Ride Access Pass Systems and Disabled Access (pre 2024)

[rob666]

Major crowd avoider here!
I have been waiting for a minor lump to be removed (one already done) for the best part of three years...safe, benign, but growing.
That weakened my immunity, so my usual general "crowd avoidance" became desperate crowd evasion, and I avoid/ed crowds at all costs.
That meant very few coasters in peak times, almost no trips out to the coast, and walking swiftly out of places that suddenly become crowded.
I shop at very off peak times, avoid public transport, and buy petrol by card at a 24 hour staffless asda forecourt.
Because I also have arthritis, it means using an access pass at Blackpool at busier times (often after work), when I'm struggling, unless the queue to get the band is longer than the combined ride queues all day, which was the case on Sunday!
I have always walked away from crowds, scariest experience ever was walking over the railway bridge behind the Stretford End back in the late seventies...never done that again. Absolutely terrifying!
Likewise, never done a peak Saturday at the Towers in thirty years, avoid school holiday outings, never done the fireworks.
My perfect day...and I usually get quite a few each year, is a pretty much empty park.
Cattle pens I still find difficult, but I've never had a full blown panic attack.
Smiler pit is pretty offensive, and could have been done so much better with a "round the back" queueline somewhere.
Likewise, the original logflume pen was hellish, hot and long, so much better when it went round the lake.
I can completely understand that some struggle queueing "in one spot", it kills my knees and hips, that is why I have to drink beer.

 

[Funcone]

It’s impossible to know for sure how many people are abusing disabled queuing systems. I don’t think the parks themselves really know, and if they did, I don’t think they’d share it with the public. I suppose there are two ways people could ‘abuse’ the system. One, is if someone with a genuine disability doesn’t use the system as it’s meant to be used, e.g. going up with a bigger group than they’re supposed to have. Two, someone without a genuine disability uses the system.

It is possible that some guests do accidentally mis-use the system because they don’t understand it. I’m a bit rusty on how the systems work, but in the not too distant past different Merlin parks had different systems which could genuinely confuse guests. Hopefully Merlin has standardised their system by now. However, one suspects a lot of abuse is deliberate, particularly towards the end of the day when most guests have had all day to familiarise themselves with the system.

As an employee you can probably get a sense of whether a guest is deliberately misusing the system, e.g.

-They refer to it as Fast Track
-It’s near the end of the day when they’ve presumably been in the park all day.
-When you try to explain the system they clearly don’t want to listen.
-They’re aggressive towards staff who are politely trying to explain how the system works.

It’s impossible to tell for sure though. One suspects it is a particular problem in the UK. As Enter Valhalla says, it seems logical that the longer the queues are, the more people will try to queue jump. Queuing is a particular problem at certain UK parks. The UK is also generally seen as one of the most individualistic cultures. For example, one major study ranked countries for how individualistic people were. The UK came third:

https://clearlycultural.com/geert-hofstede-cultural-dimensions/individualism/

Without wanting to get too political (okay, I’m about to), the UK does tend to see rule breakers as mavericks and rule followers as boring/naïve/stupid. I’m not just talking about Party Gate, or Barnard Castle, or the expenses scandal… but generally the impression the public get from our ‘leaders’ is that following the rules is mugs. You do meet a lot of people in the UK who think that things like queue jumping is a sign of intelligence, rather than rudeness, or a lack of empathy.

The US is one of the only countries that might be more individualistic than the UK, and it sounds like it’s a problem there too. For example, Bill Zanetti talks about this in a recent episode of The Guest Experience Show:

 

[WillPS]

A reason often cited for RAP is the inability to cope with crowds, or crowded situations. This leads me on to two thoughts: firstly, I don't think I've ever been in a queueline that feels 'crowded' - it feels like a queue. You have people in front and behind of you, but unless behaviour is poor (which granted, sometimes it is), they shouldn't be actively jostling you, or acutely invading your personal space.

Secondly, and perhaps more pertinently, if the density of people within a queue is difficult to cope with, how do individuals cope with the density of people around the rest of the park? Or at supermarkets, or elsewhere in general life?

Regarding point 1 - I get distressed when unfamiliar people around me are getting in my space one way or another. One of the advantages of being 192cm, big build, male, bald and probably most importantly quite confident is that I'll tell anyone who's acting obnoxiously to decist. Even the ones who take exception normally correct their behaviour. It's quite understandable that others wouldn't feel so confident and would therefore cognitively avoid a physical queueline altogether.

You might call that a 'choice' but I would ask you to consider - if you were physically disabled such that you could physically walk through a queue line and stand for short periods of time, but to do so would be very uncomfortable/distressing, and you normally use a wheelchair, is it really acceptable to be asked to just bear with it?

