Your 2024 in Review

[Matt N]

Hi guys. I know it may be hard to believe, but we’re now getting towards the point in the season where parks are starting to wind down again ahead of the closed season; the end of the season is nearly upon us once again! With this in mind, I thought it might be nice to look back on 2024 and see what our highlights from the year have been. So, how has 2024 been for you in theme park terms?

I’ll get the ball rolling with a few stats and personal highlights from my season…

Let’s kick things off with the numbers…

• Coaster count at start of 2024: 111
• Coaster count at end of 2024: 134
• Coaster count increase: 23 (+6 on 2023) - New personal best!
• Park count at start of 2024: 24
• Park count at end of 2024: 29
• Park count increase: 5 (+3 on 2023) - Joint personal best!
• Number of coaster rides: 101 (+24 on 2023) - New personal best!
• Number of park visits: 14 (-2 on 2023)
• Unique coasters ridden: 40 (-1 on 2023)
• Unique parks visited: 9 (Same as 2023)

In terms of stats, I’d say it’s been a resoundingly successful year for me, on the whole! Even though a couple of key stats fell compared to 2023, I still attained a new personal best in terms of both new coasters ridden and number of coaster rides, with 2024 being my first year ever exceeding 20 new coasters and 100 coaster rides, respectively! I also matched my personal best in terms of new parks visited; this has been quite a weak metric for me for a number of years, so I was pleased by this!

Now if I were to reel off a few highlights and lowlights of the year from a more personal standpoint, I would say something like the following:

• Favourite new-to-me coaster of 2024: Shambhala at PortAventura Park (#1/134) - I’ve long wanted to ride Shambhala, and my goodness, it did not disappoint! The sustained airtime, the speed, the first drop, the smoothness, the rerideability, the forces… not one aspect of it disappointed, and all the above aspects and more meshed together to make it a simply wonderful coaster for me!
• Favourite new-to-me non-coaster of 2024: Sesame Street: Street Mission at PortAventura Park - It’s easy to overlook a dark ride themed to Sesame Street, but I thought Street Mission was wonderful, and a definite hidden gem of PortAventura for me! The blend of screens and physical set pieces was brilliant, the animatronics were excellent, the interactivity and 3D were great, and overall, I just thought the ride was really, really good fun, and definitely my favourite interactive dark ride I’ve ridden!
• Favourite new-to-me park of 2024: PortAventura Park - I’d heard wildly mixed reviews of PortAventura, but I found the park absolutely wonderful, with some great rides, gorgeous theming, and operations that were nowhere near as bad as I was expecting!
• Biggest positive surprise of 2024: Gold Rush at Drayton Manor - After hearing some slightly muted initial reviews of Gold Rush, I went in with lowered expectations, but I have to say that I was very pleasantly surprised! I found the ride to be a brilliantly fun family coaster, with some fun twists and turns, fun tricks and backwards sections, and an overall very fun ride experience!
• Biggest disappointment of 2024: It’s tough to say; I haven’t really had any significant disappointments in terms of new things this year. I found Pleasurewood Hills a bit disappointing, but I went in there with quite lowered expectations to begin with, so I’d struggle to really call it a major disappointment as such.
• Favourite coaster ride of 2024: Any ride on Shambhala would probably be a strong candidate here, as would the final two back row rides on Hyperia, but those are two examples of where I had multiple similarly phenomenal rides on a coaster in succession. In terms of an example where an individual ride really sticks out, I’m actually going to raise my night ride on Wicker Man at Alton After Dark. The day had been, to put it politely, less than successful up to that point, and we’d waited 2.5 hours for the ride on Wicker Man. We weren’t originally expecting a night ride, but by the time we got on, we’d actually waited so long that we got an unexpected night ride! When we got on, the combination of the awesome speed and airtime of the coaster with the rain that was lashing down and the added thrill of the darkness and the area lighting made the experience truly unforgettable and left us all in complete stitches!
• Favourite park trip of 2024: PortAventura in September was a definite highlight of the year, as I loved experiencing a new foreign park for the first time and getting a new #1 coaster, but I’d also raise my solo trip to Thorpe Park and Legoland Windsor in June, as I was so pleased to finally do a solo overnight trip and both park days were great fun!
• Biggest enthusiast achievement of 2024: As mentioned above, I was really proud to finally do my first ever solo overnight trip in June. It was a great trip, and I was also very proud of myself for how everything logistically went to plan without any major hitches (well, aside from being spited by Hyperia…)!

In conclusion, then, I think 2024 was a pretty great year for me! I’m not sensing 2025 will be as fruitful for a litany of reasons, but we shall see!

So, how was your 2024 in theme parks? I’d absolutely love to know!

 

[Leigh]

I’ll flesh it out a bit more in a couple of months but as it stands:

• Creds: +117 (total 267). This will go up again by the end of the year
• New unique parks: 32
• Total park visits: 53
• Best new cred of the year: EGF, although Voltron is VERY close. It was a toss up between the two but EGF edges out as it’s exactly my sort of ride
• Worst new cred of the year: Mammut. Not because it’s rough, or because it’s particularly egregious in any way, but because it does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. It’s a waste of wood
• Best new park: EP
• Worst new park: Pavilion Fun Park, Clacton. For conning me £14 for a ride on a Wacky Worm which the op had to push around

 

[delta79]

Creds 0
Parks visited 0
Tries to get the new alton towers disability ticket - lost count

 

[John_P]

A solid year, just about my biggest year for riding new coasters.

New Creds - 130
Total Count - 646
New Parks - 31
Total Parks - 126
Favourite new park - 1st Tripsdrill 2nd Gardaland 3rd Rulantica
Favourite New Coaster - 1st Voltron 2nd Expedition GeForce 3rd Hyperia
Favourite New non coaster ride - 1st Pirates In Batavia

Overall a great year knocked off loads of bucket list parks and coasters across Europe over the summer.

Lucky enough to ride every major new for 2024 European coaster I can think of as well, Voltron, Na Fianna Force, Hyperia, Mini Figure Speedway, Gold Rush, Fjord Explorer, and Mahuka.