Paultons Park: General Discussion

[Hid]

Paultons has only in the last 17 years gained its reputation.

Alton, Chessington, Drayton, Thorpe and Pleasure Beach have been established a lot longer than Paultons so they will of course be busier

 

[Bowser]

Paultons has only in the last 17 years gained its reputation.

Alton, Chessington, Drayton, Thorpe and Pleasure Beach have been established a lot longer than Paultons so they will of course be busier

17 years is a long time!

It's about relative popularity so there is the discrepancy of the Merlin parks queue times being multiple times longer than the past weekend and Paulton's not despite the great weather across most of the country.

Are 4 times as many people visiting Merlin parks today than at the weekend due to the weather and not the same at Paultons?

 

[TedShatner10]

I get why people grab onto Paultons because it’s the rare beast of a UK park that cares about the product but people talk about it like it’s a major UK national park when it is still ultimately a small regional affair.

Paultons was more accurately smaller and regional 10-20 years ago, but not so small and regional now, even if Merlin as a company still dwarfs it nationally or globally, and this latest YT vid is almost like a sarcastic attack ad on Merlin's parks:

 

[GooseOnTheLoose]

It's about relative popularity so there is the discrepancy of the Merlin parks queue times being multiple times longer than the past weekend and Paulton's not despite the great weather across most of the country.

Are 4 times as many people visiting Merlin parks today than at the weekend due to the weather and not the same at Paultons?

Quite probably. You're presuming that good weather creates a uniform surge in demand across all parks. It doesn't.

The demographic profile of a Merlin guest (teens, young adults and, crucially, a massive pool of annual pass holders) is far more prone to spontaneous, weather driven surge visits. If you're 19 and the sun is out on Easter Tuesday, you grab your mates and head to Thorpe Park. Conversely, Paultons Parks’ core audience (families with toddlers and young children) rarely operates on a whim. Those trips are planned, budgeted and booked weeks in advance. Paultons Park doesn't see the same weather spike because their guests aren't as mobile or spontaneous.

A 20 minute peak queue on one of the busiest Tuesdays of the year also isn't evidence of superior operations. It’s evidence that the demand simply isn't high enough to saturate the infrastructure.

 

[Quantum]

A lot of the parks mentioned also have on site accomodation that bulk up the numbers. Will be interesting to see how Paultons handle people staying next the park

 

[Enter Valhalla]

It’s why I suspect despite what people say, Paultons isn’t trying to go after Merlin.
If they are then they are currently making huge strategic errors on ride capacity, and they don’t seem the type of company to make those types of errors.

Paultons aren’t trying to compete with Merlin per se. As in they know that they can’t achieve the high numbers that Merlin gets even if they wanted to, so they have understandably decided to go down a different route and are looking to peruse quality of experience over quantity of visitors.

What is however very clear is that Paultons clearly look at what Merlin do, and in many cases try to do the opposite. I have no doubt at all that Paultons regularly look on Merlin’s TripAdvisor pages, see what people moan about the most, and then do the opposite (and often make a big deal about how they do the opposite)

For example, you’ll often hear Paultons shouting about how they have free parking, and of course the big one- when they say “you don’t need fastrack here, our queues are short”. They’ve clearly seen that they can capitalise on peoples’ annoyance at long, slow moving queues at the Merlin parks and know that they have a niche over Merlin and are happy to exploit that niche. Right now, Paultons would hate to get the sort of numbers that Merlin are getting, they wouldn’t be able to cope. But I bet a lot of the people who visited the park today, left saying how great it was that there were no long queues.

 

[Benzin]

Have to factor in all the MAP holders who weren't allowed to visit over the weekend so have DESCENDED upon the parks today.