ThrillSeekerMatt

Yes, they do actully. I went to a business talk with college at Thorpe Park and they were saying than only anout (I think it was) 15% of all customers pay full price, everyone has a 2 for 1 or buys online. They were saying that they want everyone to feel as if they have got a good cheap deal, where in fact they are paying exactly what Merlin intended.

I've never understood why people do that!

Umm... well yes, that is exactly what I'm saying. Why is this so hard to believe?Watchdog are not the Legoland management team, it's not up to them to find the nests and tell Merlin about it! Their job is to expose the truth, that the nests are not being dealt with even though Legoland say they have more than one member of staff out looking for them every day!

The BBC didn't tell Legoland about the nests they found because they wanted to prove that Legoland were not doing everything in their power to stop it!It's not the BBC's job to tell Legoland about their own park! They should be sorting it out for themselves!Watchdog do not work for Merlin, they were building up evidence to show the public that the alleged 'daily inspections' were not being carried out properly!The BBC don't care about Legoland's reputation, they are not out to do them a favour by telling them where the nests are! They are just testing them so they can prove to everyone that they are not doing anything about a serious problem!

They left them to find the nests for themselves.Of course this is exaggerated slightly be the BBC, they need to make a programme out of it after all, so they will make it look as bad as they possibly can!LOL at the picture! I just thought the manager's response was a bit weak (to say the least), and Legoland only started warning people about it on their website to shut the BBC up!

I was staggered at one point during the programme when the Legoland manager says "We've taken a lot of steps to to minimise these wasps such as cleaning tables, emptying bins, cleaning floors." I'm sorry, but that's simply pathetic. Surely this should be happening anyway! This has nothing to do with wasps at all! Basically she was saying she doesn't give a flying s*** and maybe they will put up some wasp traps (like every other Merlin park) next year! They've only put a notice on their website to stop the BBC ripping them down for that too!

I think everyone knows about these rules now, enough people have been banging on about them. But it still doesn't prove that the rules were never broken!This argument could carry on for ever, Ken was the only one there at the time and it is just his word against everyone elses! There is nothing to say that the rules were not broken that day, there is every chance that he did ride Samurai alone!

I've been many parks where health and safety rules have been flouted, and have been on a few rides where even restraints have gone unchecked. I won't say when or where, but H&S rules are not always followed, it's as simple as that.

Is everyone on this forum constantly looking for a fight or what?It's very possible that Ken rode Samurai by himself. Health and safety rules aren't always followed in the real world! And everyone jumped on him for claming that he rode Slammer alone too.Calm down people!

I think we just have to grit our teeth when we read and hear these comments and realse it's going to take a long time for Thorpe to shake off its apauling reputation for downtime.To be honest it deserves all the criticism it gets. Things are definitely improving, but I don't think we're out of the woods yet.People will only be satisfied when they are reaching the same level as Alton Towers, and even then I fear we will still have the odd comment about Thorpe's past.

I've had Tidal wave to myself before, and me and a mate went on Detonator with nobody else.

True. At least they are actully working this year though! Maybe they will improve on this next year.I bet if you only visited once this year you wouldn't notice how repetative it is.

That is totally ridiculous!! There is ONE interesting part of that queue line and they've stopped people from even queueing there!! What on earth was wrong with the previous way of doing it?! Where the fastrack and standby queues meet at the top of the first flight of stairs.So now everyone misses out on the gunshots and Jigsaw's little speeches. Not happy about this at all.

To be honest, as a park they are dreadful at crowd control. Thousands of customers are held out the front jammed in to those ridiculous temporary fences, then when you're let in the rides are running at reduced capacity. Only when it gets super busy they decide to add another train, which takes AGES making the queues even longer! Surely it would be common sense to add another train whilst it's not too busy, that way everyone is happy and the queues are kept as short as possible!That's interesting that you say they might be trying to keep people out of the rest of the park to controll where people are But really? Would you do that to your customers?

This is a very good point actully, I've noticed this a lot at Thorpe Park over any other park, and it happens a lot on Rush.The VAST majority of the staff are brilliant and do a great job, it's just the odd few that hold up the queues with their ridiculous flirting and chatting every now and then.Let's face the facts though, how many people on this forum go to work and work at 100% efficiency from the start of their shift to the end? Of course people are going to slack from time to time! It's just human nature.

