Merlin Entertainments: General Discussion

[Vik]

The car park fee was introduced in 2002 under Tussauds at £2. Express was £6 then.

Under Tussauds, Towers also decided at one point they were closing the monorail on off peak days. Think that was 2004. However the backlash over that meant a quick U-Turn.
Now seems most people just walk anyway.

I recall the monorail trains looking rather dirty by that point with externally badly faded and seat covers with years of ingrained dirt.

The dying days of Tussauds (or years) were grim. Felt like 2003 onwards were a pretty rapid deterioration with just about everything with more and more cost cutting. Merlin felt like a breath of fresh air when they took control. Alas it didn’t last.

 

[Matt N]

I can understand why you’d hold this view without visiting the parks back in that Tussauds era, because a lot of the headline details aren’t massively dissimilar. With that being said, when you compare that period to where we are now, I struggle to think of anything that is really an improvement. Cleanliness, entertainment, yearly investment, general upkeep, ride availability… they were all better.

The car park was free, the monorail was clean (and open, operating efficiently), the hotels had an abundance of good quality entertainment, a great restaurant with good wine list, the park had daily live shows, a “working” farm, edible food and not extortionate prices, more flat rides, a relatively more innovative ride lineup.

Tussauds weren’t perfect, post DIC certainly pretty poor, and the initial Merlin takeover generated positive changes. Comparing 90s Tussauds and present day Merlin however is not even close.

The rot seems to have gotten so bad that the reaction to their seeming abandonment of animals is not even viewed as that much of a surprise.

I don’t deny that some of this is true. Undeniably, Pearson Tussauds did invest more highly into new things, the quality was higher in some regards, and there was generally more of a positive feeling of growth.

But my hypothesis is that at least some of that perception of better upkeep and ride availability was because a lot of the rides and core infrastructure were newer and CAPEX investment into shiny new things was flowing in readily. In the Pearson days, the Skyride and the Monorail, for example, were ~10 years old or younger, whereas in the current Merlin era, they’re nearly 40 years old. If Pearson didn’t invest much in preventative maintenance of the rides, it was better hidden by virtue of the rides being newer, whereas if Merlin does the same, it boils to the surface a lot more because the rides are getting older and the cracks are starting to show.

I would argue that the way the Haunted House and Toyland Tours were supposedly treated maintenance-wise is not the best omen for how Pearson Tussauds might have treated some of the park’s aging ride stock had they stayed on for longer. The fact that John Wardley has told us that they refused to invest further into the Haunted House after the opening year due to a lack of return on investment sounds very Merlin-style, and the fact that none of Wardley/Keith Sparks’ classic dark rides lasted in their original forms beyond 2006 would suggest that Tussauds, even potentially under Pearson, had some shortcomings in thematic upkeep. The Merlin-style ethos of “marketing first” also arguably started with Oblivion; while admittedly not quite as extreme as some of the later marketing-driven projects, it was arguably the beginning of marketing starting to take a greater role in the running of the park and the planning of investments, which people often cite as one of Merlin’s key flaws.

Going away from Alton, it’s worth remembering Chessington. That park did not receive nearly as much investment after Tussauds purchased Alton Towers in 1990, and the investment was killed almost stone dead when Tussauds purchased Thorpe Park in 1998. By the time Merlin came along in 2007, Chessington was in such a decrepit state that the park was very nearly sold off in the late Tussauds era due to the amount of money required to renovate it, and the first 10-15 years of Merlin’s tenure largely consisted of renovations and spending millions to keep the park standing still and replacing the old, decaying rides and theming. Given that Chessington started removing a lot of their crumbling theming (e.g. Runaway Train, Dragon Falls) relatively early into Merlin’s tenure, I think we can infer that Merlin does not deserve the entirety of the blame for the state Chessington fell into.

I’m not trying to say that Pearson Tussauds were bad, or that Merlin are saints. But I do think that some of the 90s prosperity was caused in part by the fact that the bulk of the park was simply newer and in a younger, more exciting phase of its life, which would have hidden any maintenance or long-term upkeep shortcomings better. Had Tussauds, under Pearson, Charterhouse or DIC, held onto Alton Towers for longer, I don’t think the direction taken would ultimately have been that different. From what I’ve heard and gleamed over my years as an enthusiast, I don’t actually think that any of the iterations of Tussauds were all that different to Merlin in many ways, and I feel that may have manifested more as the park grew older.

 

[GaryH]

The car park fee was introduced in 2002 under Tussauds at £2. Express was £6 then.

Indeed they did but the reason for introducing it was to find a new relief road. This didn’t get approval in the end at JCB wouldn’t allow it to be built on parts of their land. However, Tussauds/Merlin realised what a money spinner the parking charge was and decided to keep it.

 

[Dave]

Tussauds after 2001 and Merlin were basically the same company. It’s better to compare Pearson era rather than obsess over the name of the company.