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Ride Availability/Operations 2022-24

An absolute joke - Thirteen stopped, Air running 110 min queues ( a 10 min max ride in anyone's books), hEX closed, Spinball shut., rapids on and off. RMT +30 mins queues, WM on usual 60+ min, Rita closed - what absolute chaos luckily my MAP finishes soon as tomorrow will be last time visiting for a long while. The disregard for customers is staggering and that is before you factor in the terrible F&B offerings!
 
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It sounds like it’s been incredibly, incredibly poor today. I hate turning on the park as I love it, but it’s just not good enough. If it begins to lose people, then so be it. It needs a good kick up the arse by the sounds of it. We are in the fifth weekend of main season operations, and it is simply not good enough.
 
Why are rides breaking down so frequently and why does this only seem to affect Merlin parks. Even PB is running rings round them this year .
 
Anyone sat at home looking at queue times might have thought the park was very busy today. It wasn't - a combination of closed rides, poor reliability and reduced capacity resulted in excessive queue times for the rides that were open. We walked through the Galactica queue when it said 110min but it looked far longer (with the section going down to the car park more than half full), with a fastrack queue to the entrance and a RAP queue backing up the wheelchair ramp slowing things down further. Those at the back of the FT queue were probably looking at 60+ minute wait.

The park is a mess as the moment. Anyone who has to travel significant distances and/or pay for entry should stay away.
 
Efteling last year multiple closures over a 3 day stay - not able to get in the restaurant even though about 4 houses down in Bosrijk and seeing multiple tables empty plus an evac of the dutchman stuck for 45 mins - so it's not just AT but the offering with multiple ride closures over the past two years is lamentable, especially if you have walked miles to get on one of the rides reprted to be open only to find it has been subsequently closed after your 30 minute detour.
 
Wait, the 110 minute queue was an underestimate?

Blimey, I’ve never heard of that before…

Out of interest @John, what sort of throughput was Galactica getting on 1 train for the queue to be that long?
 
On the plus side, I heard Thirteen’s operations were very good today! If you timed, what sort of throughput was that getting?

Sorry to keep asking so many questions; as you probably know, I do have a high degree of interest in this sort of thing…
 
Matt N said:
Wait, the 110 minute queue was an underestimate?

Blimey, I’ve never heard of that before…

Out of interest @John, what sort of throughput was Galactica getting on 1 train for the queue to be that long?
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Well let's do some guesstimating here. Galactica on 3 probably gets 40-42 dispatches per hour. On 2 crafts it'll be roughly 26-28 on 1 station and 30-32 on 2 stations. So on just 1 craft I can't see there being more than 15 dispatches, which is every 4 mins. So that's 420pph on 1, 728-896pph on 2 depending on the number of stations and 1120-1176pph on 3 on max ops
 
I've not visited this season but the posts from TowersStreet socials have been a stark echo of the state of the park I've been told from family and friends this season. The brand damage is already being done, how disappointing...
 
That’s no necessarily true! People also aren’t going to visit just on its name if the time they spend there is abysmal!
 
Maybe we need to ask Shawn @ TPWW for his "Expert" opinion? As it's "always so great to be back in Alton Towers isn't it Charlotte?". Would be interested to see how he tried to gloss over the current operations chaos to his YouTube followers.
 
I grew up reading about how dire the DIC/Late Tussauds era was, and felt so lucky to have narrowly missed it.

Surely that must've been better compared to whatever the hell we currently have to put up with is...
 
Kraken27 said:
Maybe we need to ask Shawn @ TPWW for his "Expert" opinion? As it's "always so great to be back in Alton Towers isn't it Charlotte?". Would be interested to see how he tried to gloss over the current operations chaos to his YouTube followers.
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In fairness to him, he wouldn’t. You don’t have to like them to know they are usually pretty honest when situations are poor!
 
John said:
Anyone sat at home looking at queue times might have thought the park was very busy today. It wasn't - a combination of closed rides, poor reliability and reduced capacity resulted in excessive queue times for the rides that were open. We walked through the Galactica queue when it said 110min but it looked far longer (with the section going down to the car park more than half full), with a fastrack queue to the entrance and a RAP queue backing up the wheelchair ramp slowing things down further. Those at the back of the FT queue were probably looking at 60+ minute wait.

The park is a mess as the moment. Anyone who has to travel significant distances and/or pay for entry should stay away.
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I normally collect the Sun vouchers for my yearly visit to Towers but this year then the promotion ran I decided that I couldn’t be bothered with it this season given the reports of queue times and poor ride availability. The park really doesn’t seem very appealing this year to me and that’s such a pity that these issues have come to such a head this year.
 
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