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Ride Availability/Operations 2022-24

To play devils advocate. When both parks had at least one major coaster closed, Thorpe still had bigger queues on average.

Even the flats all had 1+ hour queues at Thorpe.

It’s half term. It’s scarefest/fright nights. Do you honestly expect queues to be shorter?

Sure. You can blame availability but when everyone says Thorpe has better capacity I terms of rides you’d be expect Thorpe to have lesser queues?



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Danscott22 said:
Bianca will have the nerve to say it's been a great season come November 10th as well, I can just see it coming. Absolutely abysmal.
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To be fair, what do you expect her to say? A large part of her role is to be a PR hype woman for the park; she’s hardly going to say “it’s been dreadful” or even “it’s been a difficult season” or something along those lines.

Her role requires her to hype things up and put out a positive spin, which is also why I think people read too much into her describing this season as “the best ever” at the beginning of the season. She is always going to say good things, because her role is to encourage people to visit and put out a positive message. If she said “it’s been dreadful”, or “it’s going to be a mediocre year”, she wouldn’t be encouraging too many people to visit.
 
Matt N said:
To be fair, what do you expect her to say? A large part of her role is to be a PR hype woman for the park; she’s hardly going to say “it’s been dreadful” or even “it’s been a difficult season” or something along those lines.

Her role requires her to hype things up and put out a positive spin, which is also why I think people read too much into her describing this season as “the best ever” at the beginning of the season. She is always going to say good things, because her role is to encourage people to visit and put out a positive message. If she said “it’s been dreadful”, or “it’s going to be a mediocre year”, she wouldn’t be encouraging too many people to visit.
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For me, what would go a long way is if she admits (either in an official statement or via a vlogger/enthusiast interview) that she and the park know its been a tough year for everyone - both the park and guests - for various reasons (she doesn't have to say specifically what they are), and that they've identified what's gone wrong and that they are going to do their very best (and then some) to put things right and make sure its not repeated next year.

As you say, she'll always big it up because that's what she's paid to do, but some down to earth, grounded honesty would go a long way too.
 
You’re right Matt that Bianca is not going to disparage the same park she works for, but by the same token there does need to be some accountability for the broken promises and shocking decisions. Let’s face it, the audience that Bianca’s videos reach are the same audience who know this season has been abysmal. Some honesty is the least that can now be offered.

In respect of comparing queue times between Thorpe and Alton, one would surely have to start by ascertaining that the visitor numbers for that day were similar before you can draw any conclusion about capacity/operations.
 
Specifically made an account to comment on this after reading these forums for a solid 10 years.

The operations today were appalling. Stuck in the galactica queue for close to three hours whilst it broke down, didn't manage to get on any other coasters because as soon as we started walking there, they had either shut or the queue was 2hrs+ because everything else was shut. With the skyride out, it's not like we could easily move about the park to get to rides when they opened either.

All in all, we were there from about 10:30-8:30 and between us only managed Galactica, Curse, Spinball, Battle Galleons, and Hex. We did also do mine tours and daz games, but when you're at a theme park you kind of expect to be able to go on the rides, no?

To add salt to the wound, they weren't giving out the "come again for free passes" unless you bothered to take time out of your day to wait at guest services and complain, which we did. Doesn't feel like nearly enough compensation for how incredibly poor today was to be honest.

On the plus side though, staff were all fantastic and galactica felt pretty smooth!
 
AltonLover123 said:
To play devils advocate. When both parks had at least one major coaster closed, Thorpe still had bigger queues on average.
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Thorpe has always been a sh*show at Halloween, it's a smaller park so it's obviously going to have longer queues when it's near capacity. Alton's more recent problems however have been rides going down for long periods throughout the day, not opening at the start of the day, closing early or not opening at all.

You expect queues to be longer at Scarefest, yes, but you don't expect half the coaster lineup to be out of action for large periods of the day like they have been recently.

I have been going to the park for over 25 years at this point (dear god I'm getting old), and I've never seen anything as bad as these past two seasons for ride ops and availability. So much so that I haven't bothered going to Scarefest in recent years. You expect queues, but the overall level of service they're providing their customers with at the moment is utterly shameful.

As @Matt N says, it's unlikely Bianca would ever come out and publicly address the many issues with this season, it's been on her watch ultimately. Nobody is going to say they know the company they run has gotten worse whilst they've been in charge and that they're 'sorry 'bout that.'

Not really a wise career move.
 
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It’s fine for guest services to hand out a free pass for another day but that doesn’t cover the petrol and time to get there, time taken off work in annual leave, cost of accommodation, parking, food and drink in the park or at the accommodation etc.

A free ticket or a fast pass just don’t cut it anymore
 
I was going to say people should be demanding refunds but I am seeing comments on Alton Towers News and Discussions group on Facebook saying that guest services were refusing refunds and were trying to palm people off with fast track.
 
They may have upped the engineer pay but so has everywhere else. Where I used to work, same engineering principles but indoor, fixed shift pattern etc is now at 46k and a hell of a lot closer to housing etc.
 
TPW’s video today from yesterday shows just how truly dire it was. The Dark Forest in particular had dozens of customers just sitting round looking miserable. There’ll be people who’ve attended in recent days who’ll have left and said they’ll never come back.
 
From a legal perspective I think it’s too much of a grey area in terms of what they can actually do for refunds.

They state they can’t guarantee what is available, and what won’t but surely at some point with what they have advertised on their website as being at Alton and what you get when you arrive entitles you to get a refund for the service not being completed.

Needs to be looked into.
 
We’re on platinum MAPs, we’ve never missed a Scarefest.

But we’ll probably give this one a miss.

I know on the face of it we’re paying our MAP anyway, but it’s rare for us to spend less than £100 over the course of a day, and how many more are there out there seeing all this unfolding on social media and thinking the same thing?

They really need to drill down into this - reliability and ops are in the toilet. Why? Can’t recruit? Why? Keep asking why until it leads them to a solution - it’ll be somewhere in the region of money, conditions, transport, living arrangements, all of which are within Merlin’s power to put right.
 
We're due to go on Sunday/Monday. Fortunately my son enjoys the water park more than the theme park these days so that's pretty much a sure thing but basically my plan now is for us to arrive well into the afternoon so things are actually open and hopefully just get a ride on Wickerman, Thirteen, Curse and Hex. If we manage that i'll consider it a very successful visit which seems a low bar! Doesn't seem any point arriving before lunch atm.
 
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