Visited Thorpe Park yesterday (Sun), and they were trialing the Reserve and Ride on the 5 main coasters again. Previous trials, the only way to ride was to reserve a time slot. Yesterday, you could queue as normal if you wished, or reserved a time slot, and when your time came, went to the Fastrack entrance, get the code scanned then get on the ride via Fastrack queue.
For the best part, from a guest who chose you use it point of view it tended to work quite well. Initially (until well in to afternoon) you were given a time slot as there and then, no waiting at all, but later on the time slots for Saw were around an hour after reserving, but the others tended to be less than 30 minutes. Between a couple or small group of you, can work the system to your advantage when it gets busier.
On the negative side. The system crashed and was down for around 2 hours late morning until around 1pm. One reservation disappeared, even though the time to use it still had not expired nor been cancelled. Trail was ended quite early, around 4pm, 2 hours before park close, even though time slots given were around 30 minutes later.
It must of had an impact on the Fastrack queue as reserve and ride people used this queue as well as normal paid Fastrack users. I did hear a couple of grumbles from those in the Fastrack queues about it.
You could obviously queue normally if you wished, which most people seemed to do. I guess people simply can't be bothered with what could seem a bit of a faff to reserve a time slot, though in reality it was very straight forward and took seconds. The main queue, on Saw & Colossus especially, must of been an awful experience, as not only did it have to endure the usual fastrack queue, this was worse due to Reserve and Ride guests in there too.
We got the impression that the way Reserve & Ride operated yesterday kind of reduced the value of the fastrack. Though from a guest perspective it worked a treat. Was at a fairly busy Thorpe Park, with queues ranging from 40-90 minutes and was able to get quite a large ride count in.
Other things to note from yesterday too. For the best part, staff seemed to be working to get the trains dispatched as quickly as possible. Inferno on occasions wasn't stacking, Swarms train was being dispatched just as the one on track had hit the first brakes. Even Colossus, they managed to get a train dispatched just as the one on track stopped in the brakes. Not often you see this at Thorpe. The only problem was at times they got a bit to distracted trying to find a single guest or 2 or 3 from the queue line to fill up the train, and seemingly forgot there was actually a train there waiting to dispatch. :0 The batching (or lack of) in the stations left a lot to be desired, which led to Inferno having something like 3 rows with 2 people on each etc. Also, Saws station was nothing short of a scrum with just a mass of people and no batching at all.
