Benin

See they're doing lift hill walks for Hyperia. For £120. And you need to have done a track walk on Colossus, Oblivion or Swarm within 3 years. Seems a bit off to enforce that.

Visited yesterday. Was fine overall since didn't set foot in X-Sector or Dark Forest (a recurring thing). Probably should've had some alarms when parking in what is usually the coach park rather than the disabled/express area, but there was a queue so directed elsewhere. Didn't bother with Toxicator as queue was consistently long. As per most of the thrill attractions on park. Wickerman batcher wasn't doing a great job as wasn't actually batching the main queue just RAP/Fastrack. Which meant baggage dump was a mess of people. Ended up waiting over 30 minutes in a fairly quiet Rollercoaster Restaurant for food. Think it went missing on system as food we did initially receive wasn't ours nor table next to ours. Who ordered after us but got food first. Burger was actually decent but seemingly toasted within an inch of its life? Skyride was testing and staff were training on Rapids at least. No Hex wasn't too problematic for us since not taking lil one on it. Spending most of our day in CBeebies Land really does mean we miss out on most of the problematic issues currently at the park. The sheer lack of support attractions is so telling though. No Blade meant faffing about doing nothing whilst others went on Nemesis, and also why we don't bother with 2 major areas of the park. It's daft and needs sorting not just from my selfish side but also to ease the pressure on the coasters in those areas. Justin's House is absolute chaos though.

Learnt that trick off Towers.

Good for them. Though why they're announcing something for NEXT year so far in advance is very Blackpool.

The quotes were from Abdab of Terror Tomb fame. It made as much sense as most of the posts. But doesn't look like Thorpe are going for the speciality car for Hyperia this season. Otherwise they'd have gone on about it by now.

On the engineering side it's probably a mixture of factors of having lower staff numbers, poor retention of said staff, high turnover of staff over the last few years (losing the knowledge), ageing ride population and the newer rides are far more complex in their nuances. Engineering as an industry is struggling to fill in the next wave of people. Having a job offering below average wage and out in the sticks isn't particularly enticing for a number of them.

Keep the building, gut the innards and put something worthwhile in there.

Ignores also the amount of stuff that's vanished over the years. Even this year we're down 2 rides what with Blade and Clem Fandango leaving. Plus Dungeons being mothballed. Genuinely not enough to do at the park. And without things like Blade there's nothing to do with little one whilst rest of group does Nemesis or whatever else.

It's weird that these opening day queues are going back to those 90s era lengths. Thirteen's opening day waited 90 minutes with @Mark9. I don't think any major coaster or ride opening since has been that low since. That a Top Spin is getting a peak 140 minute queue is madness.

It never drains but it pours. Will probably be spending most of next weekend in CBeebies.

Goudrix has new Vekoma vest restraint trains!

Just purely on the amount of energy/force required for the short period of acceleration time on Rita/Stealth I dread to think how that would correlate up to the bigger boys. Remember going into the Rita launch room and being surprised at how quick it was, but doing that constantly must wear it out considerably, especially factoring in Ka having more trains. Then again Xcelerator was a bit of a nightmare too. Maybe American engineers are just worse than elsewhere?

I'd imagine the incidents on Bounce & Treetops also didn't help. Towers just about clung onto its reputation after Smiler, Oakwood having more incidents after Hydro was never going to help.

https://www.oakwoodthemepark.co.uk/blog/sin-categoria/oakwood-theme-park-to-close/ Closed for good. Had some great night rides on Megaphobia in my early enthusiast years.

Imagine the OUTRAGE that would've occurred when Beanoland closed for 2 months to start the Wild Asia process. Closing it for 2 years is ridiculous.

Bringing back THAT pre-show. 😬

Is Minecraft Land for 2026 or 2027? That will make a massive difference.

Rest in Pieces.

Haven't the Passholder Days historically been terrible though? For all the parks.

I'm quite lucky that I rarely have to get Monorail these days, but the one time I did last year was painful. And that was at 3pm on a Scarefest! Might go on this if the queues are short. If.

I'd be a bit peeved about Sea-Life, but I live within decent driving of 2 and they're good attractions for little one currently. Plus planning on London based nonsense later this year so always good to have some additional freebies.

The rate of expansion they were doing at the time was never going to be sustainable. Legolands and Midways everywhere. But was all short term mindset at the end of the day. The issue with the removal of attractions is then devaluing the Annual Pass. Which is basically their entire business these days. So those would likely also have to go down in price as well.

Quite bad that I genuinely wasn't sure if people meant the fake or real gift shop in this discussion.

Quick example of one of my lunches at Efteling (from the cafeteria by Vogel Rok) over my Christmas visit. Can't recall the price unfortunately but it's a definite stark difference in quality to what's on offer at Towers in particular. Woodcutters would never. The entry cost is so dependent on BOGOFs, MAPs and booking online finding value in it, however if you charge north of £50 for a standard day ticket people expect that quality regardless. Fortunately as my visits to Towers mainly center around CBeebies these days I've avoided much of the poor availability overall, but it's incredibly telling on the faces of other visitors that it's leaving sour tastes in the mouths. Especially when on a number of times both X-Sector and Dark Forest end up with nothing to actually do. The years of poor investment are coming back to roost. On top of people tightening purse strings because we're still in a cost of living crisis that seems to only be on the way of getting worse.

Hydro/Drenched was a millstone around the neck of the park for years, it probably should've been removed far earlier post incident.