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Thorpe Park: General Discussion

Well, I don’t know what everyone has been moaning about… If you go to a theme park the week the lockdowns end on a weekend no less then it’s kind of expected to be rammed, but today it’s been the total opposite.

No real problem at security, main gates opened at 9:25 then they had us stand on the paths either side of the beach area then finally let us go to rides at 9:55. People generally keeping space all day, only a few times did I see people not wearing masks on the rides and a lot of people had them on in the que lines also. The toilets under the dome had hot running water. The soap deepeners were broken but they had soap in a tub on the top both times I went in there.

The dome is a bit naff, and the merch store is still terrible if your looking at a one stop shop type of thing on the way out.

For the most part the staff will efficient, and rides were going out semi quick all day. It did help that there was no one in the park which kind of made the people running to the rides at the start pointless as it was walk on for loads for the rides almost all day… some of the biggest ques were on the flats with vortex having a 20-45m que almost all day.

The people with fast-tracks must have been kicking themselves, on one of my runs on swarm there was a couple Infront of me by about 20 secs as they entered the fast-track que, I overtook them in the completely empty normal que and got onto the ride before them as they were messing having there passes scanned and ticked off.

All I can say is this has made up for my disappointing trips to Alton on Monday and Legoland Tuesday this week and I hope Alton is the same as thorp was today, tomorrow because wow.

10am till 5pm ride list.

Saw

Colossus

Saw

Saw

Stealth

Stealth

Swarm

Swarm

Swarm

Swarm

Flying fish

Rush

Quantum

Zodiac

Nemesis

Nemesis

Nemesis

Stealth

Stealth

Stealth

Stealth

Rumba Rapids

Detonator

Nemesis

Nemesis

Colossus

Colossus

Saw

Tidal wave

Nemesis

Saw
 
Tappits said:
Well, I don’t know what everyone has been moaning about… If you go to a theme park the week the lockdowns end on a weekend no less then it’s kind of expected to be rammed, but today it’s been the total opposite.

No real problem at security, main gates opened at 9:25 then they had us stand on the paths either side of the beach area then finally let us go to rides at 9:55. People generally keeping space all day, only a few times did I see people not wearing masks on the rides and a lot of people had them on in the que lines also./QUOTE]
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Whilst I'm fully pleased you had a great day (I've had some cracking days at Thorpe over the years, although it's always been a gamble), you didn't visit on the same day as I did, where I did have a completely different experience to this so of course you wouldn't know what I was "moaning about" as we weren't there at the same time. Do you think that's fair to say?

It's quite possible that I experienced first week of the season problems and some have been resolved. I just watched Shaun's Vlog and didn't recognise much of what he was saying, particularly operations on Saw and Colossus which paled poorly in comparison to what I saw on Stealth and the Swarm (which were rather good). Saw and Colossus were stacking badly. It took ages to despatch. Saw in particular, the host wasn't letting many people into the building which meant shuttles were empty at the station waiting for guests to reach the platform. I can't explain why despatches were so slow on Colossus.

I was fully expecting a busy day, it wasn't actually as busy as I thought it would be. I visited first week of opening, but not a weekend day. The bag check queue line photo above posted by @monkeyboy was taken the same day I visited and I can confirm that it's a true reflection of what happened on the day. They certainly weren't letting any of us anywhere near any part of the park before gone 10am, instead opting to hold us in very large crowds on the usual pathways. Social distancing was almost completely non existent and surpassed even my own low expectations (I wasn't expecting AT or EP levels of SD but I expected at least SOME).

Not only has most of the age group who visited last week gone back to school, with the park hours being decreased by just one hour this week despite much lower visitor numbers, but I'm hoping that your experience today is also a testament to the park learning from last week's issues and improving their operation.

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Matt.GC said:
Whilst I'm fully pleased you had a great day (I've had some cracking days at Thorpe over the years, although it's always been a gamble), you didn't visit on the same day as I did, where I did have a completely different experience to this so of course you wouldn't know what I was "moaning about" as we weren't there at the same time. Do you think that's fair to say?

It's quite possible that I experienced first week of the season problems and some have been resolved. I just watched Shaun's Vlog and didn't recognise much of what he was saying, particularly operations on Saw and Colossus which paled poorly in comparison to what I saw on Stealth and the Swarm (which were rather good). Saw and Colossus were stacking badly. It took ages to despatch. Saw in particular, the host wasn't letting many people into the building which meant shuttles were empty at the station waiting for guests to reach the platform. I can't explain why despatches were so slow on Colossus.

I was fully expecting a busy day, it wasn't actually as busy as I thought it would be. I visited first week of opening, but not a weekend day. The bag check queue line photo above posted by @monkeyboy was taken the same day I visited and I can confirm that it's a true reflection of what happened on the day. They certainly weren't letting any of us anywhere near any part of the park before gone 10am, instead opting to hold us in very large crowds on the usual pathways. Social distancing was almost completely non existent and surpassed even my own low expectations (I wasn't expecting AT or EP levels of SD but I expected at least SOME).

