I’ve started to go camping round the corner.
Granted not everyone has the equipment or the means to camp. It’s only good for the summer months
It’s £10 a night, 5 minutes drive from Alton Towers. A proper toilet and shower block similar to the star gazing pods. However, you can easily come and go to the local village and you can cook your own food and have a fire pit.
Looking towards fireworks, it’s painful to see the prices of hotels at the resort. I’d love to stay as a treat. However, it’s a lot in comparison to a lot of accommodation
Good to see a few improvements in the hotels:
- New bar in Flambo's (see TS Facebook/socials for pics)
- Camden Hells now on tap in Splash Landings & ATH
- Live band in the Atrium for the first time in years (see TS Facebook/socials)
- Separate kids disco in ATH, meaning Dragon Bar/Atrium was more adults (far less kids running around because they actually had their OWN ents!!)
- Flambo's was fine - not amazing, but fine. Although judging by the TS Facebook posts, you'd think saying you had a decent meal in Flambo's is the equivalent of backing the BNP at the next election.
The replies on the posts about beer were frustrating though. Complaining about £7 a pint for standard lager is reasonable, if its the Camden stuff then £7 isn't too bad, but for Magners its a rip off. The number of people doing "Its a theme park, what do you expect" was suprising. Then on the post where the TS Team did get a beer in the Tavern there were several people trying to make out the team are alcoholics if they can't go a day without a beer! Different people enjoy different things, Ethan would ride Smiler all day, but many of the TS team will take a break with a pint for a bit, there are spaces at AT to do both things!I was coming here to tag the team to make them aware the TS Facebook account had been hacked, it felt so odd seeing a string of positive posts about the hotels I thought that was the only possible explanation.
The replies on the posts about beer were frustrating though. Complaining about £7 a pint for standard lager is reasonable, if its the Camden stuff then £7 isn't too bad, but for Magners its a rip off. The number of people doing "Its a theme park, what do you expect" was suprising. Then on the post where the TS Team did get a beer in the Tavern there were several people trying to make out the team are alcoholics if they can't go a day without a beer! Different people enjoy different things, Ethan would ride Smiler all day, but many of the TS team will take a break with a pint for a bit, there are spaces at AT to do both things!
The price of rooms at the hotels has actually fallen back to normal levels. At the start of this season, even with discount - rooms were £250-300/night. However, they are widely available for £150-200 now (on most nights).
150-200 is fair. Something still needs to be done about the quality of service etc still need to be looked at.
But.........people are obviously paying the higher bracket so why would they put the prices down.
Well people obviously were not paying the £300 rates that were there at the start of the season, hence why they have come down. We didn't stay on opening weekend this year as they wanted £125pp for 2 nights, even after discount. Historically (going back to 2018 ish) we were looking at around £90-100pp for a weekend (after MAP discount based on 3-4 sharing a room).
I am hopeful that by 2024 main season, sufficient time over winter allows the new team to overhaul many aspects of the resort experience - although refurbishments/work that requires significant capital expenditure will no doubt need to be worked on over many years ahead.
It’s now been 10 years since they started refurbing the Explorer rooms in ATH into Moon Voyage with what I believe at the time was a plan to refurb them all into different themes in phases.
They got as far as the Arctic rooms and stopped. Those left as Explorer are pretty ancient now, they should be prioritising getting those refurbed in my view.
Anyone seen this in the hotel terms and conditions. Is it new? Maybe the restaurants are loosing too much money