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Your predictions - 2025 > 2030

Do you think the park will improve, stagnate or decline in 5 years time?

  • Improve

  • Stagnate

  • Decline

Results are only viewable after voting.
MaxPower

MaxPower

TS Member
As we all know, there is a significant amount of work needed to get the park back to where it once was in it's heyday, and it would be interesting to see what everybody thinks the future holds for the park over the next 5 years. I've seen a few people putting interesting viewpoints across as to how they think the park will develop, so I thought it would be good to have a dedicated predictions post.

So this thread is for you put your thoughts out there. If you had to put money on it, how do you realistically predict the park will change over the next 5 years?
 
Overall, I think the park will improve. I’m sure it won’t be an easy ride, and Rome certainly wasn’t built in a day, but there seems to be genuine intent to improve the experience from those now at the park. Things like the excellent spruce ups of areas like Gloomy Wood and Forbidden Valley, as well as the build of Project Ocean, suggest that they have a good idea of where Alton’s deficits lie and a good intention of improving things overall.

I don’t think they’ll have solved every problem, but I’m confident that overall, the experience of the park will have improved by 2030.
 
Without getting into details that would just be pure guesswork on my part:

I think the ride offerings will increase from what they currently are due to new flat rides and maybe Horizon, I don’t think we’ll see the removal of anything significant in the immediate years but maybe back end of the decade will see a full FV style refurb to either DF or WW.

I think the park will continue to struggle with ride reliability and resourcing as there’s no quick fix to this, so I think we’ll continue to see rides opening late, 4pm closes and the like.

Overall I think the park will be in a better place in a few years time, but who really knows.
 
You would expect someone like me to put 'decline', but it depends on personal interpretation. So I went for stagnation.

My theory is that it couldn't really get any worse. We hit rock bottom in 2016 and 2017, and again these past 2 seasons. It could get worse of course, and I expect a number of things will continue to decline. Events and opening hours have been wound back down and I think this will continue, as will street theatre and I can see the monorail going. That's all pretty grim stuff, and I doubt I'd really bother going much after that. Maybe a visit once every few years to see what's new. Very sad.

So with that grim assessment, there is a reason why I put stagnation (optimistic at best). When they were scraping the barrel in 2016 and 2017, the only real positive coming over the horizon was Wickerman, which would have just been pretty much standard periodic investment in years gone by, with everything else was pointing in the direction of everything that's happening right now actually. Its around that time that the fate of the monorail, the spa, and the current Skyride closure was sealed. The difference now is there is some sort of partial rescue plan in place whereas there wasn't before. The problem is that in putting out fires, new ones keep cropping up elsewhere.

I think there's signs of this already, but from a business point of view I would put my money the park being a slightly tidier version of what it is now with a few extra flats and maybe a major investment. Opening hours will continue to be poor, I can see another event going. Maybe we'll get some more interesting food options will come forth, but the core offering will remain crap. Investments will be probably be better than the cheap tat like the Walliams World fiasco, but a far cry the what we saw in the 90's. They'll mainly be replacements of things reaching end of life and not additions. I can see operational costs being cut further. Sadly, the Monorail is a gonner.

I can't see the business case for high levels of investment, and if Blackstone thought it was worth it, we would see some green shoots by now. But money appears to be being spent on stopping further rot. We're in a new normal, it's a regional park of 2-2.5m visitors per year mascerading as something better by riding on the name recognition of past glories and will remain that way.
 
I'm optimistic they'll improve but more worried they'll stagnate. One positive is that the parks has a very passionate divisional director in Bianca.

If it was me, I'd be doing multiple flat rides in 2025, followed by a family flume in 2026 with possibly a flat or two and then Project Horizon plus some flat rides in the surrounding area for 2027.

This would be tagged on by cheaper investments such as funhouse, play areas, 4D Cinema etc. to help make it much better experience.
 
They have a team with the drive to return it to jewel of merlins theme parks.
The worry i have is fatigue. The team pushes to get the resources to get the park to a standard that they want to be at.
After a time the up hill battle to get resources will fatigue them and then the turn around will slow or even stop.
 
I voted stagnate, but I fear my version of stagnation is in fact decline.

The one thing we need to see is a clear indication that the correct budget is being allocated. It is very clear now that the budgets remain too low even to maintain the park on a stable footting, let alone improve.

We're now back to that "ah, well. Maybe next year!" stage of the season where there's nothing really left where they can demonstate they are splashing the cash.
 
Decline.

We’re nearing the end of the 5th season in this decade, and we still do not have a clear vision or strategy of the medium to long term of the park. Covid is no longer an excuse. The Smiler incident is certainly no longer an excuse. But as Squiggs says above, there is no attempt to attribute the correct budget to the park to allow it to shine. There is no ambition for where the park could and should go. I could probably count on one hand how many elements of the 2010 10yr plan were implemented, so I have little faith that the park will improve 15 years on
 
Very similar to @EuroSatch - a definite decline. The park has already been in decline for the last 5 years at least (in my opinion), certainly in terms of ride investment, maintenance and operations. I don't forsee any reason for this to change unfortunately.

