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Not once did D.M.K mention crowds or the park being busy as a source of disappointment. All the issues raised were operational and customer services ones completely in the parks control.

Completely agree, was in the park at 9:30 yesterday and when the island opened up we headed straight into a 60 min queue for saw at 10:05. swarm didnt open until midday. It then shut at 5 as someone took ill on the train and had to be ambulanced out. they gave everyone in the swarm queue a fast track pass but even the fast track queues were 40 mins or so. Nemesis fast track queue snaked all the way round to rhumba rapids. that was my third visit of the year and probably the last until oktoberfest. We got alot done for how busy it was but only by luck of being near rides aa they re-opened after a fault. from memory everything apart from maybe tidal wave broke down twice yesterday. when you see storm surge on 90min + you know things are bad LOL

I think you've missed the point of the post, which highlights a major issue that UK parks simply cannot cope when they are busy. Of course people expect the parks to be busy during half term, but operations need to be swift and the park should be running to maximum to reduce waiting times as much as possible, but that just doesn't happen. It's very much a case of it being how the park is running, rather than how busy it is, that causes the most issues IMO.

I would say that even if you got there and inside say by 9.30, having been keeping an eye on the queues for e.g. saw, Colossus and nemesis this/last week (if they managed to open on time) were easily getting to around 45 min+ by 10.30. Yesterday Saw had already managed to hit "90+" minutes by the time it got to 10.25. I'm going on Friday and slightly dreading how mad it'll be to be honest (when I booked I had hoped it wouldn' t be too bad), although its not sold out under 'reduced capacity' as people say I doubt its much different to a typical summer weekday in non-covid times. Setting expectations is important but I'm sure by now people should know its just going to be mad busy for the rest of the summer due to that pent up demand. Not saying thorpe should just shrug their shoulders at that though- definitely should be doing all they can to improve throughput and distancing people on rides is a little silly when they don't enforce distancing in queues and people stand shoulder to shoulder almost.

The 2021 season so far has been an absolute shambles and it's evident from the comments on social platforms. Seems both Chessington and the Towers are suffering with similar problems. We recently visited TP and I got our money back after a terrible day - although it was evident that Guest Services were suffering. This is solely based on opinion but I found the main issues were: Multiple rides down all-day and at least one major attraction "delayed" at any one time. The amount of "technical difficulties" they have with rides at Merlin parks has become evident in recent years. Pre-COVID attendance levels but with COVID protocols still in place. The protocol of wiping down the rides every 30mins - 1hr is ridiculous. The staff were half-heartedly spraying the rides, most the time missing seats while chatting away, using the time as an break. Witnessed this multiple times throughout the day. Upselling of Fastrack was intense. Staff obviously tasked with hard-selling Fastrack. At the start of the day, staff were repeatedly mentioning they were expecting 90min+ queues. General operations were really hit-and-miss. There just doesn't seem to be the desire from staff to get throughput up. Really hoping things improve but we've decided to stay away from the parks for the remainder of the season.

Hex has always been one of my favourite rides, but the last couple of times I've been on it, the music on the actual ride section has been really quiet and only comes from one side of the room. It really robs it of the atmosphere and excitement :-( Its so quiet you can actually hear the ride mechanism creaking over it lol

This thread is just brilliant - I’ve been reading through it again and nearly spat my Pepsi out 😂

The capacity has been reduced, but pre covid the park never really hit capacity anyway. So even though the capacity has been reduced, there is pretty much the same amount of people they would get on a standard weekend. Mix that in with the reduced capacity on rides and social distancing, the park looks and feels busier than pre covid. I really don't think they should be advertising the fact they have a reduced capacity, same with all the merlin parks. It's giving people the wrong idea that the parks are going to be less crowded when in reality, there is pretty much the same crowds as normal.

