Ride Access Pass and Disabled Access - 2026 Discussion

[imanautie]

I fear you are mistaking a suggested adjustment for a mandatory one.

Nimbus provides a menu of potential adjustments that a venue could offer for that symbol. It does not dictate that every venue must offer all of them. "A virtual queue" is listed as an option, yes, but so is "a quieter entrance" or "avoiding congestion".

Merlin's argument (and I suspect their legal defence) relies on two points; the environment and the reasonableness test.

A theme park is, by definition, a crowd. Even if you use a virtual queue, you are still surrounded by 20,000 people. You still have to navigate the crowded pathways, the crowded merge points and the crowded baggage holds. If a guest truly cannot handle crowds, Merlin is arguing that a queue bypass system doesn't actually solve the fundamental environmental issue of being at Alton Towers on a Saturday in October.

If providing a virtual queue to everyone with the Crowds symbol results in the collapse of the park's operations (as we have seen with the 90 minute RAP queues and unobtainable reservations), it ceases to be a reasonable adjustment. It becomes an operational burden that disadvantages all other guests.

If we look at Nimbus' definition closely: "This indicates that standing isn't necessarily the issue, but the environment of the queue is."

If standing isn't the issue, then physically waiting isn't the barrier. The barrier is the congestion. Merlin sells a product that avoids congestion: Fastrack.

By narrowing the RAP criteria to strictly physical / medical necessity, they are effectively saying: "If you physically cannot wait, we will help you. If you find waiting distressing but are physically capable of it, we have Quiet Rooms, or you are welcome to purchase the premium service designed to skip the line."

It is a brutal interpretation, but it is logically consistent with a business trying to reduce an alleged 30% user base down to a manageable 5%.

Where's this 30% figure come from? Does not line up with the known (I'm not the only person who knows how to see the numbers) capacity for rap Vs day tickets.

 

[fearnwood]

Genuine question - because a person has been diagnosed with say ADHD why would this automatically mean that person is unable to stand in a queue?

As a parent of two children who had RAP passes until yesterday, I can say that this is not how the rules state it should ever have worked. The RAP guidelines always stated that specific evidence of how the condition limited their ability to queue had to be presented, however we have seen plenty of occasions where the rules were being flouted.

Originally we used to bring our sons whole diagnosis folder and the Guest Services staff would spend a while reading the various documents before issuing the card. Then a few years later Merlin updated the RAP guide to specifically state that a blue badge would no longer be accepted as evidence at guest services for a RAP to be issued, so I was surprised at our next visit when both the person in front of us at GS produced a blue badge and was immediately handed a RAP card without question, and then the person who had been standing behind us did exactly the same. Some years later Merlin updated their rules again to say that the scheme would be managed by Nimbus as the rules were being flouted, but as far as I could see it was the GS staff who were handing them out against the actual rules. Maybe they were trying to avoid confrontation, but I do think it's unfair that the system is seen as out of control, but the people who should be policing it aren't reinforcing the rules so what else was ever going to happen?

We have letters from specialist consultants for each of my children stating that they cannot tolerate a crowded queuing environment for long, on the face of it you'd look at them and they look fine - however even the relatively short exposure in the RAP queue is utterly exhausting for them as they become mentally overwhelmed and quickly need timeout for a while, As others are pointing out I am sure some people will abuse the system and suddenly find another condition that meets the criteria, but that says more about the wider medical system if GP's are willing to do that on demand. As I already observed, there has been a problem with a failure of the people who are supposed to be enforcing the rules rather than a problem with the rules themselves...

 

[John]

The number presumably comes from before there was a cap on the number of people using RAP.

I believe the guy currently trying to deal with the issue through the courts claimed Merlin provided a figure of 30% of their guests using RAP before the cap

 

[GooseOnTheLoose]

Where's this 30% figure come from? Does not line up with the known (I'm not the only person who knows how to see the numbers) capacity for rap Vs day tickets.

The alleged 30% figure I referenced (I never stated it as fact and am highly critical of the figure) comes from Christian Jarvis' efforts to reform ride accessibility all over the world, although mostly at Merlin parks, in not only his image but his naming rights too... Though the less said about his shady antics the better.