We're very likely to see a near-decade pass by without any major investment (something which would be been unthinkable in the 2005-2015 period), and net we've seen an enormous reduction in offering and quality without any continuing external factor to blame.

Sad for what was once one of Europe's great parks, but I really don't see it any other way.
 
This was a tough one; having seen & heard the passion, enthusiasm and desire to lift Towers coming from both Bianca & John B, along with the recent Forbidden Valley overhaul... I could see an upwards trajectory. However, it's really hard to ignore the fact that overall, this season seems to have been a frustrating disappointment for many so far, despite the investments & enthusiasm from the park.

The optimist in me is thinking 2024 has been used as a year to fix things behind-the-scenes, work out where the biggest holes are and do groundwork for future seasons. We should have Skyride, Hex and Ocean operating next year at least which would be a big positive. The pessimist in me worries that with sooo much of the basics to fix, as well as trying to chase growth/freshness all at the same time, it could be too much of a 'struggling to keep head above water' situation for anyone to ever return Alton Towers to it's level of former glory. If someone like Bianca can't start to turn things around in a few years, I'm not sure who could?

Everything said, I chose stagnation because I'm just not certain enough either way!
 
Too soon to tell, I can see @Squiggs point but the headwinds haven’t exactly been kind and when you consider the lead in times for stuff to occur in theme parks I don’t buy @EuroSatch argument you can yet dismiss Covid. We also have really poor attendance this season.

Saying that I don’t see anything yet that suggests the park will certainly improve, there are positive arguments you can make such as investment in older rides (Curse, Nemesis) and investment in flat rides. The opening hours are less of a sign than some suggest due to cost of living and weather but up-time on rides has been shocking.

Genuinely have no real hope things will improve but think it’s still too early to tell, I have regularly said 2025 will be the deciding year, if there are no improvements next year then it’s definitely decline.
 
All evidence points to decline.

It’s a inferior product to all its major competitors: Phantasialand, Efteling, Europa Park, Port Aventura.

Its inability to get “better” in any regard:
- ride selection
- events
- capacity
- food and beverage
- theming
- attraction quality
- opening hours
- resort offering
- accommodation
- value for money
- customer service
- transport

None of these things have improved in over a decade, through a myriad of factors. Bad management, lack of investment, lack of ambition, lack of long term planning, lack of vision. What’s changed?

The constant stupid restrictions from Poole. The lack of control of hotel bookings, AI chatbot help, outsourcing of food, outsourcing of theming production, outsourcing of audio production, outsourcing of h&s planning. What does Alton do themselves now except run and maintain the rides, open the gates and run the social media? Merlin and DIC before them have shown they have no willing or ability in running these attractions in a successful way. They are now basically six flags.

Decisions are made for the benefit of the investors, not the long term running of a better theme park.

What do I think will happen:
2025: project ocean opens
2026: sky ride remains closed. FFF removed. PH started. Dungeons re theme opens.
2027: 4D cinema reopens. Skyride removed
2028: PH opens.
2029: X sector flat ride opens. Galactica closed.
2030: New hotel opens. Spinball Whizzer closed.
 
Despite the last few years of cost of living crisis and high inflation etc post-Covid, people did still and more so now have expendable income, and that is being spent more and more on travel, tourism and leisure (over house moving, improvements etc). This should be an environment that Alton Towers thrives in. If it is struggling to build guest numbers back up, it needs to look at itself rather than blame other factors.

If you build it they will come. If you don’t build it, they won’t.

Years of neglect have taken their toll and are very much visible to guests, and what they see sticks. It needs fixing, and not a short term fix but a long term vision of what the place could be. They also need to understand their market, and how to reach as many demographics as possible. Whilst LadBaby may have nabbed xmas number 1 a few times, them and that awful sausage roll do not have a broad appeal, and certainly Gen Z are not the ones listening to LadBaby
 
If the skyride was removed, they would have to put something in its place for access.
So it will be the skyride that will be replaced.
 
Does anybody believe there’s a chance that a new flat ride could go down in the winter ready for next year? I’m sure I recall heavy rumours that Towers had purchased three, and there’s some areas of the park that wouldn’t need a planning application?

Just in isolation, one new flat ride in FV isn’t going to get the masses flocking back.
 
Mick said:
Does anybody believe there’s a chance that a new flat ride could go down in the winter ready for next year? I’m sure I recall heavy rumours that Towers had purchased three, and there’s some areas of the park that wouldn’t need a planning application?

Just in isolation, one new flat ride in FV isn’t going to get the masses flocking back.
Click to expand...

Quite a lot of the park doesn’t need permission, they only needed permission for Ocean because they wanted it on the big concrete platform thing.

Most flats don’t require much ground work so in theory they could easily install more flats in a closed season.
 
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