This is the reality of dealing with considering mental health disabilities by the way, it's way easier to discriminate without realising that you are.

Regarding point 2 - the key difference is that the park is huge and if you find yourself consumed by a crowd of people you just get out of it, straight away more or less or within a matter of seconds. This is a day to day challenge for someone with anxiety/agoraphobia and something they have to deal with all the time, so is likely to be doable. Far rarer and harder-to-deal-with would be contemplating being toward the front of a long queue and having to walk back past the entire queue in a distressed state trying to make an escape.

 

[Deejay]

As part of this process, some attractions have already been made accessible to guests with physical and visual disabilities. The respective minimum requirements and clearances per attraction can be found in our guidelines, which are available on site at our visitor information office.

From Europa park I’ve heard the government does not allow access for cognitive needs??

 

[Enter Valhalla]

I agree with the point that that the UK is very individualistic, and this sadly leads to people doing things for themselves rather than thinking about the greater good of everyone. Look at how many idiots there were during the pandemic who refused to wear masks for example. When you go abroad, you see this attitude far less. Central to Northern Europe for example, are far more about doing things for the greater good, and you’ll see far less people try to bend the rules.

But going back to my previous point, it sort of feels like the Merlin parks in the UK have gone too far towards accommodating this attitude, which sadly has led to people using ride access passes as an excuse to “queue jump” and looking for any reason to qualify for a pass, whereas people with the same reasons, in other countries, or even in the UK 15 years ago, would never have even thought that they might qualify for a RAP, and would have still had a good day using the main queues and keeping the RAP queues clear for people who have greater need to use them.

It’s only in very recent years that we’ve seen the parks put limits on who qualifies, and this isn’t at all surprising when you see RAP queues going round the block and entire trains being filled with RAP holders.

As previously mentioned, many of Merlin’s rides were never built to accommodate a main queue, fastrack queue and RAP queues of the volumes that they now get, and this leads to a very miserable experience for the people stuck in the slow moving main queues.

 

[Matt N]

Weirdly, RAP only really seems to be a thing of any significance at the Merlin parks.

Even other UK parks don’t seem to have significant RAP usage. I didn’t notice any RAP at Blackpool last time I went, Paultons didn’t seem to have an awful lot of RAP (if any), Drayton Manor didn’t really appear to have much (if any) RAP usage on my recent visit, Oakwood doesn’t appear to have any significant RAP usage (FastPass, on the other hand, was very significant on the one peak day I visited on, but that’s besides the point)… heavy RAP usage seems to be a very Merlin thing.

I wonder why?

 

[pluk]

I wonder why?

Because they allow it to be?

 

[rob666]

Blackpool has regular, and frequent rap use.
I'm one of the users, though, as I tend to go off peak, and my needs vary a great deal, I don't always need/use it.

 

[Matt N]

Because they allow it to be?

My question was more; how is it that there appears to be way more RAP usage at the Merlin parks? On average, every park must surely have a broadly similar percentage of disabled visitors (broadly speaking, of course; some will naturally get more than others), so what is it that Merlin does that means that RAP is so much more heavily used in their parks than it is in other parks in the UK? What do Paultons and the like do differently with theirs?

 

[tayspru]

My question was more; how is it that there appears to be way more RAP usage at the Merlin parks? On average, every park must surely have a broadly similar percentage of disabled visitors (broadly speaking, of course; some will naturally get more than others), so what is it that Merlin does that means that RAP is so much more heavily used in their parks than it is in other parks in the UK? What do Paultons and the like do differently with theirs?

The difference is 100% Facebook groups - because there are multiple Merlin attractions that all have the same RAP process, it’s very easy for your average parkgoer to find out what to do to get a RAP, and then apply for one because they can not because they need it.

 

[Shaggy_Dog_]

My question was more; how is it that there appears to be way more RAP usage at the Merlin parks? On average, every park must surely have a broadly similar percentage of disabled visitors (broadly speaking, of course; some will naturally get more than others), so what is it that Merlin does that means that RAP is so much more heavily used in their parks than it is in other parks in the UK? What do Paultons and the like do differently with theirs?

I’d think that it’s also down to the fact that at a park like Towers a not insignificant amount of people feel that they need to get themselves on RAP to try and even things up against the Fast Track users that are whizzing through and filling up trains whilst the regular queue seems to stand still.

Look at a park like Paulton’s where everyone is on an equal footing and can see that the regular queue is being worked through fairly or parks that only have minimal use of a fast pass and compare that to Towers where it can feel unfair with regards to fast pass users jumping in and it creates a system that people want to get one over on.