However, I am absolutely fascinated by your assertion that you "know how to see the numbers".

Unless you have a login for Merlin's internal reporting dashboards or their Accesso backend, I assume you are inferring this data from scraping the availability on the pre book portal?

If that is the case, you are measuring the Cap, not the Demand or the Prevalence.

You are seeing the arbitrary limit Merlin has placed on bookings to stop the system collapsing. You are not seeing the total number of people who hold a pass, the number of people who are eligible but couldn't book, or the actual throughput impact on the day.

Confusing the number of available slots with the number of eligible users is precisely why we are in this mess. Please, do enlighten us on your methodology. I do love a good spreadsheet.

 

[imanautie]

The alleged 30% figure I referenced (I never stated it as fact and am highly critical of the figure) comes from Christian Jarvis' efforts to reform ride accessibility all over the world, although mostly at Merlin parks, in not only his image but his naming rights too... Though the less said about his shady antics the better.

However, I am absolutely fascinated by your assertion that you "know how to see the numbers".

Unless you have a login for Merlin's internal reporting dashboards or their Accesso backend, I assume you are inferring this data from scraping the availability on the pre book portal?

If that is the case, you are measuring the Cap, not the Demand or the Prevalence.

You are seeing the arbitrary limit Merlin has placed on bookings to stop the system collapsing. You are not seeing the total number of people who hold a pass, the number of people who are eligible but couldn't book, or the actual throughput impact on the day.

Confusing the number of available slots with the number of eligible users is precisely why we are in this mess. Please, do enlighten us on your methodology. I do love a good spreadsheet.

Yep it's the cap I keep eyes on, be a much bigger problem if the total passholders number was public!

Not an exact measurement I know,but useful to at least compare last year to what merlin are saying

 

[Ash]

I’ve said it on this topic before but in 2006 on Nemesis you would see, based on what I experienced, around 50 people a day at most on a busy using whatever the RAP system was back then.

This number is now at 100s of not 1000s a day.

The reasons, rights and wrongs of that can be debated till the cows come home. But that’s my experience for what it’s worth (before the bird says anything)

That situation replicated across an entire park is not sustainable. A line always has to be drawn somewhere. As it’s become more accessible this has increased the pool of people it is open too, then eventually with the same ride capacity’s and trying to maintain a level of access to such a wide group, something had to give.

And this was done restricting access before the turnstile via the booking system. This I suspect was to try and the reduce the need to restrict the pool of people. To which they got slaughtered, maybe the execution was bad, but what choice did they have.

As someone who doesn’t use the service, observationally it seemed to have had the desired effect.

Merlin, for reasons known only to them are now looking at restricting the pool of people, which “may” open up overall capacity.

It was glaringly obvious the current situation could not continue. Same ride capacity, ever increasing pool of people, same RAP capacity, just doesn’t work.

Add to this a minority abusing the system, early block bookings, large parties and paper passes being manipulated, I’m afraid you reap what you sow.

As you will all know, I’m first to jump on Merlin, but on this I genuinely think they are caught between a rock and a hard place. Not everyone can get their own way, but dealing with people’s “entitlements” in this day and age is extremely difficult.

Good luck to them.

 

[MaxPower]

I dont like queues personally. I'm not willing to queue over an hour for anything as I get naggy, so I don't. Whether this would count as a disability if I were to be diagnosed, I have no idea.

As a result, when a ride is on a two hour queue, I simply won't ride it. I don't expect the park to bend over backwards to give me a magic pass because i'm impatient.

On the other end of the scale a friend of my wife has crohn’s. She has had part of her bowel removed, gets fatigued quickly and needs to be able to access a toilet at short notice. This is the perfect example of who should be entitled to a RAP and quite rightly should be prioritised.

There's an awful lot of people playing the system at the expense of others with genuine mental and physical illnesses. As a result everyone loses; regardless of what Merlin decide to do.

People are just shameless unfortunately.

