What Next?

[GooseOnTheLoose]

But they will pay £46 per person for Paultons for low queues, free parking, better food and reliable rides Yes, they’re not similar in terms of visitor numbers, public perception, cost of hardware etc but principles remain close.

If Merlin asked for me an extra £15 per visit, similar applied to MAP prices with the equitable service return I’d be chuffed.

But this proves my point rather elegantly.

Paultons Park charges £46. Alton Towers charges £32, plus £12 parking, so £44 all in, essentially the same cost... and yet Alton Towers receives roughly two and a half times the amount of annual visitors.

The Merlin guest isn't paying more for a worse experience because they have no choice. They're paying the same, sometimes less, because Merlin has engineered the transaction to feel like a win. The voucher, the deal, the "I only paid £32!" that's the product. The park is almost incidental.

Paultons Park charges a clean, honest price and delivers a clean, honest experience. Merlin charges a fake inflated price, hands you a discount, and you leave feeling smug. Both models work, it's just that hey're just selling to different psychological needs.

You rightly note that Paultons Park and Alton Towers / other Merlin attractions aren't comparable in visitor numbers, and that's exactly the point. You're comparing a boutique artisanal boffering to to a national chain, and wondering why the chain doesn't charge artisanal prices.

Paultons Park has low queues because they charge a flat, inflexible £46 and cater to a very specific, affluent, middle-class southern demographic (specifically, parents of toddlers being held hostage by a tyrannical, two dimensional cartoon pig). It's a premium product with a naturally capped audience, and it's brilliant at what it does.

Merlin, however, has a multi-billion pound debt pile to service. They can't survive on fewer guests per year at a premium gate price. They need to feed the beast. If they abandoned the special offers, the return tickets, the passes, and set a hard £50 gate, the Casual Visitor wouldn't nod approvingly and say "jolly good, I look forward to my equitable service return." They'd go elsewhere. Attendance would crater. The queues would vanish, and so would the revenue required to run a park the size of Alton Towers.

Maybe it’s my perception but the “value” proposition at Merlin just doesn’t exist for me anymore, but maybe that because I’m not a MAP owner.

This is the business model. The day ticket value proposition is supposed to feel underwhelming. It's a decoy. It exists purely to make the Merlin Annual Pass look like a financial necessity. They don't want you carefully weighing up the equitable return on a single £68 ticket. They want you on a monthly direct debit, locked into their ecosystem, turning up five times a year.

If anything, Paultons Park is the outlier. A fairly priced product that succeeds despite not playing the deal game, but notably they're not scaling it. There's only one Paultons Park. There are lots of Merlin parks, because the Ryanair model has a much larger addressable market.

The British public has voted, repeatedly, and with their wallets. I'm not defending it, just explaining it.

 

[slappyofmcguire]

My story.

I visited Paultons for the first time last year for my 50th. Slightly swayed to do so with oakwood closing not long after my first ever visit, I wanted to get in the parks I hadn't visited lest the close and I never go, like Camelot did.

And despite being surprised by the high ticket prices and travelling from Durham for the experience (in the rain for half of it!) I can honestly say that despite not really being the target market, I had one of the best theme park experiences I've had for years.

I toyed with the merlin pass when there was the get a hotel room and get a free pass that was on at the start of the year, so essentially getting a MAP for 68 quid would have been a bargain.

Ironically I'm still going to Thorpe this year, so I maybe should have acted, but the thought of almost feeling obliged to go to Chessy or Alton almost filled me with dread with the state of both parks food queues and reliability so I didn't bother.

I think there is an element of familiarity breeding contempt because I haven't been to LWV for 15 years, but have been twice in a week for the opening of spinning coaster. (The park is just over an hour down the road and cost 17 quid to get in), and again, despite the rain, had a great couple of days.

I think Paultons works in it's capacity because it's very much a destination visit, with most people calling it Peppa pig world instead of Paultons, however while I am very much intent on going this year it has taken me at least 35 years to find a reason to go.

So maybe it's not about price. It is very much about value. And the fact that you can't get a decent meal at Alton, even if you would be willing to pay over the odds for it is maybe symptomatic of it. It feels like the guest experience is very much down the list of priorities (thorpe and the other parks possibly less so), and it would perhaps be interesting to see what the park would be like if it restructured in the wake of Universal coming to provide a much more expensive but destinational experience. It's hard to say. I'm not in any rush to get back though.

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[Bowser]

Comparing the entrance price of Merlin and Paultons is fairly meaningless when the former relies very heavily on a discount subscription service.

 

[Ash]

Comparing the entrance price of Merlin and Paultons is fairly meaningless when the former relies very heavily on a discount subscription service.

And yet it’s still awful.

They have entirely different business models. As has been eloquently pointed out on here.

I suppose I just don’t think it works for me personally. Or I think increasingly so the public at large.

I mean considering Universal are likely to charge £75-£125 for a day ticket they’re making a hell of a bet. And I appreciate the different value propositions etc.

My point remains, there feels a gap. Particularly at Alton, for a £45 a day ticket attraction of greater quality, more aligned to somewhere like Efteling. With less to no IPs. Allowing Merlin to concentrate on the southern parks.

Alas time will tell.

 

[Bowser]

My point remains, there feels a gap. Particularly at Alton, for a £45 a day ticket attraction of greater quality, more aligned to somewhere like Efteling. With less to no IPs. Allowing Merlin to concentrate on the southern parks.

That would require new ownership. A consortium of wealthy theme park enthusiasts perhaps?

Alas i can’t envision a realistic scenario where even were Merlin to sell, that AT would end up in the hands of an independent owner with the funds, passion and vision to revitalise it.

 

[slappyofmcguire]

What has just occurred to me about people comparing Paultons and AT is that Paultons really is an outlier in this country. Most UK parks model themselves to some degree on AT, whereas Paultons very much has the feeling and modus operandi of a European theme park, like an efteling or one of the Swedish parks.

It is a heavily themed park as opposed to a park with themes.

It'll be interesting when Kynren the storied lands and the southern equivalent open to see if there is more of an appetite for heavy themeing or bigger and better rides, because a lot of the similarly sized parks to Alton in Europe seem to prize that ahead of bigger better faster longer.

I just don't want Alton to go the way of Blackpool and similar seaside resorts and survive rather than thrive, bound by the legacy of old rides and feeling tired. Maybe a small park just has the ability to be much more agile.

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