from one restaurant, whilst introducing it to another because “it’s the future”.

As for why they’ve gone for doughnut burgers, I do have a couple of thoughts: -

- they’re pretty far behind the trend for doughnut burgers, which came and went quite some years ago.

- whilst the trend has been and gone, it remains an unusual food item. Because it’s unusual, they can arguably get away with producing a product that is poorer because people have less frame of reference for what a “bad” doughnut burger is. By way of example, if it were a regular burger, people would more easily be able to ascertain unacceptable quality and are potentially more likely to complain, rather than believe poor quality is actually just their own taste.

- you can charge a higher price for unusual items under the guise of them being “special”.

- unusual items provide the artifice of a more specialist restaurant.
 
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