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PortAventura: General Discussion

Rant warning, lol.
Does anyone else on here that’s been to PA recently think the reputation for poor ops is harsh on the staff? When I went I saw them working flat out on almost every ride to get the train out as soon as possible.
The problem for me is the guests. The despatch host will tell them where to go, but oh no we’ve changed our mind about who we want to sit with. Oh now we’ve messed up the numbers and someone doesn’t have a seat cause we can’t count to 2! Oh now we’ve gotta take a selfie on the ride before the bags are put away. Oh now we’ve left our phone in our pockets, can you undo my restraint so I can put it in the bag. Etc etc, the list goes on. So many times I saw frustrated ride ops and inconsiderate guests that, having queue jumped in front of you, deem it ok to hold you up even more by faffing around.
I think PA is a beautiful park, ruined by the people that visit it unfortunately.
Rant over. 🤣
 
Tommy85 said:
Rant warning, lol.
Does anyone else on here that’s been to PA recently think the reputation for poor ops is harsh on the staff? When I went I saw them working flat out on almost every ride to get the train out as soon as possible.
The problem for me is the guests. The despatch host will tell them where to go, but oh no we’ve changed our mind about who we want to sit with. Oh now we’ve messed up the numbers and someone doesn’t have a seat cause we can’t count to 2! Oh now we’ve gotta take a selfie on the ride before the bags are put away. Oh now we’ve left our phone in our pockets, can you undo my restraint so I can put it in the bag. Etc etc, the list goes on. So many times I saw frustrated ride ops and inconsiderate guests that, having queue jumped in front of you, deem it ok to hold you up even more by faffing around.
I think PA is a beautiful park, ruined by the people that visit it unfortunately.
Rant over. 🤣
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The guests do have a significant impact, yes (I did see instances of people trying to hold phones out on rides etc), but there’s far more the park can and should be doing to mitigate against the issues that you’re talking about. Even just signs before you get on saying “you must wear shoes”, or “no phones on ride” would at least help to convey the situation and reduce the load on staff. Plus the issues of queue jumping, of course.

Even despite all this though, Shambhala consistently stacking for minutes at a time on 2 train ops (which it was on most of the weekend) really should not happen, and I do have to put some blame on the staff for that as it was happening every despatch.
 
Leigh said:
The guests do have a significant impact, yes (I did see instances of people trying to hold phones out on rides etc), but there’s far more the park can and should be doing to mitigate against the issues that you’re talking about. Even just signs before you get on saying “you must wear shoes”, or “no phones on ride” would at least help to convey the situation and reduce the load on staff. Plus the issues of queue jumping, of course.

Even despite all this though, Shambhala consistently stacking for minutes at a time on 2 train ops (which it was on most of the weekend) really should not happen, and I do have to put some blame on the staff for that as it was happening every despatch.
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Can honestly say that when I went Shambhala was also on 2 trains and I hardly ever saw it stack. I may of just got lucky with my visit. So many people say how bad it is and they can’t all be wrong. It’s just that when I went the ops on everything were not bad at all. I agree that they should be clearer on whats allowed and whats not tho.
 
I've always been in two minds about this. Part of it is the Spanish culture is naturally very laid back. Anything you do in Spain will take twice as long as anywhere else, that's not a PortAventura thing it's the same anywhere, you've also got to think those staff are working in 30°+ heat every day for 14 hours.

Yes in a lot of instances they could do better such as the main queue / express pass ratio but I don't think it's as bad as some make out.
 
There’s truth in both. The guests can cause throughout problems between queue jumping, not complying with instructions and general faff. Obviously whether that happens depends on the guest.

Similarly, operations from staff speed/efficiency also varies quite drastically. We’ve experienced both very good and very poor staff across the resort.

I suppose this is true at any park, but PA seems to have more extremes than some other places.
 
Tommy85 said:
Can honestly say that when I went Shambhala was also on 2 trains and I hardly ever saw it stack. I may of just got lucky with my visit. So many people say how bad it is and they can’t all be wrong. It’s just that when I went the ops on everything were not bad at all. I agree that they should be clearer on whats allowed and whats not tho.
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Shambhala had pretty decent ops when I visited a few weeks back. I'd say the worst ride for ops in the park was easily Furious Baco. Load and dispatch of a single train was 6 minutes at one point 😂 But yeah as a whole I didn't find the ride ops all that bad throughout the park, certainly no worse than somewhere like Busch Gardens Tampa. I'd agree with the post about general guests at the park playing a big part in slowing ops down.
 
Shambhala was double stacking frequently when I went. Severely poor operational management.
 
Do PortAv not operate shifts for staff during summer!?

Many parks will have an early and late shift on very late night closes.

Ops at PA is partly why I rarely can be bothered to visit.
 
AstroDan said:
Do PortAv not operate shifts for staff during summer!?

Many parks will have an early and late shift on very late night closes.

Ops at PA is partly why I rarely can be bothered to visit.
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Not really, I'm sure some will but for the majority it's a full day. You'll normally see the same staff on a ride in the evening as you would have in the morning.

Again it's not uncommon in Spain, most Spanish hotels in the towns who have entertainment crews will start at 12 lunch and they won't finish till midnight.

The same goes with PortAventura's entertainment teams, it's why 95% of shows start from 12 lunch as the cast are still there at park close for the parade.
 
Vik said:
I’m just looking forward to the day I go there and see Shambhala on 2 trains. Must be bliss 😂
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But the catch is that the two train service makes literally no impact on throughput because they take 5 mins per dispatch.
 
Are operations worse this season than normal? I see Shawn has really been moaning about the park on his visit yesterday and today, saying it’s the worse he’s ever seen. I’ve also heard similar stories from lots of different people who have visited this season.
 
I’ve not visited this year, but if I were to speculate, I’d say it might be a result of the very inconsistent standards which are set across the resort. We’ve experienced both really good and absolutely appalling operations over several years, so it could well be the case that people are striking unlucky.

Either that or they’ve sorted out the consistency issue by making everything terrible.
 
I've been to PortAventura three times and had Express on all of those visits; it is unfortunately a necessity unless you are going at a time when the park is dead. I really like PortAventura as a park, it's beautiful. Slightly lacking in the rides department but still not bad. And you can usually get a good deal. But the operations across the board really do put you off from wanting to visit again.
 
I am shocked at reading about all these horror stories from PA. Only we visited at Easter and were pleasantly surprised with how good operations were. Even when Shambhala had a queue, which at one point extended out the cattle pen, operations whittled it down super fast! Almost Silver Star levels! and I can promise you I'm not exaggerating the queue didn't stop! Same could be said for all other rides apart from Hurricane Condor which was horrific and why I thought they were trialing the virtual queue.
 
Shawn's new video really highlights how poor the ops were on Shambhala. I think what he was describing might be the worst ops I've ever personally heard about in a park. Stacking on 3 trains taking over 5 minutes to dispatch, meaning 10 minutes plus on the brake run, plus 6-10 empty seats - singles and doubles - on the trains. Yikes 😬
 
Danscott22 said:
I think what he was describing might be the worst ops I've ever personally heard about in a park
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Fuji-Q(ueue) says hi...

I refuse to go back to PA due to how bad the ops are currently, I'd rather just spend an extra day in Barcelona.

It does seem bizarre to spend so much money on top rides only for them to be operated in such a way.
 
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