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Ride Availability/Operations 2022-24

Brexit has also played an impact, along with H&S changes (procedures) post-2015 and general poor management over recent years.

Sorting out availability is a massive priority for Alton. The good thing is they know it and dollar is going in to address it.
 
Alton Towers without a doubt have quite a decent inventory of spare parts. You cannot run rides as hard as they do without it.

I don't think that's the main issue with availability though.....for the most part. I think the issues lie else where.
 
jon81uk said:
Visiting in the early 90s we certainly wouldn’t have time to get in the monorail and all the way back to the car for lunch and back to the park and still get everything done
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That's a fair point, i'm probably thinking of Chessington or Thorpe Park in regards to that.
 
Great to see towers getting rides open on time again🤣 seriously today has been a disaster so far. Having to delay the races because runners can't get in. Should just be an event for the runners because the 'spectators' are just going for rides
 
Ethan said:
Great to see towers getting rides open on time again🤣 seriously today has been a disaster so far. Having to delay the races because runners can't get in. Should just be an event for the runners because the 'spectators' are just going for rides
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The event will rely on selling both runner and speculator tickets to be financially viable. They may however need to tweak the allocation of runner vs spectator tickets as the event becomes more popular.

The rides are due to open on a staggered basis depending on where they are in relation to the running course. If the race has been delayed it is likely the ride opening will be pushed back too.
 
Ethan said:
What are the ops like today? Hour queue for all the coasters that's significantly busier than I was expecting
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I think a year ago, not many people were aware you could buy spectator tickets and enter the park at a discounted rate than usual. I remember talk of people riding oblivion on their own in the dark last year and 2021!

This year, I think lots more people have cottoned on to the fact they can have a day out at the park at a cheaper rate than normal, hence the hefty queues.
 
Unfortunately all rides were on reduced capacity at the weekend, I’ve no idea on the capacity during the weekend, but capacity was lower than sone 10-4 days.
Oblivion 1 station 4 shuttles
Smiler 3 cars
Galactica 1 station 2 crafts
Wicker man 2 trains

Also with RMT, TH13TEEN and curse being closed for winter maintenance and the loss of the three retro rides, it did mean availability was low. Then on Saturday there was a large amount of broken down rides which opened late or didn’t open at all.

The only thing I would say is that queue times were generally wrong, due to there being very little fastrack and RAP compared to usual days.
 
djtruefitt said:
The only thing I would say is that queue times were generally wrong, due to there being very little fastrack and RAP compared to usual days.
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Purely anecdotal but personally i find the Merlin app queue times to be way off. Especially with the parks i visit regularly (Chessington and LegoLand), i can typically visually see the queue line and make a much better estimate (Eg Skylion will say 60 minutes when it's closer to 20 minutes, Dragon will say 10 minutes when it's more like 45 minutes).

I don't know if this is because the updates are way out of sync or they're trying to drive people towards certain areas (or Fastpass purchases).
 
Bowser said:
Purely anecdotal but personally i find the Merlin app queue times to be way off. Especially with the parks i visit regularly (Chessington and LegoLand), i can typically visually see the queue line and make a much better estimate (Eg Skylion will say 60 minutes when it's closer to 20 minutes, Dragon will say 10 minutes when it's more like 45 minutes).

I don't know if this is because the updates are way out of sync or they're trying to drive people towards certain areas (or Fastpass purchases).
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In truth, I think it's more likely that due to RAP/FT volumes, they struggle to actually know how long queues are.

When I worked on Rita at Alton in 2007, RAP was effectively non existent aside from the occasional guest in a wheelchair, and fastrack was less than 100 guests per hour. The ride also had 2 or 3 extra staff, allowing for 2 more platform hosts and an entrance host. All of this meant guests could be properly informed before joining the queue and the ride achieved a consistent 900/hr or an occasional 1000. The record that season was 1060/hr. Imagine that!

Each queue area in 2007 was reliably circa 30 minutes.

