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General Queue Times Discussion

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Queues today felt really slow. Smiler pit was less than half full yet I queued nearly an hour, last year the whole thing took 45 minutes. What's changed because this surely can't be down to worse social distancing this season?

Six hours was not sufficient for today. I did the classic head to the back first trick and knocked out walk on rides on Gangsta Granny, Thirteen and Rita by 10:40. Felt things were going well but unfortunately every coaster queue was 30-60 minutes from that point on. I spent the whole day anxiously checking my watch trying to work out if I was going to make it on everything to justify the six hour round trip and I finally entered the Oblivion queue at 3:55 finishing off the six big coasters that were open (Nemesis closed all day). Loved riding the coasters but not the best day I've had at Towers.
 
Alsty said:
Hopefully this social distancing malarkey will end in June and we can get back to more accurate queue times.
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Well last year social distancing resulted in queues being massively overstated, now it's the opposite.
Edit: the day does feel very different when nemesis is shut, it feels like a big loss
 
I think this year there is very little social distancing at all in the queues compared to last season, so if the ops are doing queue times based on people being spread out, and they aren’t then the queue times will be A lot longer. So in reality the queues are worse than normal times, as the rides still have social distancing in place.

The only ride not really affected is Rita, as all other rides are leaving empty rows, or not putting groups together on rows.
 
A 90 min queue for Galactica of all things is shocking, especially on a 4pm close. Last time I rode it the queue was out the entrance through all areas but we were on in around an hour.
 
I’ve only done one 4pm close this year and that was gangsta granny opening, so can’t really comment how rides are operating. But are they doing there usual “low day”, where the likes of Galactica and Oblivion will be on one station?

Wicker Man was only on two trains on Monday, but not sure if that’s the norm for a 4pm close or if it had issues as it did shut Sunday for half the day.

However any queue near an hour, probably means you shouldn’t be shutting at 4pm
 
I guess we need to see the TripAdvisor feedback come in. It's unlikely the hours will change just because we think they should be open later... but if they start getting slated on the socials then that might put pressure on them.
 
Looks like Nemmy and Funk'n'Fly are both closed again today. (The former for 3 days so far and the latter for 4 days so far).
Fingers crossed that it really is just general maintenance and they'll both be ready for the weekend. :)
 
Skyscraper said:
Looks like Nemmy and Funk'n'Fly are both closed again today. (The former for 3 days so far and the latter for 4 days so far).
Fingers crossed that it really is just general maintenance and they'll both be ready for the weekend. :)
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Funkn fly is a disgusting ride anyway wouldn't catch me going on that
 
Stevros said:
, and then Galactica this afternoon advertised as 40 minutes, actually queued over 90 minutes for it!
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Alsty said:
Hopefully this social distancing malarkey will end in June and we can get back to more accurate queue times.
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Fingers crossed, indeed, but with the example above someone has dropped the ball. More than double what was advertised doesn't feel like it's as best as they could do given the current circumstances. Furthermore they have demonstrated that they can be more accurate.
 
Maybe they understate the queues so the park doesn't look suspicious. If the park were advertising 90 mins for a lot of their rides, the government would think they're letting in more people than they should??
 
Ethan said:
Maybe they understate the queues so the park doesn't look suspicious. If the park were advertising 90 mins for a lot of their rides, the government would think they're letting in more people than they should??
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“the government” isn’t watching that closely to care about ride queue times.
If Staffordshire council got reports that the park was unsafe then they would investigate, but they won’t be randomly looking at the ride times on the app.
 
jon81uk said:
“the government” isn’t watching that closely to care about ride queue times.
If Staffordshire council got reports that the park was unsafe then they would investigate, but they won’t be randomly looking at the ride times on the app.
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Ye that's fair enough. The capacity has been rumoured to be around 11-13k, but I personally can't see that being accurate as every time I've been at weekends the car park has been full. I haven't actually seen the car park as full as I've seen this season pre covid.
 
Main and Galactica car parks being full doesn't say much. On a properly busy day the hotel car parks, car park J (EV and pod parking) and all of the coach & minibus car parks would be full too - that's before they start using the fields, which are massive.

They no longer have enough parking space available when the park hits pre-covid capacity - ten years ago they had far more space as they didn't have EV or the pods, so those fields were used for parking.
 
John said:
Hex had long queues all last year too, there's only 10 groups per ride cycle so it's running at about 1/3 capacity
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Still seems a little high, perhaps less than 1/3? I can't recall the last time I saw it on a 20 minute wait at full capacity.
 
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