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Ride Availability/Operations 2022-24

We were in the queue at Chessington and Dragon’s Fury broke down. Upon exiting the queue line we got a free fast track for any ride in the park (which I’ve never seen them do before).

If you are behind Chessington in that regard you are in big big trouble.

It’s not acceptable to allow people to queue for over an hour or two for the ride to breakdown and evacuate the queue and receive nothing in the way of compensation for time wasted.
 
Bowser said:
I compare this to Paulton's where we were recently stuck on the lift hill of Velociraptor for all of 5 minutes and were still immediately given a fast pass ticket.
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And also Flamingo land where we were stuck on Kumali’s lift hill for 20 mins and when we got off there was senior management there who apologised profusely and gave us free fast track for the rest of the day.
 
It was after covid that they stopped issuing exit passes. It was in the time when they didn’t have fastrack in operation and exits were supposedly one way - therefore there wasn’t a logistical way to make them work.

In the end they just never came back. I understand that they didn’t want people saving up exit passes all year to use them on Scarefest and Fireworks days causing issues for fastrack queues (which absolutely was happening).

But there is nothing stopping them dating the passes and only allowing them to be used on the day they are issued to avoid that problem.
 
AT86 said:
But there is nothing stopping them dating the passes and only allowing them to be used on the day they are issued to avoid that problem
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Yeah i'm almost positive the passes we were given at Paulton's were dated. We didn't even use it (as was quite late in the day and queues were short anyway), if it was undated presumably i would have retained it like the dreadful person i am.
 
I've only seen them issued to people on the ride and in the station, but I guess it's at the manager's discretion. They wouldn't give them to everybody in a 60 minute queue that's for sure.
 
If 'saving up' is a problem, just use different colours for months, or even just change colours/logos for the events; it can't be more than a couple of hours work creating a set of them for the entire park!

Miserable that they are giving people nothing after queueing for hours.
 
So if 800 people are told to fast track something then that's great for those guests.

However if you're already waiting 45 minutes for another ride and suddenly 800 people with fasttrack turn up then you're going to be annoyed.
 
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MattyH said:
So if 800 people are told to fast track something theb that's great for those guests.

However if you're already waiting 45 minutes for another ride and suddenly 800 people with fasttrack turn up then you're going to be annoyed.
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You're assuming everyone booted out of the queue with a jump-ticket returns at the same time, which is a bit of a leap, no? I'd expect some would use them straight away on another attraction (not the same one neccessarily), the rest would trickle back in to the same ride after it reopens or simply not be used at all. I was given one of these passes a few times in my peak-visiting years, I don't think I ever actually used them tho, always 'saved for a busier day' (which never came).
 
I remember get quite a few of these! Got one once in 2015 the very quiet year of the crash- I remember I couldn’t give it away for love nor money! I kept trying to use it and it was so quiet the ride host would give it back as the main queue was so short! I think it came to the point where I just kept it as a souvenir!

I’m not going to lie I did a save a few up for night rides on Wickerman in its first year!

I think these days to get some sort of compensation for a breakdown you need to go to guest services! I witnessed a Galactica breakdown were people were stuck in the position just out of the station for about 20 mins - some people were quite panicked during it and very anxious. They just recommended to the people once they got off the train to speak to a member of staff- who probably sent them to the guest services queue! Whereas definitely a couple of years ago they would’ve all go a few priority passes!
 
Poisson said:
Ride evac, yes. Queue evac, no.
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If you’ve waited two hours for a ride and are in the second half of the queue then it does seem unfair that you then need to start again waiting two hours for something else. The issue is many people saving those passes up to use on fireworks night, I know I used to. They should give something to anyone who waited more than an hour for something, but need to have an expiry date for that week.
 
If they'd given them out to everyone they kicked out of a queue after an hour over the weekend they'd have needed thousands and it would just result in people waiting an hour to use fasttrack & main queues not moving at all. Reliability needs to be better for them to be able to offer FT as compensation.
 
John said:
If they'd given them out to everyone they kicked out of a queue after an hour over the weekend they'd have needed thousands and it would just result in people waiting an hour to use fasttrack & main queues not moving at all. Reliability needs to be better for them to be able to offer FT as compensation.
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Is the reliability that much worse than 20 years ago? I can remember getting a ticket to enter via the exit after something closed down back then, but I'd probably waited two hours or more. I don't then recall issues with redeeming them.
 
John said:
If they'd given them out to everyone they kicked out of a queue after an hour over the weekend they'd have needed thousands and it would just result in people waiting an hour to use fasttrack & main queues not moving at all. Reliability needs to be better for them to be able to offer FT as compensation.
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So I suppose the best solution is actually maintain the rides properly. Few years ago downtime was rare, now it happens every day on every ride without fail
 
John said:
If they'd given them out to everyone they kicked out of a queue after an hour over the weekend they'd have needed thousands and it would just result in people waiting an hour to use fasttrack & main queues not moving at all. Reliability needs to be better for them to be able to offer FT as compensation.
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jon81uk said:
Is the reliability that much worse than 20 years ago? I can remember getting a ticket to enter via the exit after something closed down back then, but I'd probably waited two hours or more. I don't then recall issues with redeeming them.
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There's a fair few factors affecting it, but certainly at Fireworks it was god awful.

Ride availability wise:
  • Galactica on two craft, going up and down like a yo-yo
  • Spinball up and down
  • Oblivion opening pretty late on
  • No Nemesis
  • No Hex
Then you've got other factors which also affect the queue times. For the other topics, but RAP being more prevalent and Fastrack being heavily used as a form of compensation to those complaining at Guest Services too. And let's not forget the old trick of saving up those FTs from earlier in the season to use at Fireworks.
 
Craig said:
And let's not forget the old trick of saving up those FTs from earlier in the season to use at Fireworks.
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Yes I will admit to having done that myself many years ago, so it is something that needs changing to give a reasonable deadline on any recovery pass given after a long queue due to a breakdown. But I'm sure it used to be a lot more standard to give those passes out when there was a breakdown and a multi-hour queue.
 
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