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Thorpe Park: General Discussion

I agree the queue times have been terribly inaccurate this year in particular. However, just to clarify a misconception - the people responsible for updating the queue times have no care abiab selling Fastrack; it's ckmoletelc different people in completely different departments. So the park don't inflate queue times on purpose to sell Fastrack. I agree it is a, convenient, side effect though...

But yeah, no clue what's happened. Things had improved slightly a couple of years ago. Queue times were somewhat more accurate, and at the very least, there was never ridiculously exaggerated queue lengths. Now though it seems to have gone down the drain..
 
Abiab?
Ckmoletelc?
Spellchecker required.
And in my own humble opinion, the park do overestimate queuetimes.
The few times I have been, all the queue estimates were far longer than reality.
Either incompetence or deliberate fasttrack pushing.
It has gone on for years.
 
Your times may be bad but it's nothing compared to advertised 60 mins being a walk on for tomb blaster. On the other hand, I waited for red force for 2.5 hours when the advertised time was 50 mins...
 
I think Merlin get to much credit with conspiracy theories such as pushing fastrack sales via inaccurate queue times and closing single rider queues.

The truth is it’s nothing but incompetence and poor operations on their behalf.
 
But how do you know the truth though?
I have had the same argument with other parks, single train operations, considerable queues on off peak days, slow operations...all mean greater queuejumping pass sales.
And park senior managers are well aware of the fact.
Efficient operations earn less short term profits.
 
rob666 said:
Efficient operations earn less short term profits.
Click to expand...

Efficient operations means less queues, better guest feedback and therefore better value for their day, increasing the likelihood of spending money elsewhere and making more return trips to spend more money.
 
AT86 said:
I think Merlin get to much credit with conspiracy theories such as pushing fastrack sales via inaccurate queue times and closing single rider queues.

The truth is it’s nothing but incompetence and poor operations on their behalf.
Click to expand...
I've previously given them the benefit of the doubt but it's just so obvious now.
 
As said before, the people who update the queue times are in R&A, not the Fastrack sales dept. and so have no interest in pushing fastrack sales.

At Thorpe Park, the operator of each ride is the one responsible for updateting queue times, which they do by calling a hotline and asking them to change it. It’s quite a faffy process, especially with the amount of other responsibilities such a paperwork and actually operating the ride that that one staff member also has to deal with.

Rides teams are also regularly encouraged to be efficient when possible, with the intention of keeping queue times down. I am certain there is no conspiracy to try and push fastrack sales in this way.
 
HermanTheGerman said:
As said before, the people who update the queue times are in R&A, not the Fastrack sales dept. and so have no interest in pushing fastrack sales.

At Thorpe Park, the operator of each ride is the one responsible for updateting queue times, which they do by calling a hotline and asking them to change it. It’s quite a faffy process, especially with the amount of other responsibilities such a paperwork and actually operating the ride that that one staff member also has to deal with.

Rides teams are also regularly encouraged to be efficient when possible, with the intention of keeping queue times down. I am certain there is no conspiracy to try and push fastrack sales in this way.
Click to expand...
The towers method of having ride hosts update queue times on an iPad is a lot better.

Sent from my Swift 2 X using Tapatalk
 
HermanTheGerman said:
As said before, the people who update the queue times are in R&A, not the Fastrack sales dept. and so have no interest in pushing fastrack sales.

At Thorpe Park, the operator of each ride is the one responsible for updateting queue times, which they do by calling a hotline and asking them to change it. It’s quite a faffy process, especially with the amount of other responsibilities such a paperwork and actually operating the ride that that one staff member also has to deal with.

Rides teams are also regularly encouraged to be efficient when possible, with the intention of keeping queue times down. I am certain there is no conspiracy to try and push fastrack sales in this way.
Click to expand...
Fair enough. Guess they're just useless then.

Either way - it's hugely inaccurate and misleads people into buying fastrack, thus making everyone else day more tedious.
 
Before the days of iPads and centralised systems, the ride host at the entrance used to just guess the queue time and update the sign at the entrance. Periodically the operator would phone the entrance and ask how big it was before feeding it back to operations control. The only time we tended to inflate the queue time was at the end of the day when we wanted to go home :laughing: (this was Towers, not Thorpe but I'm sure it was the same)
 
I thought they had staff who while walking the park would update times when needed?

Either way inaccurate (longer) queue times do result in Fastrack sales
 
Thorpe isn’t too bad when it comes to queue times. Chessington are far worse. And they oversell fastrack too which results in incredibly pee’d off guests and chaotic operations on a busy day.
 
Thorpe used to use a system where a ride op gave a random person a piece of paper as they entered the queue with a code written on it, you then gave the bit of paper to another ride op when you got to the station and they could work out from that how long the queue was.
 
IanSR said:
Thorpe used to use a system where a ride op gave a random person a piece of paper as they entered the queue with a code written on it, you then gave the bit of paper to another ride op when you got to the station and they could work out from that how long the queue was.
Click to expand...
So basically a paper version of what they do with the app?

Sent from my Swift 2 X using Tapatalk
 
IanSR said:
Thorpe used to use a system where a ride op gave a random person a piece of paper as they entered the queue with a code written on it, you then gave the bit of paper to another ride op when you got to the station and they could work out from that how long the queue was.
Click to expand...

Jesus Christ mate what period of history you talking about here?... Tudor?
 
Error said:
Jesus Christ mate what period of history you talking about here?... Tudor?
Click to expand...
They still done this at chessington this season on gruffalo ride. Best way to see que times we was given a bit of paper as entered ride the que time said 45 mins. Got to the front in 20 and after we done the ride the times had changed
 
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