WOAH.Imagine if they had released someones restraints and it suddenly started rolling!I bet a few people lost their jobs that day.

HAHA! What were they thinking! I'm glad they got kicked out, what idiots.

Alton Towers, Monday August 23rd.So I set off on my 3 and a half hour journey to the Towers after rounding up my mates. The journey up north was very rainy, and this set the theme for most of the day.We arrived at the monorail in plenty of time and were at the park gates around 5 mins before ERT started, so we were ready and rearing to go! First stop was Oblivion, then over to Nemesis via Hex. Air was next on the list, but the rest of the day’s order is a bit of a blur to be honest!This was my first visit to the Towers for 2 years so it was my first ride on Th13teen. It is most certainly not the thrill ride advertised and I left feeling extremely disappointed, even after reading all the reviews. But anyway, the less said about that ride the better in my opinion. After the obligatory ride on Rita we got away from the ridiculously busy Dark Forest and explored the rest of the park.Queue times were generally good throughout the day; the longest queue was for Spinball at about an hour because it was running at reduced capacity due to the weather. Th13teen had a 50 minute queue when I was there but that was fairly early on, Rita was at about 40, Nemesis was around 30 mins all day and Air was slightly more. Oblivion barely had a 10 minute queue all day!The park is looking very good at the moment, I didn’t see one breakdown, there is next to no graffiti or litter, the staff were all very friendly and helpful, and they were working extremely hard to keep the queues relatively short.The weather really started to close in at around 5ish and a few rumbles of thunder saw the park start to empty. Many rides were near enough walk on later in the day so we managed to rack up a king size ride count!Ride Count (as far as I remember...)Oblivion – 4Nemesis – 3 (1 front)Air – 2Duel - 2 Th13teen , Rita (front), Sonic Spinball, Skyride, Ripsaw, Blade, Flume, Congo River Rapids, Submission, Hex- 1Total ride count 21! That’s amazing for the middle of August! Although it was raining, and we did buy a 'scream' fastrack so got a ride on Nemesis, Air & Oblivion without queueing.

Saw Alive was on the Gadget Show briefly tonight. It will be on Demand Five if anyone's interested.

The worst place for chavs is the indoor queue for X:\NWO. For some reason they get all excited and rowdy when they are put together in a dark damp smelly area. And if 2 herds come in to contact then god help anyone else in the queue line. They start emitting some strange sounds at an incredible volume, words that aren't strictly words, 'brap' for instance. I mean what on god's earth is 'brap' supposed to mean? Some sort of mating call perhaps? I wouldn't mind if they kept their pre-riding rituals to themselves, but their blatant disregard for any other human being means that anyone standing near them has to put up with their poor behaviour and ridiculous language until they reach the font of the queue, and even then they risk being on the same train as them.And don't get me started on the flaming queue jumpers.

Last year I saw a pack of chavs hanging around near the Colossus inline twists, when the train went past they started launching stones or something at the riders Some bloke that had been standing across the path ran over and gave them a right ear bashing and a sort of mini-fight broke out (well it was more of a one way thing with one man taking on 3 spoiled little sh*ts) someone else came over and joined in. After a bit of pushing and shoving the 3 idiots soon scurried away. Didn't see the little brats for the rest of the day And I've also been standing in the Detonator queue when a half empty coke bottle plunged in to the bushes about 3 feet away!

Exciting media event? I wonder what that could be?Not very exciting for whoever arrives expecting to experience the maze on Friday! At least they are letting people know in advance.

I'm supprised they don't play the 'Hello Zepp' music in the photo collection room at the end (and in the stairwell on the Ride).I LOVE the idea of the 'game over' room at the end of the maze!

I thought I read somewhere that there were originally 10 rooms on the boat? Because I remember people were talking about how the attraction will develop and grow over the years as Saw Movies were released.Hmm.. maybe I just imaginged that

Any chance they will add another room (or 2) for Fright Nights?I seem to remember reading somewhere that there were a few unused rooms at the moment.