 

[Qwerty123]

The question that nobody can really answer in relation to ambulant RAP users is at what level of discomfort does a dislike for queuing (which is extremely normal to have regardless of disabilities) turn into an inability to queue and how can the difference between the two be objectively measured when there is an obvious incentive for people to self report as falling into the latter category.
Whilst I do think a blanket omission of anyone who is unable to queue for non-physical reasons goes too far it has been long clear that the number of people qualifying needed to be reduced in order to provide sufficient capacity for those in most need. I also think there is a major difference on the impact on this between those who struggle with queues but are able to understand their own limitations and those whose disabilities affect their own understanding of what they are able to cope with. There is also an element that many of those with a more profound level of learning disability will not be able to understand that the rules have changed and will therefore not understand why they are no longer able to skip the queues.

People both with and without disabilities regularly choose to avoid activities where they consider the negative elements to outweigh the positives and I do not think it unreasonable for those with normal levels of intelligence (who are able to understand how the need to queue will affect them) to be expected to take the queues into account when deciding whether to visit rather than expecting an alternative to queuing to be available.

 

[rob666]

I do get amused by the idea that people genuinely believe that Merlin will look at an online petition and think "oh, OK maybe we'll go back on this" lol.

If they got a million signatures, they very much would take notice.
Any commercial organisation of that size would, without question, take notice, and not laugh it off.

This will be costing Merlin a lot, both in legal checks, and probable refunds.
They will take notice of the petition and respond to it, if the numbers keep growing.

 

[DiogoJ42]

Maybe we need a counter petition to force them to stick to their guns and deal with the problem?
I'd wager there are a hell of a lot more people fed up of seeing RAP abuse than there are people impacted by the new rules.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.

 

[Bowser]

Maybe we need a counter petition to force them to stick to their guns and deal with the problem?
I'd wager there are a hell of a lot more people fed up of seeing RAP abuse than there are people impacted by the new rules.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.

There’s certainly a lot of supportive comments on social media, though that’s predominantly people “fed up with ADHD and anxiety” and perhaps not the best barometer.

The petition doesn’t seem particularly popular, currently sitting around 9000 signatures.

Whether Merlin will see either of these metrics and find them vindicating we will have to see…

The other issue is MAP culture has created an expectation of being able to visit theme parks regularly. Unfortunately we may have to accept that’s no longer feasible if a working accessibility system is to exist. Less frequent visits facilitated by fast track are a potential solution for those who no longer qualify. And Merlin will be delighted.

 

[DiogoJ42]

There’s certainly a lot of supportive comments on social media, though that’s predominantly people “fed up with ADHD and anxiety” and perhaps not the best barometer.

Uuuuurgh! Even if thats how they genuinely feel, such comments just get all legitimate gripes dismissed. They are not helping!

 

[Craig]

The other issue is MAP culture has created an expectation of being able to visit theme parks regularly. Unfortunately we may have to accept that’s no longer feasible if a working accessibility system is to exist. Less frequent visits facilitated by fast track are a potential solution for those who no longer qualify. And Merlin will be delighted.

This is an interesting point, and one where I’d agree that for some the parks have become a “must do” regularly as part of a routine over a 2 or 3 times a year special occasion. That’s fine if you’re visiting, queuing and experiencing the rides in the standard queues, but not so much when these regulars are continually using a very finite and limited resource such as RAP.

What they could have perhaps looked at is something that limits the number of RAP visits each person/family can have across the course of a season. That prevents slots being quickly filled up by those that perhaps who have a higher than usual knowledge of how the system works and gives those who are more occasional visitors the potential to get a look in. If people hit that limit of visits per season, they could maybe go into a ballot to grab a smaller allocation of further slots? Of course that presents its own issues with complaints, extra complexity and maybe even legal issues too.