Not only has most of the age group who visited last week gone back to school, with the park hours being decreased by just one hour this week despite much lower visitor numbers, but I'm hoping that your experience today is also a testament to the park learning from last week's issues and improving their operation.

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Agreed the day I visited was hell on earth. Too many people on the park to cope with ride capacity due to restrictions.
I watched 3 staff working on detonator and when it was in clean down time,2 staff stayed in cabin and left it to 1 member.
You know things are bad when FT/Rap are 30 mins.
Not just noted at TP
Chessington was mad also, 1 staff loading/ unloading all ques and then operating the ride on monkey swinger.
AT wasn’t much better with the temp rides, they have used the load/unload footage and sent it to the showmen of how not to make money!!!!!

But it was 1st week hey ho


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monkeyboy said:
Agreed the day I visited was hell on earth. Too many people on the park to cope with ride capacity due to restrictions.
I watched 3 staff working on detonator and when it was in clean down time,2 staff stayed in cabin and left it to 1 member.
You know things are bad when FT/Rap are 30 mins.

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I think the capacity was OK, it was just the way they operated. It was 10:02 before they let is into the park despite huge crowds queing back to the dome, when just 10 mins to let us disperse would have made a huge difference. I could see no reasonable sense into why Saw and Colossus operations were so slow. When they were cleaning down the Swarm, 2 poor sods were wiping down as fast as they could in front of the waiting guests whilst a third kind of lulled around doing nothing but making friendly physical gestures to the person in the op cabin.

Although I got a decent amount of coasters done, it was because I ran around for the first 2 hours staring at the app on my phone and took an early lunch, no hope if you wanted to avoid an hour or more queue on virtually anything worth riding post 1pm (Colossus reached 130 mins numerous times). 6pm close was just insufficient for such queues. Towers queues last week, some of which are seen as long by commenters on other threads, were incredibly tame compared to Thorpe's.

Social Distancing was so bad I'm surprised they got away with it. I don't get all particular about it after being stuffed inside a supermarket all year, it's just it was so poor I was hit in the back no less than 5 times by teenagers so close behind me (not all little toe rags either, just generally kids with no direction). That's not acceptable in normal times.

To clarify, despite the claim in the post above, neither of us visited on a "weekend" either. Not that a weekend day should make a difference, poor operations are poor operations whatever the day of the week it is.

I have to say though, the staff were the best I've seen in a long time at Thorpe. The Rush ride op dealt with someone who kept pulling down their mask and mouthing off at the staff brilliantly. The staff on Saw and Stealth were also great with my 10 year old son, messing around with him, having fun, geeing him up and making sure he felt safe and comfortable when they checked his restraints.

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imanautie said:
It could be they are changing DBGT to be more like a maze
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Or just the capacity will be tiny due to distancing and the throughput low if they are taking extra time cleaning the VR headsets.
The queue time was slow for DBGT so they are just preventing the queue getting too big by going for a "virtual" queue by doing timeslots.
 
Good to see on the Q&A for black mirror, is that fastrack isn’t available on the ride. I imagine it will come within a few weeks as there is a fastrack entrance. But at least it’s not active when it opens.
 
We now have Thorpe’s 2021 advert, including Black Mirror Labyrinth:

Interesting stuff! Could “let it out” be a new slogan for the park?
EDIT: We now have another version, sans Black Mirror:
 
djtruefitt said:
Good to see on the Q&A for black mirror, is that fastrack isn’t available on the ride. I imagine it will come within a few weeks as there is a fastrack entrance. But at least it’s not active when it opens.
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Presumably the mandatory pre-book is just the fastrack package renamed (and free)
 
Possibly, but it's worth nothing that aside from hotel guests getting exclusive access it's running virtual queue ONLY. As such RAP users have to book too, though they can go in at any time and time cards will not be marked.

An unusual decision for a new attraction, will be interesting to see how it works in practice. Seems like it could reach capacity very quickly and anyone not in the park shortly after opening may miss out.
 
John said:
Possibly, but it's worth nothing that aside from hotel guests getting exclusive access it's running virtual queue ONLY. As such RAP users have to book too, though they can go in at any time and time cards will not be marked.

An unusual decision for a new attraction, will be interesting to see how it works in practice. Seems like it could reach capacity very quickly and anyone not in the park shortly after opening may miss out.
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I'm fully expecting the link to get leaked.
 
John said:
Possibly, but it's worth nothing that aside from hotel guests getting exclusive access it's running virtual queue ONLY. As such RAP users have to book too, though they can go in at any time and time cards will not be marked.

An unusual decision for a new attraction, will be interesting to see how it works in practice. Seems like it could reach capacity very quickly and anyone not in the park shortly after opening may miss out.
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Presumably the pre-booking is being done due to Covid measures moreso, given the nature of a mirror maze (unless they go the PA route and make everyone wear gloves).
 
Benzin said:
Presumably the pre-booking is being done due to Covid measures moreso, given the nature of a mirror maze (unless they go the PA route and make everyone wear gloves).
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wearing gloves makes no difference with Covid? It’s primarily an airborne virus, wearing masks is far more important together with distancing and ventilation.
It would be a lot more about distancing that is keeping numbers inside down.
 
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