I believe it is currently waiting on a part. I think it's been removed from the app, so will probably be down for a while. Rotten timing given the weather and it being half term. This is a dreadful idea in my opinion. Despite what many people think, queue prediction is hard. Few parks actually manage to do it well in my opinion. At the moment, it is even more volatile thanks to Covid and social distancing (or lack thereof). I imagine this idea is being tried for the following reasons: 1. They don't know what the queue times are when they're very long 2. They're getting a lot of complaints because of long advertised queue times When it comes to solving problem 1, there's not much they can do short term. The park is busy, queues will be long. But that in itself is a problem. A quick look on social media suggests that plenty of people feel that numbers aren't being restricted enough for Covid. Should the park, in future, be restricting numbers more? Should they now be looking at relaxing social distancing measures on rides (filling up all seats / rows)? The second problem is more insightful to their thought process. Anyone who's filled out one of the park's survey machines will know that you're asked a question to the effect of 'Did queueing spoil your day?'. This is a pretty big KPI that all the Merlin parks (and likely parks outside of Merlin) are interested in. Presumably, at the moment, they're getting a very high percentage of people answering "Yes" to 'Did queueing spoil your day?'. They've probably also noticed that "Rides per head" (the average number of rides each person has ridden) is low. As such, one possible conclusion that could be drawn is that "People aren't riding rides and saying that queueing has spoilt their day. We're advertising long queue times, so maybe people are put off by the long queue times". The solution there is then to not advertise long queue times, but instead advertise a minimum waiting time. That might not be what has happened. To be honest, I'd be surprised if there's people looking into KPI scores and probing in that way to come to that conclusion in that way. But it's a possible thought process. Equally, it could just be that they're getting a ton of complaints of 'The queues are all saying they're 2 hours'. As Matt says, people will not see the '+' here, and just assume a 90 minute queue. People leave common sense at the door when going to a theme park. There's another problem I've skirted around here. Operations in general. In my experience this year, they've been a mixed bag. Certainly not as bad as they have been in recent years, but not as good as they should be. Why that is, I don't know. But they need to come up with practical solutions to be able to get more consistent operations that are sensible and in line with what the rides can achieve, and with what the park needs. As for the more specific topic at hand... 1. If this is a trial to see if '90+' works, I hope they see it doesn't work, and they see that quickly. 2. If there's concerns about accuracy, introduce broader time frames, especially for higher values. 3. Work on actually make queue times accurate. More on this below. 4. The park need to understand that, ultimately, long queues are happening To expand on these points... 2. Perhaps they should introduce ranges like '90-100', '100-120', '120-150', '150-180'. When a queue is at that high level, it doesn't matter if it's 120 or 140 really, it's still a 2-2.5hour commitment of your day. Next to no one is going to enter a 140 minute queue, and then check their watch just before boarding and go 'Ooh, well that queue only took us 137 minutes, great job!' 3. I'm sure some remember a trial that happened on Saw a few years back to improve queue time accuracy. This would display queue times accurate to the minute, rather than in increments of 5-10 minutes. There's more details on this technology, provided by a company call Headmapper, here: http://www.headmapper.com/case-studies Interestingly, there is also a report which outlines how successful the trial was in 2015, which is largely positive. The technology was again used in 2017 for another trial. One reason why it didn't seem to carry on was costs involved with the product. Another is because it's a bit of faffy system which requires fixed cameras at certain locations (when usually, cameras are need to be moveable for security purposes)....so it would involve the costly installation of more cameras. So if the park really wants to improve queue accuracy and have a positive impact on people's day out, they could put their money where their mouth is and fork out for this. But then that still doesn't address the above point. And why spend out so much for something that doesn't tackle all the issues here. There are alternatives though, which are much cheaper. However, getting people within the park to get on board with the idea that queue accuracy is important is much harder than one might expect. So unless there's a shift in philosophy on that, this will never happen. 4. I'm not saying that the park don't know that long queues happen, or that they're bad or anything. But from my experience, there's a certain fear in acknowledging that the park will have long queues, and that this impacts that all important aforementioned KPI. Instead, there's an over-focus on improving queue accuracy, short term incentives to ride staff for improving throughputs and other weird stuff. Instead, there should be an acceptance that queues will be long as it stands and looking at ways to sustainably ensure that this causes minimal impact to someone's day. This should include making queues more interesting to be in, investing in the park so there's more things to do and making the park a more pleasant place to be in outside of the rides. And that should happen on top of the park improving queue accuracy and throughputs. Even if that should be a secondary focus. --- Wow, that was a bit of rambling rant. I'm sure some people on here know this is something I've had prior involvement in in one way or another. and even if not, it's probably clear I have some level of interest in this at a deeper level. Obviously there's many issues here, and many of them are long term, costly things to sort out. It's worth looking at short term alternatives, as well as little things that can be trialled in the short term to get a gauge on if they work. But honestly, this is the equivalent of sticking a used plaster on a wound that needs stitches. In short, the park need to acknowledge that they will always have long queue times, invest in the park to improve the number of things people can do, have queue lines be more interesting to be in and put some actual thought into how to estimate queue lengths over just picking a number out of thin air