Oakwood Discussion

[rob666]

Very hard to recruit staff for a few days, followed by a six week dead spell.
People just won't do it.
Students are still at college, their main recruitment pool I imagine.

 

[Enter Valhalla]

I know that last year Oakwood did open for Easter with basically half the park not available. Oakwood has a really small Engineering team, about 6-8 engineers in total I think, so it really doesn’t surprise me that they struggle to get all the rides turned around in time for Easter especially since Easter is so early this year.

 

[dantheman38]

Any news on new rides this year?

Drenched is due to reopen with new ride vehicles and Spooky 3D was closed last year and was being upgraded/redeveloped. There was also that large plot of land where the old mini golf was, designated for new development.

Given all that one would expect therefore there to be something new this year, but I haven't seen anything.

 

[Matt N]

In case anyone wasn’t aware, it would appear that Oakwood no longer opens midweek outside of peak periods (e.g. half terms, school trip season, summer holidays): https://www.oakwoodthemepark.co.uk/about-the-park/opening-times/

I’m not sure how much of a new development this is, but I just thought I should make people aware in case anyone was planning a trip.

I can see why they have ceased off-peak operation given how deserted the park typically is outside of summer, but as someone who’s holidaying in Pembrokeshire from 13th to 17th May and was hoping to pop in to ride the new retracked Megafobia, it is nonetheless disappointing…

If I’m not mistaken, I think Oakwood may now be one of very few parks in the country that does this. Mid-week closures full stop are rare to nonexistent in the Merlin parks and even many of the smaller parks, so Oakwood pretty much shutting entirely on off-peak days is quite an outlier among UK parks.

 

[Thameslink Rail]

Wait, they're not open for the Easter holidays?!

 

[John_P]

They didn't but I can see the thinking with how early Easter was this year it would probably be difficult to get the required staff numbers for a few weeks only to then close again.

 

[rob666]

Well there goes the major part of world tour of Britain part two...I'm too old for coasters at weekends, I'm a midweek mono moody now.
Might end up on a world tour of England at this rate.

 

[Matt N]

Wait, they're not open for the Easter holidays?!

No, not at all; they’re opening on 27th April.

They only open on weekends until mid-June, when they begin to open on every day bar Wednesdays. I assume this is for the start of school trip season; based on my one experience at Oakwood during school trip season, the park gets pretty rammed. As someone who lives very near the South Wales border and went to secondary school right on said border, it was certainly a popular school trip choice for our school in the summer, and I can imagine that it gets even more that way once you get further into Wales.

They only begin to open every day of the week in July, for the start of the summer holidays.

Midweek operations then cease entirely once again at the beginning of September. The only other week where the park opens midweek at all is for October half term, and the park shuts for the season after October half term ends on 3rd November.

 

[Relife]

The reduced opening times is not a good look for any park. Oakwoods biggest problem is it location and being heavily reliant on tourist trade.

Paultons is similar but is also near major urban area's, Oakwood isn't easy to get to for most of the UK. I do worry about it's future at this point

 

[rob666]

Oakwoods biggest problem is a long term lack of investment.
Paultons has had massive amounts of investment, in a busy residential area.

 

[Relife]

Oakwoods biggest problem is a long term lack of investment.
Paultons has had massive amounts of investment, in a busy residential area.

I was only really referencing the tourist trade but yeah Paultons has had tons of investment. Given where Oakwood is they really new new attractions to motivate people to visit.

 

[dantheman38]

They had segregated off some land for development but I'm not sure what if anything they've done with it.

 

[Funcone]

Folly Farm reports 500,000 guests a year, although with a different pricing structure, and they’re open a lot more days each year than Oakwood. In the final years of being family owned Oakwood were reporting 400,000 guests a year, but they were working hard for those, with a lot of money in capital investments (Megafobia, Hydro, Speed etc), as well the After Dark nights in the summer, and what appeared to be a significant marketing budget. According to Wikipedia Oakwood got 500,000 visitors the year that Megafobia opened. Of course, despite getting a sizeable chunk of visitors, they weren’t making loads of money. It did seem to be a work of passion as much as anything else.