 

[Squiggs]

My question was more; how is it that there appears to be way more RAP usage at the Merlin parks? On average, every park must surely have a broadly similar percentage of disabled visitors (broadly speaking, of course; some will naturally get more than others), so what is it that Merlin does that means that RAP is so much more heavily used in their parks than it is in other parks in the UK? What do Paultons and the like do differently with theirs?

Surely that comes down to ride availability and attendance?

If you take Drayton Manor for example, broadly speaking they have the same number of rides aimed at adults as Alton Towers, but get around half the number of visitors. Obviously there is variance for ride capacity and popularity, but at any given time it means that customers with Easy Access Passes are more spread out around the park.

At Alton be comparison, a larger number of RAP holders are concentrated onto the same number of rides, even more so with are closures like Hex and Enterprise.

 

[BarryZola]

I'm with Tayspru. I just think more people are made aware that there's a chance of getting a RAP due to the prominence of AT on social media and they see others easily getting it so grab one for theirselves (and their party) too.

 

[Matt N]

Surely that comes down to ride availability and attendance?

If you take Drayton Manor for example, broadly speaking they have the same number of rides aimed at adults as Alton Towers, but get around half the number of visitors. Obviously there is variance for ride capacity and popularity, but at any given time it means that customers with Easy Access Passes are more spread out around the park.

At Alton be comparison, a larger number of RAP holders are concentrated onto the same number of rides, even more so with are closures like Hex and Enterprise.

The weird thing is, though, Chessington (as an example) doesn’t get a huge amount more visitors than DMP does (DMP was quoted at 1.2 million when the takeover happened in 2020, while Chessington got around 1.5 million in 2019), and they now share a broadly similar target market (families and younger children). Chessington and DMP probably have quite a similar composition of rides (both have 4 coasters and a wide selection of family-orientated filler rides).

In spite of this, RAP is commonly said to be heavily used at Chessington compared to any other park in Britain; of the Merlin parks, it’s always Chessington that seems to be reported as having the toughest struggle with RAP. Whereas Drayton Manor, even on their family rides, seemed to have far more limited quantities of it, even when I visited on a busy day in the summer holidays.

I know that Chessington has well documented struggles with ride capacity, but Drayton doesn’t exactly have high capacity rides either, from what I can tell. What about Chessington is different, I wonder? I can’t imagine that 300,000 more visitors would make such a profound difference on their own…

 

[Danny]

As mentioned previously, it's very much the ease of finding out about RAP and how to claim it through social media. The smaller independent parks don't have the theme park equivalent of MumsNet that the Merlin ones do, in particular Lego and Chessington.

 

[Alsty]

Is it also because the Merlin parks attract some of the biggest queues, so there's more incentive to try and jump the queues?

 

[Squiggs]

The weird thing is, though, Chessington (as an example) doesn’t get a huge amount more visitors than DMP does (DMP was quoted at 1.2 million when the takeover happened in 2020, while Chessington got around 1.5 million in 2019), and they now share a broadly similar target market (families and younger children). Chessington and DMP probably have quite a similar composition of rides (both have 4 coasters and a wide selection of family-orientated filler rides).

Chessington has less than 3/4s of the rides that Drayton Manor have. So they have 300,000 more guests per a year spread over a significantly smaller number of attractions. (Though again, capacity and popularity of the specific attractions also come into play, as well as suitability of different access types)

 

[pluk]

My question was more; how is it that there appears to be way more RAP usage at the Merlin parks?

And my answer stays the same! Other parks don't allow their access pass users to gain such a huge advantage over other visitors, and have historically more robust processes for issuing passes. Use feeds demand for more use, and Merlin have allowed that cycle to grow hugely into the unmanageable mess we have now. Other parks haven't.

 

[Funcone]

I'm a bit rusty on Merlin's processes. Clearly the ride access pass is heavily used, but depending on how much things have changed in recent years, maybe not quite as much as some people think. You've potentially got ride access passes, parent swaps (which can also be abused very easily, assuming they haven't improved the system) and priority passes (although someone said they might have stopped issuing them) - which are given out as a form of 'service recovery' when someone's had a negative experience. On some rides you might also have Fast Tracks coming down the same line as well. It might not always be obvious to other guests who's got a ride access pass, who's got a parent swap, who's got a priority pass and who's got a Fast Track.

 

[Thameslink Rail]

Parent swaps appear to have gone (although I have seen a lot of complaints about its removal). As for entrances and queues, yes it does get very complicated as the Smiler has five entrances with three merging downstairs (Main, Fasttrack and ambulant RAP) who can access the baggage hold, single rider bypasses the baggage hold to stop guests joining the main queue after the merge point, then there's the non-ambulant RAP accessed via the shop. I would love to see the average queue ratio. I can't think of any major rides where RAP and Fasttrack have the same entrance but it's likely that guests in the main queue won't know who is who.