I also think there’s a lot of discussion solely on the tangible experience on park, rather than considering other issues too:

• We have no idea on the number of people eligible for RAP. We have seen the 30% figure quoted, but do we know the trajectory of applications in recent seasons? Is it accelerating to levels which are going to cause issues to become substantially worse?
• Despite some RAP users saying they’re having a better experience on park, we have no idea on the number of complaints Merlin are dealing with as a result of things like people not being able to get a slot. Every one of those complaints has a cost to the business to deal with through staffing costs and potential offers of compensation.
• Just like complaints from RAP users, we have no idea on complaints from standard guests who are having to wait substantially longer too. Again, this comes with a cost for time spent dealing with it and offers of compensation too.

So while I’m sure Merlin are happy there’s a potential uptick to Fastrack usage from this change, there’s arguably greater potential cost benefits from eventually dealing with fewer complaints, an uptick in overall guest satisfaction and an uptick in guest spend longer term too. Yes, it perhaps sounds heartless - but as others have pointed out, they’re a business. Their aim is to keep as large a chunk of their guests as happy as possible, resulting in the biggest return from them.

For those pointing out that other parks in the UK are not adopting this strategy, all I’d say is the likes of Disney were the canary in the coal mine for these changes. Of course they’ve had the foresight to include fully accessible queue lines in the first place, but they’ve also got the financial clout to throw money at the technology and to deal with DAS interviews every 8 months. Of course that’s not to mention the sheer ride capacity to deal with it all too. Eventually, the same issues seen at Merlin parks will trickle down to the other parks - it’s just the impact is delayed the smaller the park is.

Despite still being in the camp that the changes are necessary, I’m still perplexed by the communication mess of it all. That said, it’s firmly of their own doing in sitting on it for so long. We’ve discussed the issue with RAP for years, and it really should have been properly dealt with long before now.

 

[Dave]

If yo were designing a park now you would put a quiet room in every park area and say “sit in there until called”.

The issue is the double queueing abuse, if they can’t physically queue for another ride then some of these people will suddenly not need RAP and those that genuinely need that support will have a lovely space to spend some time whilst waiting to ride.

 

[imanautie]

If yo were designing a park now you would put a quiet room in every park area and say “sit in there until called”.

The issue is the double queueing abuse, if they can’t physically queue for another ride then some of these people will suddenly not need RAP and those that genuinely need that support will have a lovely space to spend some time whilst waiting to ride.

Think that was perhaps one plus of the old wristbands System, bit easier to spot that.
Now if you mean people swapping back and forth between raps that's also solvable if you have some sort of "scan your admission ticket to join this group", hey presto makes it harder to do.

 

[Dave]

Think that was perhaps one plus of the old wristbands System, bit easier to spot that.
Now if you mean people swapping back and forth between raps that's also solvable if you have some sort of "scan your admission ticket to join this group", hey presto makes it harder to do.

It wasn’t at all easy to spot the wristbands, you just slid them under your sleeve.

You would need guests to scan into every ride whether RAP or not with your suggestion and every ride entrance would need staffing to manage the turnstiles. This would cause huge queues in a morning if you wristbanded all guests and if you just used tickets what’s to stop people swapping the tickets with each other?

Quiet rooms with sensory equipment and a small outdoor space would probably solve the issue but wouldn’t be cheap to implement, and as I say, the people who are abusing the system probably won’t want to sit in those spaces so will go back to “coping” with the queues.

I feel strongly about this because a family member with severe disabilities (both physical and neurological), was effectively excluded from the park because RAP queues got so long.

 

[Bowser]

Think that was perhaps one plus of the old wristbands System, bit easier to spot that.

On the flip side is it unreasonable for RAP users to use an attraction with little to no queue?

I’ll confess our typical Chessington routine was to ride Vampire, then when faced with a 90+ minute timeout to visit Room on the Broom on our way to either the sensory room or a quiet lunch location because the queue was always 5 minutes or less.

Historically RAP users were also waiting longer than the main queues as the RAP line waiting time often wasn’t accounted for in the time out, though the new capacity generally eradicated this and it looks like the new system has this built into it via the entrance scans.

 

[Islander]

On the flip side is it unreasonable for RAP users to use an attraction with little to no queue?

I’ll confess our typical Chessington routine was to ride Vampire, then when faced with a 90+ minute timeout to visit Room on the Broom on our way to either the sensory room or a quiet lunch location because the queue was always 5 minutes or less.