Do we know how many guests a year Oakwood gets now?

 

[Coaster]

I think it's a shame Oakwood doesn't attract more customers; surely with it being the only theme park in Wales, there is a captive audience there?

Agree that lack of investment is likely to be the main cause for this; whilst, as enthusiasts, it's worth the trip for us for Megafobia alone, families who live locally probably don't see it the same way when the park goes by year on year without ever adding anything new to their offering.

 

[Matt N]

Do we know how many guests a year Oakwood gets now?

For what it’s worth, Oakwood was not in a list of the top 10 most visited paid-for tourist attractions in Wales from 2019-2021, and the #10 attraction in that list was getting numbers between 145,000 and 81,000: https://www.statista.com/statistics/508894/visits-paid-tourist-attractions-wales/

That would suggest that Oakwood’s guest figures have certainly declined a fair amount since the 2000s.

I think it's a shame Oakwood doesn't attract more customers; surely with it being the only theme park in Wales, there is a captive audience there?

Agree that lack of investment is likely to be the main cause for this; whilst, as enthusiasts, it's worth the trip for us for Megafobia alone, families who live locally probably don't see it the same way when the park goes by year on year without ever adding anything new to their offering.

The problem is that while Oakwood may be the only semi-major theme park in Wales, some of the most populous areas of Wales live equally close or perhaps even closer to somewhere else.

If you live in Cardiff or Newport, it’s probably not much further to drive to somewhere like Drayton Manor or Paultons Park. If you live in Wrexham, Alton Towers and Blackpool Pleasure Beach are probably closer.

I think that lack of investment is likely to be at least a contributing factor to Oakwood’s decline, but I don’t think the location exactly helps its predicament. It’s just so, so rural and so, so far from the majority of the major population centres in the UK that it relies almost primarily on holidaymakers to the Pembrokeshire region.

Some of the more successful parks in the country have a considerable captive audience living nearby to prop them up outside of peak season. Oakwood is just so far out of the way that it doesn’t really have that. I live very close to the South Wales border, so further southwest than most of the major UK population centres, and even for me, the park is a 2h 15m, 120 mile drive on a good run. For most people in the UK, the park is simply too much of a long drive away to justify going there in its own right, and I’m not sure that anything less than a totally unprecedented degree of investment would change that.

 

[Poisson]

Outside of Cardiff and Swansea you don't really have the population nearby. Even for Hereford just over the border it's faster to get to Towers.

 

[Katy]

Some of the more successful parks in the country have a considerable captive audience living nearby to prop them up outside of peak season. Oakwood is just so far out of the way that it doesn’t really have that. I live very close to the South Wales border, so further southwest than most of the major UK population centres, and even for me, the park is a 2h 15m, 120 mile drive on a good run. For most people in the UK, the park is simply too much of a long drive away to justify going there in its own right, and I’m not sure that anything less than a totally unprecedented degree of investment would change that.

100% this. It's a 5-6 hour drive from Blackpool, and for me there isn't really all that much there - besides Megafobia - to make me want to do that drive more than once a decade. Speed rides awfully and seems to usually run on 1 train, the rest of the coasters are really old family/kids models.

 

[Matt N]

People may liken Oakwood to other, more successful parks in tourist-centric, coastal locations like Paultons Park, but I’d argue that it is considerably more disadvantaged in terms of location and nearby captive audience than many of these parks. To cite a few case studies:

• Paultons Park: The South Hampshire conurbation, the 7th most populous urban sprawl in the UK with 856,000 residents, is located within 30 minutes of the park. The Bournemouth/Poole conurbation, the 16th most populous urban sprawl in the UK with 466,000 residents, is also located within 30 minutes to an hour. A not insignificant proportion of the Greater London conurbation, the most populous urban sprawl in the UK with 9.7 million residents, is also located within a 1.5-2 hour drive.
• Blackpool Pleasure Beach: The park is located slap bang within the Blackpool conurbation, the 34th most populous urban sprawl in the UK with 239,000 residents. Large swathes of both the Greater Manchester conurbation, the 2nd most populous urban sprawl in the UK with 2.6 million residents, and the Liverpool conurbation, the 6th most populous urban sprawl in the UK with 864,000 residents, live within a 1 hour drive of the park.
• Flamingo Land: The West Yorkshire conurbation, the 4th most populous urban sprawl in the UK with 1.8 million residents, is located within a 1-1.5 hour drive of the park. The Tyneside conurbation, the 8th most populous urban sprawl in the UK with 774,000 residents, is located within a 2 hour drive of the park. The Teesside conurbation, the 18th most populous urban sprawl in the UK with 376,000 residents, is located within a 1 hour drive of the park.
• Adventure Island: The park is located slap bang in the middle of the Southend-on-Sea conurbation, the 28th most populous urban sprawl in the UK with 295,000 residents. The Greater London conurbation, the most populous urban sprawl in the UK with 9.7 million residents, is almost entirely within a 2 hour drive, and some of the more northern and eastern parts of this conurbation get within 1-1.5 hours and even under an hour in some cases.

In Oakwood’s case, the largest conurbation within a 2 hour drive is the Cardiff conurbation, the 17th most populous urban sprawl in the UK with 447,000 residents. The only other two are the Newport conurbation, the 26th most populous urban sprawl in the UK with 307,000 residents, and the Swansea conurbation, the 27th most populous urban sprawl in the UK with 300,000 residents.

Of these, only Swansea is located less than 1.5 hours away, and none are located within an hour. The immediate surrounding area of the park is very rural, so that captive audience to prop the park up outside of peak season just isn’t really there.

The only other semi-major UK parks I’d put in a similar boat location-wise are Pleasurewood Hills and Great Yarmouth Pleasure Beach. The largest conurbation within a 2 hour drive is the Norwich conurbation, the 38th largest urban sprawl in the UK with 213,000 residents, and the only other two notable ones in the top 75 are Ipswich (42nd with 179,000 residents) and Colchester (65th with 122,000 residents). Norwich is at least within an hour of those two, though, whereas Oakwood does not have any major conurbation within an hour.

From an observer’s view, Pleasurewood Hills in particular does not exactly appear to be thriving either. Similarly to Oakwood, the park has pretty much ceased midweek operation outside of peak season, and there hasn’t been an awful lot of investment or momentum there in recent years. I can’t speak too much for Great Yarmouth, but from everything I’ve seen and heard, Pleasurewood appears to be in a similar boat to Oakwood despite being owned by the Looping Group.

Source for the figures: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_areas_in_the_United_Kingdom

 

[James]

Oakwood is located in a popular holiday/tourist area, and Tenby is only 20 minutes away by car. I wonder whether the park's lack of advertising and investment has affected it in the long run. It should thrive on tourists and holidaymakers during school holidays and summer.

It's a hard park to encourage people to travel far for a day out. There's not much to do there. I can't speak for everyone in Wales, although certainly where I live, Oakwood was a day trip you did in school; if your parents could drive, it would be a family day out, then beyond that, you usually feel no need to go there later in life. Other parks in the UK, such as Paultons, Alton, and Drayton, have a more varied and interesting line-up of rides and attractions in comparison.

 

[Matt N]

Oakwood is located in a popular holiday/tourist area, and Tenby is only 20 minutes away by car. I wonder whether the park's lack of advertising and investment has affected it in the long run. It should thrive on tourists and holidaymakers during school holidays and summer.

Investment, maybe, but they certainly seem to advertise a fair bit in Pembrokeshire. Whenever I’ve been to the area, I quite often see signs for “Oakwood Theme Park: Wales’ BIGGEST Family Day Out!” scattered around towns like Tenby.