Its made me smile reading some of these posts....A lot of them read "capitalism is evil" we should all be equal "socialism" rules
People buying there way to first class, the best seats in the house, Ferraris, big houses is a fact of life, complaining about it wont change anything.
There is and never will be equality in the world. Merlin is a business. Capitalism at its best, its not here for us. Its here for its shareholders and doesn't care if were happy sad or indifferent, as does every other listed company.
It will use every method at its disposal to make £ more every time. As every business will.
There are roughly 800 VIP pass holders.
At any given point during a weekday they'll be about 10 per park. And weekend about 30 per park. I know as I ask every time, and were at a park every weekend.
Thorpe has a maximum capacity of 15,000 people and an average capacity of 8000 people. On average they sell 1000 fast tracks per day (single shot or bundle)
Meaning VIP people represent 0.003% of the entire people at the park on an average weekend day.
Yes VIP re-riders are out of order and shouldn't be doing this as it clogs up the queues unnecessarily. But with only 30 people on average there and only a couple of them re-riding (as most the VIP people respect the system) You can do the math for yourself the over day the impact of the VIP pass against the total number of rides on a day is such a small number I cant even count the zeros. Merlin DO reduce the number of "ultimate fast-track" for sale on the day based on the number of VIP's there expecting as most book using the online form before they attend and turn up.
Back to my rant about class anyway.
Merlin is business. Trains have first class, Planes have first class (with no airport queuing), Ships have first class, Cinemas have premier seats, at events you have crap seats and really expensive seats, you can take a cab or a limo, mcdonalds or a mitchelin star restaurant, there are private doctors and hospitals if you don't want to wait, even banks have "premier customer" queue which is always empty despite there always being a massive queue for the normal tills . Every business has to make money, we don't live in an equal world and most business breed inequality to charge the wealthy few to have premium products, as quite often those wealthy few make up a large % of there bottom line EBITDA.
This is not new, capitalism has been around for since the 14th century and is here to stay.
So don't blame merlin and don't blame the VIP pass holders. Blame society, and accept it.