Historically RAP users were also waiting longer than the main queues as the RAP line waiting time often wasn’t accounted for in the time out, though the new capacity generally eradicated this and it looks like the new system has this built into it via the entrance scans.

I think this becomes an extremely difficult question, because honestly I think (or hope...) no one would complain about a RAP user making use of a little-to-no-queue attraction whilst being timed out on something big*. The contention comes (quite reasonably) when queuing for something big*, whilst being timed out for something big*.

How would you ever differentiate between the two?

* - by big, I mean long-queued

 

[GooseOnTheLoose]

What they could have perhaps looked at is something that limits the number of RAP visits each person/family can have across the course of a season. That prevents slots being quickly filled up by those that perhaps who have a higher than usual knowledge of how the system works and gives those who are more occasional visitors the potential to get a look in. If people hit that limit of visits per season, they could maybe go into a ballot to grab a smaller allocation of further slots? Of course that presents its own issues with complaints, extra complexity and maybe even legal issues too.

Whilst this sounds logical on paper to prevent hogging, as you've alluded to it is legally perilous.

Selling a product marketed as "Unlimited Entry" (MAP) but then telling a disabled guest, "Sorry, you have used up your disability quota for the year, please come back when you are cured or start queuing," creates a direct discriminatory barrier that able bodied passholders do not face. It would be an open goal for the Equality and Human Rights Commission, you are penalising a guest for the frequency of their visits solely based on a protected characteristic.

If yo were designing a park now you would put a quiet room in every park area and say “sit in there until called”.

Quiet rooms with sensory equipment and a small outdoor space would probably solve the issue but wouldn’t be cheap to implement, and as I say, the people who are abusing the system probably won’t want to sit in those spaces so will go back to “coping” with the queues.

The issue with the Quiet Room solution is scale, even if we assume that they're evenly distributed.

If the statistics regarding 20 - 30% of guests being RAP users are even remotely accurate, you aren't looking for a Quiet Room. You're looking for a holding facility with the capacity of a departure gate at every major attraction.

Let's be generous and assume that the 2,000+ RAP users on a busy Saturday are perfectly split across the "Big 7" coasters. That's roughly 285 people waiting per ride at any given moment.

To house nearly 300 people safely, and importantly, quietly enough to be a valid sensory break, you'd need significant square footage. Standard building occupancy guidelines (roughly 1.5m² per person for a loose waiting area) suggest you would need approximately 430m² of floor space just to hold that single group.

To put that in perspective, a standard tennis court is roughly 260m². You would need a facility nearly double the size of a tennis court, located next to the entrance of every single major coaster, just to house the displaced RAP queue.

And that is just for a waiting room. If you want it to actually be a quiet / sensory room where people aren't practically sitting in each other's laps, you need even more space. If you reduce the size to fit the available land, you are simply creating a crowded indoor queue line, which defeats the entire purpose of the accommodation.

The brutal reality is that Merlin has realised they cannot engineer their way out of this with apps, rooms, or scanners. The volume was simply too high. The only lever they had left to pull was the eligibility criteria itself.

It is a sledgehammer approach, and the communication has been abysmal, but it is the inevitable mathematical conclusion of a system that had collapsed under its own weight.

 

[Smudgy]

As a result, when a ride is on a two hour queue, I simply won't ride it. I don't expect the park to bend over backwards to give me a magic pass because i'm impatient.

I suffer from ADHD and dyspraxia, which makes it uncomfortable for me both physically and mentally to stand in long queues, but key point is that it is ‘uncomfortable’ not ‘impossible’. I never have an never will use a RAP, as it is possible for me to wait in a normal queue, and therefore I will. Just like you said, I don’t expect them to bend over backwards when I can wait in a normal queue. RAP should be reserved only for those who need it, not people who want it because they’re slightly uncomfortable, or those who are genuinely just exploiting the system. These people not only make things worse for normal guests, but also the people that genuinely need RAP. Where were all of these people who ‘need RAP’ 10-15 years ago?