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Ride Availability/Operations 2022-25

MrTowers said:
I do feel for the park as im sure the staff and managers just want everything to work
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I’d feel bad for them if it was out of their control. Adverse weather, regional power cut etc.

But the park picked the opening day of the season to both debut a new ride and offer extended hours for dark rides with the intention of enticing as many customers as possible when they weren’t in a position to deliver what they were selling.
 
Giving out Fastrack/Exit Passes always caused problems later in the day because of the hordes that would descend upon whichever ride went down in the first place.

However, the parks should consider something for MAP holders. As "oh you can just return anyway" isn't a particularly nice response to get if you've travelled hours to visit, stayed overnight, arranged childcare, etc. (Yes I'm still annoyed with Thorpe's distinct lack of response to me last year).

Generally the operations do improve as new staff come in. Less double checking/shadowing and what-not. To say that it won't improve at all is unlikely as the year goes on, however I think after Towers doing a bit of a purge of "seasoned" staff the other year has had a knock-on effect on this.

Wickerman on 3 trains usually stacks as well, so it doesn't always benefit from it compared to Thirteen. Would probably imagine engineering have prioritised certain ride capacity (Smiler and Blivvy) or are stretched too thin to get everything ready. Again.

I think doing what is their second longest opening hours on opening weekend was incredibly foolish. And given how much the park struggles if anything dies (or in many cases, an entire area) shows the lack of supporting infrastructure in case things do go wrong. Also CBeebies Land closed at 5 again, so didn't want young families to hang around again.

And go wrong it does. On a very regular basis. And that's the main issue, days where every coaster has some form of major downtime is common, rather than a rarity.
 
Danscott22 said:
I feel sorry for anyone who's visited today and had to put up with the terrible availability but I also feel sorry the the park in the same way. It's not acceptable but they obviously don't want to have things shutting all the time. Rita for example was closed for over 6 hours and never re-opened. I hope it's just early season teething for everyone's sake
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I feel sorry for those that visited, but I have no sympathy for the park management, who were not properly prepared, again, for a new season.
This is all the parks fault.
It happens most years.

My old work training, repeated for a quarter century at many efficiency meetings for management.

Proper preparation prevents piss poor performance.

Cost cutting shows when getting old dinosaurs started.
Things never used to be like this at Alton.
 
It’s true. Opening day at the park has been a busy day as long as I can remember. I never recall there being such massive issues with operations and breakdowns as there have been in recent seasons, even when new rides open (which they almost always do on opening day).

It’s very clear that the park can be operated properly from the first day of the season, but the failures in investment, management and recruitment are all resulting in the issues we now see.
 
Yesterday was shoddy.

I waited over an hour in The Smiler's SRQ (main was 50, so this turned out to be a mistake) while empty seats went round. Turns out the new staff on the baggage thing were too slow to keep up with the main queue, so didn't have any time to pause to let single rides through baggage and up the stairs. So the SRQ was empty in the station, and full downstairs (a frustrated batching person told us all this).

Many parks in that situation would recognise the screw-up and just let three trains worth of single riders into the main queue as a goodwill gesture.

Staffing and training is only part of the problem. There are many relatively cheap physical adjustments that could be made that would improve operations and overall experience (for example, RMT's dispatch buttons being moved to the right place at the back of the station). But all of these things require the bare minimum of investment, which they've already made clear they have no intention of carrying out.
 
Sam said:
Yesterday was shoddy.

I waited over an hour in The Smiler's SRQ (main was 50, so this turned out to be a mistake) while empty seats went round. Turns out the new staff on the baggage thing were too slow to keep up with the main queue, so didn't have any time to pause to let single rides through baggage and up the stairs. So the SRQ was empty in the station, and full downstairs (a frustrated batching person told us all this).

Many parks in that situation would recognise the screw-up and just let three trains worth of single riders into the main queue as a goodwill gesture.

Staffing and training is only part of the problem. There are many relatively cheap physical adjustments that could be made that would improve operations and overall experience (for example, RMT's dispatch buttons being moved to the right place at the back of the station). But all of these things require the bare minimum of investment, which they've already made clear they have no intention of carrying out.
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Never should have touched The Smiler’s single rider queue. It’s reliant on someone batching four different queues and physically moving a gate across.

If they had to change it because of the fire exit they should have removed it or thought of another way to do it.
 
I haven't watched the full video yet but TPWW were uncharacteristically scathing in their preview, citing yesterday as "some of the worst operations I’ve ever seen at a major theme park…" which is quite the indictment!

Will be interesting to see how Chessington and Thorpe Park fare later this month.
 