Now? More like 45.ti 50.
 
AstroDan said:
In truth, I think it's more likely that due to RAP/FT volumes, they struggle to actually know how long queues are.

When I worked on Rita at Alton in 2007, RAP was effectively non existent aside from the occasional guest in a wheelchair, and fastrack was less than 100 guests per hour. The ride also had 2 or 3 extra staff, allowing for 2 more platform hosts and an entrance host. All of this meant guests could be properly informed before joining the queue and the ride achieved a consistent 900/hr or an occasional 1000. The record that season was 1060/hr. Imagine that!

Each queue area in 2007 was reliably circa 30 minutes.

Now? More like 45.ti 50.
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Are there less staff in general now then?

And more Fast-tracks sold?
 
There are absolutely less staff on various rides than in the past. For example it was very common that flat rides such as Tea cups, Twirling Toadstool, Enterprise etc would have at least 2 staff members.

It meant loading/unloading checking restraints etc was done in half the time. Toadstool would have the second member of staff batch the next ride of guests whilst the ride was cycling to speed things up even further.

As the minimum wage went up over the years the park reduced the number of staff in an attempt to keep the wage bill down. The impact of this is lower throughputs across the park.
 
AT86 said:
As the minimum wage went up over the years the park reduced the number of staff in an attempt to keep the wage bill down. The impact of this is lower throughputs across the park.
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So how many staff work at the theme park right now? Let's say 300+ on rides, food, shops etc. So a park that probably makes 100 million a year (minus taxes) can't afford to maintain the same amount of staff
 
Ethan said:
So how many staff work at the theme park right now? Let's say 300+ on rides, food, shops etc. So a park that probably makes 100 million a year (minus taxes) can't afford to maintain the same amount of staff
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The park cite they have a total of 2500 employees during the main season across the resort. I have no idea how many of those are in the park versus the resort side but I imagine it is considerably more than 300.

2023 Seasonal Recruitment Blog | Alton Towers Resort

The recruitment team have been working hard behind the scenes, finalising our plans for the 2023 season!
www.altontowers.com www.altontowers.com

The planning docs for Horizon stated the wage bill for 2021 to be somewhere in the region of £30million.

I have no idea of the revenue or profit for Alton Towers specifically, is your £100 million simply a guess?

The resort theme park division as a whole had £450million in revenue and £109million profit in 2022 according to Merlin’s accounts. This is across six attractions - of which Alton Towers is one of the largest. So somewhere between £75-£100 million in revenue (not profit) might be a reasonable educated guess.
 
Ethan said:
So how many staff work at the theme park right now? Let's say 300+ on rides, food, shops etc. So a park that probably makes 100 million a year (minus taxes) can't afford to maintain the same amount of staff
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They have about 2500 across the resort I think.

A better metric however is how many hours per week they have to staff as not everyone will be full time. I doubt that info is out there.
 
There was a large slashing of staff following the financial crisis of around 2008. I remember that many gardeners were made redundant following that, and it definitely would have impacted the rest of the resort. It happened in many industries across the board and staffing levels have never really recovered on the whole.
 
I look back fondly on the simpler times when queue lines had the signposting 'Wait time X minutes from this point'...

The fact that these are all now non-existent speaks volumes on how much Fastrack and RAP has made it near impossible to estimate queue times!
 
jmc said:
I look back fondly on the simpler times when queue lines had the signposting 'Wait time X minutes from this point'...

The fact that these are all now non-existent speaks volumes on how much Fastrack and RAP has made it near impossible to estimate queue times!
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I don't understand how they ever used to work anyway. As soon as a train is taken off a ride then the wait sign becomes void
 
AT86 said:
Because this was a time when it was standard that coasters ran a full compliment of trains every day.

It was the absolute exception to operate with less trains.
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It is weird that towers have gone from always running things on full capacity to now having rides regularly on reduced capacity, compared to Thorpe who used to run rides on 1 train but now they never do that
 
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