• ℹ️ Heads up...

    This is a popular topic that is fast moving Guest - before posting, please ensure that you check out the first post in the topic for a quick reminder of guidelines, and importantly a summary of the known facts and information so far. Thanks.

Ride Access Pass and Disabled Access - 2026 Discussion

Bowser said:
I expect you were lucky with perhaps the benefit of booking quite far in advance when availability of slots was typically at its highest. If you were looking in February for a trip in August then yes you'd likely get a slot whereas if you were looking for Easter then they'd be long gone.

My experience of checking very frequently was the slots for peak dates typically went 4-6 weeks in advance (and more so for the Halloween events at Thorpe and Alton).

Obviously now the difference is you can only book a few months in advance so demand will always be high. I think if you're a RAP user then the hotels need to offer free cancellation.
Click to expand...
Very good point, yes, we would have booked well in advance and they wouldn't have been 'event' days.

Dave said:
I didn’t visit those parks in that time frame but was it fine for all the other visitors? Were queues manageable for those not on RAP or was the majority of ride capacity being given to RAP to manage the demand leaving everyone else waiting hours?

Genuine question as I did not attend those parks, but whether a RAP system works or not also has to factor in all the other guests access to attractions as well as RAP guests.
Click to expand...
They all seemed fine to me. We were always split between me and my eldest on the bigger rides (no RAP) and my daughter and wife on your smaller rides (with RAP) and we all had a good day and got on plenty of rides, no more or less than any trips I've made to parks without my kids and RAP use.
 
Dave said:
I didn’t visit those parks in that time frame but was it fine for all the other visitors? Were queues manageable for those not on RAP or was the majority of ride capacity being given to RAP to manage the demand leaving everyone else waiting hours?

Genuine question as I did not attend those parks, but whether a RAP system works or not also has to factor in all the other guests access to attractions as well as RAP guests.
Click to expand...
Please keep in mind that for a lot of the queues at Legoland and Chessington RAP and Fast Track are the same queue, so you can't differentiate between the two.
 
Dave said:
It’s almost like a new eligibility plan to focus the resource towards the people who need it is required……….
Click to expand...

Very good! 🤣

We cant be having common sense ideas and approaches in the UK in 2026 though. We dont do that here anymore.
 
Poisson said:
There would be so much less aggro with proper ratios on rides. Needs to be 95% main queue, let RAP and FT fight over the rest.
Click to expand...

If you limit RAP to 5% of a rides capacity but don’t limit the number of RAP guests on park you create a situation where RAP guests might get on very little in a day.
 
DiogoJ42 said:
Just like the rest of us then.
Click to expand...

Yes but the parks have a guest limit (we see them sell out) so it’s the same principle, we can argue about the rights or wrongs of the limits they choose but it’s not like Towers would allow 60,000 people to enter the park, so yes there is a limit to all guests.
 
Is that not what the pre-booked system does? There's currently a RAP cap in park for this very reason. How tight eligibility is doesn't massively matter for throughput, just the % of people in park that's RAP.
 
Poisson said:
Is that not what the pre-booked system does? There's currently a RAP cap in park for this very reason. How tight eligibility is doesn't massively matter for throughput, just the % of people in park that's RAP.
Click to expand...
Yep, just it assumes all rap users will go on the same rides at the same times, it's not responsive as such
 
I'd say the system mostly worked. The biggest problem was the capacity issue which meant that the physical RAP queue was sometimes 30 minutes+ on Galactica and Wicker Man but that's an issue with the park rather than with the RAP system that should be fixed as more capacity becomes available. The only issue I had with the app itself was it would sometimes throw up an error when scanning the QR code, not sure why.
 
Thameslink Rail said:
The biggest problem was the capacity issue which meant that the physical RAP queue was sometimes 30 minutes+ on Galactica and Wicker Man but that's an issue with the park rather than with the RAP system that should be fixed as more capacity becomes available
Click to expand...

Interesting because that is an issue with the RAP system imo. The digital queue should be telling people they can’t currently join if it exceeds a set number, which is what the previous system at Chessington and Lego was doing.

If they’ve removed that feature across all the parks that doesn’t bode well.
 
The thing is, if you scan at the entrance to the ride and it tells you to come back in 50 minutes because the standard queue is 50 minutes long, shouldn't you get straight on when you return after 50 minutes? Otherwise you're having to wait longer for having a disability?

Or have I misunderstood how this new system works?
 
Bowser said:
Interesting because that is an issue with the RAP system imo. The digital queue should be telling people they can’t currently join if it exceeds a set number, which is what the previous system at Chessington and Lego was doing.

If they’ve removed that feature across all the parks that doesn’t bode well.
Click to expand...
I agree but this would depend on whether the RAP team were aware that several rides were on reduced capacity. The number of RAP guests in the queues probably would have been fine if the rides were on full capacity.
 
Thameslink Rail said:
No, you scan the code at the RAP entrance which starts the timer, you then enter the RAP queue and ride. If you have a timeout of 90 minutes and the RAP queue is 30 minutes then you will have 60 minutes left after the ride.
Click to expand...
That's really interesting actually, as it still leaves big chances of RAP guests getting on more rides than normal guests (some of that timeout will be used travelling to the next ride, eating dinner etc and the first ride of the day is still a shorter queue than the standard queue).

Merlin missed a trick. They could have taken away that advantage if they used what I suggested above, which may have stopped a few people bothering to get RAP if they didn't really need it.
 
Thameslink Rail said:
I agree but this would depend on whether the RAP team were aware that several rides were on reduced capacity. The number of RAP guests in the queues probably would have been fine if the rides were on full capacity.
Click to expand...

It should be automatically linked to queue time though no? If the ride is on a 90 minute queue, regardless of whether it’s on 1 or 3 trains the percentage of slots open should be a ratio of that.

Otherwise all 200 RAP users could theoretically swarm on said ride and disproportionately affect the main queue whilst themselves facing an intolerable physical wait time.

I don’t think an onsite RAP team being notified of real time operations is viable.
 
Bowser said:
It should be automatically linked to queue time though no? If the ride is on a 90 minute queue, regardless of whether it’s on 1 or 3 trains the percentage of slots open should be a ratio of that.

Otherwise all 200 RAP users could theoretically swarm on said ride and disproportionately affect the main queue whilst themselves facing an intolerable physical wait time.

I don’t think an onsite RAP team being notified of real time operations is viable.
Click to expand...
Sorry I misread your original post and thought you were talking about the number of guests in the RAP queue. I agree although that system would have struggled yesterday as Wicker Man, Galactica and Smiler were regularly 90+ with the other coasters not much lower, there just wasn't enough capacity to go around.
 
They have upped the availability on rap since the introduction of mandatory pre-books, yesterday there was 1500 slots available which ofc still didn't nearly meet the demand of people wanting or needing to book it.
So there was more people in the rap queues than the last couple years but still better than if they weren't capping it when they were all just as long as the main queues.
The app fixes the issue that the staff put a lower time out than what's on the queue board or when overwhelmed they just write nothing but the main issue with the app was it was giving errors constantly when scanning qr codes.

Anyway significant chunk of visitors now have rap, most people qualify regardless of if they use it or not, any none off peak dates will get booked up the minute they're released, Merlin will get cancelled if they do anything about it, people with physical disabilities get to stay at home.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top