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I'd have exactly the same attitude. I wouldn't hold the park at fault regardless of who got hurt, even if it was me let alone family or friends, not unless they gave them the knife or set up the fight. This is one of the major things wrong with the world in my eyes; everything is always someone else fault. Someone should have prevented, someone should have intervened, someone should have seen the future. The suspect is the suspect. You can mitigate against a risk, but you can not eliminate all danger. The security as it is is a reasonable response to the risk presented. With this being the first incident of this type in 40 years, how many issues have they prevented with their actions in this time? Loads I expect. Considering your opinion of their clientele you'd be hard pressed to argue against that having been the case, but you can't prove the effectiveness of a preventative measure. You can learn from incidents, you can see how something happened and amend your processes for the future, but that does not prove an ability to have foreseen.

The lack of facilities is exactly my point - Thorpe should have a facility similar to Pleasure Beach where everyone gets searched IMO. In relation to antisocial behaviour, it occurred at Pleasure Beach back when it was free entry however since introducing the security measures it's a very rare occurrence in my experience. Thorpe Park on the other hand has a lot of antisocial behaviour, more than I've ever seen in Pleasure Beach, and yet their security measures are nowhere near up to the same level. You mentioned about PB upping security due to antisocial behaviour, yes this is true, however my point is that they have had a secure entrance with the capacity to search everyone since 2009 whereas Thorpe (a park which has suffered from antisocial behaviour for years) doesn't. I have witnessed more antisocial behaviour at Thorpe than in any other park personally, by a long way. There have been times where I haven't felt safe due to the behaviour of other guests. I feel that much stricter security and having scanners built into the entrance would prevent this, and given that Thorpe's bag checks have caused long delays whilst also not being thorough for years, they have had ample time to introduce a better more permanent solution IMO. Why should it be accepted that a park handling thousands of guests per day has such a "DIY" security setup with a few huts and massive queues? It is just not good enough.

I think that given that Thorpe has a lot of security incidents and seems to have a higher number of poor guest behaviour than other UK parks, it should have higher security levels. BPB for example have scanners which all guests must walk through. I don't feel that they do though, because they don't have the capacity to search every guest thoroughly enough to make it safe. They either have to not search all guests completely or cause 2 hour queues; this has been an issue for years and they have had plenty of closed seasons to address the issue with a new entrance but it hasn't happened. I have witnessed a much higher number of security incidents at Thorpe Park than any other park in the UK, I've never encountered that sort of behaviour on such a large scale at another UK park. I feel that increased security presence would be a deterrent to people who would otherwise cause that type of behaviour. I'm holding them accountable for the fact that somebody was able to get a knife into a supposed secure theme park. Given the issue with knife crime, plus Thorpe Park's tendency to attract poorly behaved guests, I think that makes it even worse that bag and guest searches haven't been thorough. I am not entirely blaming Thorpe; obviously the moron who did it is the culprit, however I do think that Merlin/Thorpe should be held accountable for not having stringent enough security. It seems strange to me that they were not checking pre-booked tickets which were clearly in place to ensure that social distancing was possible through limiting the number of guests.

By technicalities the park is somewhat at fault, as there was a failing in the security somewhere that allowed a guest to have a knife upon their person. False equivalence aside, at least the park reacted to the incident. Perhaps too over the top but given the limited options currently available I'm not sure how I would've tackled that solution in a matter of hours.

The problem with agendas is thats its very easy to see through them. No it isn't the parks fault that someone got attacked. Your equivalency with a terrorist attack is ridiculous or are you saying it's the airlines fault for 9/11 and the plane hijacking. That last sentence by the way, all park queue times across the board are up. I never used to queue more then 10 minutes for Nemesis (alton towers for all those that call Inferno the wrong name) and now queues sit at half an hour at minimum. Thats what happens when you social distance and clean the seats and restraints every half an hour. Thats something the park is doing for guest safety so to sit there and say the park doesn't care about care and experience is so wildly of the mark its in Brazil.

Pluk summed up what I think. The main thing that went wrong here is the person who did indeed bring the knife in the park. I am sure this could of happened at most parks. Thorpe actually have a fairly decent system in place. Some parks in mainland europe you can just walk into without even a search.. It is very easy to sit here in hindsight and list everything that the park has and hasn't done, though before this happened I swear nobody was complaining about security/searching at the park? Nasty things happen everywhere all the time. Theme parks are not exempt from this. ^^^ This There is many things Thorpe do wrong, but I find some of this hate thrown at them for this to be a bit uncalled for.

Whilst Energylandia does benefit hugely from EU funds, they would not necessarily struggle if it was lost. The original grant was only for investments up to this year (including the Vekoma Mine Train, which is on site but hasn't started construction yet, and I personally doubt would open this year, especially with Covid). However, they did successfully apply for more funds, which is helping them "accelerate" plans they had for the next few years, which has included the building more accommodation, and further expansions. Should those EU funds no longer be made available, their investment would likely still be large, but just more spread out. If the country's homophobia increases further, it would be interesting to see how badly tourism is hit, and how it would affect the park. I don't know how many of their visitors are international, but they certainly have got the attention of the enthusiast community, which no doubt helps in drawing more people in. This is particularly prevalent with Zator being just inside a region that's declared itself LGBT-free. A drop in visitors could hit the park harder than them not having access to EU funds. Obviously what happens to Energylandia pales in comparison to LGBT rights in Poland.