Bowser said:
I haven't watched the full video yet but TPWW were uncharacteristically scathing in their preview, citing yesterday as "some of the worst operations I’ve ever seen at a major theme park…" which is quite the indictment!

Will be interesting to see how Chessington and Thorpe Park fare later this month.
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I've seen similar from other bloggers too
 
Surely the aging ride line up is what's hurting them now. I'm no expert on ride maintenance but Alton do push their coasters to the limits and seem to complete a limited amount of maintenance on them.

An idea of the age of the coasters:

Runaway mine train 32 years
Oblivion 26 years
Galactica 22 years
Spinball 20 years
Rita 19 years
Thirteen 14 years
Smiler 11 years
Octonaughts 9 years
Wicker man 6 years
Nemesis reborn 1 year

With the bulk of this lineup now 20+ years old, Alton have been relying on these workhorses for a while now. Even with the best maintenance they won't be up to peak performance. The gaps between new thrill coasters grew bigger obviously down to the Smiler incident and covid. The 3/4 year big investments made the park what it was, the 5 year gaps with no flats either has hurt the park for both availability and reliability.

Will it be 4 more years before we see another thrill coaster going by the track record. Looking at when the Smiler opened followed by octonaughts 2 years later this looks like the same cycle with nemesis reborn and the Postman pat replacement. This won't do anything to help the thrill ride capacity and reliability.
 
MrTowers said:
...With the bulk of this lineup now 20+ years old, Alton have been relying on these workhorses for a while now. Even with the best maintenance they won't be up to peak performance. ...
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Blackpool has some very old coasters running, steel and wood.
From the first day of the season, even if the Rev needs a tow rope.
They get them running.
Age is no excuse.
Quality maintenance is all.
 
MrTowers said:
With the bulk of this lineup now 20+ years old,
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Out of the 10 rides you've selected, only 4 of them are 20+ years old. 40%. That's not the bulk.

The age of the lineup isn't an issue, many parks operate an older one successfully. The issue is the lack of flex in the park if and when an attraction goes down. There's a distinct lack of supporting attractions, or entertainment offerings, to pick up the slack.

Pretty much all of Disneyland Paris' attractions, in the main Disneyland Park, are over 20 years old, if not 30.
 
Astoundingly, availability on opening day at Pleasure Beach was excellent this year. As Rob says, their ride lineup is considerably older than Alton Towers’; it’s not excuse.

It’s been raised before, but if you look at Europa, which has a not dissimilar age of rides, you can see that good, proactive maintenance can prevent the poor ride availability Alton are constantly presenting.
 
At Europa the older rides (Bobbahn, Mir, Blitz) tend to have even better availability, I imagine for a few reasons: less complicated than newer rides, adjustments and improvements made to the ride systems over decades (Towers patently do not do this), but most importantly, the staff know the rides like the backs of their hands.

Feels like at well-run parks there's a huge amount of institutional knowledge that's passed down between generations of staff. I imagine at EP they know every single nut and bolt of Bobbahn by now. That just doesn't happen at Towers – or any Merlin parks.
 
venny said:
Astoundingly, availability on opening day at Pleasure Beach was excellent this year. As Rob says, their ride lineup is considerably older than Alton Towers’; it’s not excuse.

It’s been raised before, but if you look at Europa, which has a not dissimilar age of rides, you can see that good, proactive maintenance can prevent the poor ride availability Alton are constantly presenting.
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Funny you mention PB as I was going to mention that last year PB had a pretty horrid opening for 2024 almost akin to Towers here but in contrast for this year they by all accounts had a pretty good opening for 2025. So far PB are off to a good start compared to Towers though I'm aware many will disagree with that.
 
Feel sorry for Towers? Really? Nah. Last year was dire and they’ve had plenty of warning of what the issues are and had months over closed season to sort some stuff out at least. Just because it’s opening day is no excuse.

People pay a lot of money to visit and if a day is earmarked for opening then everything should be ready. Not very late openings, multiple rides closed for hours on end. Not a good start. Some say it will get better but it didn’t last year so what hope is there this year?

Talking to others stopping at chained Oak this morning over breakfast and also Liz who runs it, everyone had a torrid time yesterday and it seems to be a continuing complaint Liz hears constantly.

And today so far isn’t much better. In Oblivion SRQ and on the 15 mins we’ve waited so far it’s broken down twice. And now just evac’d queue line. Smiler is running round with empty seats despite the SRQ being way out of the SRQ entrance. Nemesis, Galactia and 13 opening late.

Utter shambles. No excuses anymore.
 
If ops don't improve soon then heads need to roll either in the engineering team or at management level. It's simple not acceptable to have multiple coasters going down on the first day of the season. RMT which is the oldest coaster on the park is the most reliable which is incredible.
 
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