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Firstly I should apologise for posting this as a separate thread, and initially in the wrong part of these forums. I hadn't seen this board when I posted. Just to pick up on Mysterio Kas reply, we visited Legoland on Friday, Chessington Saturday, Legoland Sunday and Thorpe Park Monday. I wouldn't really compare Thorpe Park, as it was nearly deserted due to the storm the previous night. But I couldn't believe the difference between Chessington and Legoland. Legoland seemed to run like clockwork. It was pleasant to walk round, everything was open, staff were friendly, it was an excellent day out. Chessington was just stressful - walking round with a miserable child while everything seems to be shut, being sent away from rides, staff not appearing to have a clue, etc. It genuinely seemed that the place was on its last legs and about to close down (and I see from some other comments in the Chessington section that if anything it's got worse since). Presumably it was the first big weekend for both parks? This is nothing to do with new rides - after all, the whole park was new to us. It's just that the ones they have got are in such poor condition. There's a good chance we'll revisit Legoland in Summer; we wouldn't go back to Chessington if you paid us!

Saturday 26th

Hi there I visited Chessington for the first time last weekend. Though you might be interested in a first time visitors view. I live in the north of England, and bought Merlin annual passes for the family for the first time this year. We decided to visit the southern parks at Chessington, Legoland and Thorpe Park over the Easter long weekend, staying in a travelodge locally. Well, what a massive disppointment it was. From what I can tell the rides must be falling to pieces, given how little they actually seem to work. Four rides were planned to be closed for the whole day (Black Buccanneer, Griffins Galleon, Rameses Revenge and Rattlesnake) - although there was no notification of this before we entered the park, and the 'queue times' screens in the park had the first three listed as operational all day, with a 5 minute queue. As it happens there was a board outside the park listing these 4 as closed which I saw when returning to the car to get lunch, but it certainly wasn't out at 9:50 when we arrived! On top of that, Dragon Falls, Dragons Fury, Jungle Bus, Kobra, Tiny Truckers, Tomb Blaster and Zufari were all closed when we got in, leaving us pretty mich wandering round the park to see if anything was actually open! In fact within about 10 minutes of the park opening, Vampire and Bubbleworks were showing 40 and 30 minutes queues respectively as everyone ended up going to those. During the course of the day all these rides did manage to open, for at least some period of time. However Dragon Falls opened for a while then closed fairly soon afterwards. We were actually sitting on Tiny Truckers with our youngest when it was closed and we were turfed off. We were on Bubbleworks when it stopped and got stuck. Looking at some of the comments on Facebook, other people have had similar experiences with other days recently, with numerous rides out of action or closing midway during the day. Now given it was the end of March that we went, and the park has only been open for a few weeks, I can't help wondering what state these rides are going to be come August time! One other thing we noticed was the immaturity of the staff. Most of the park seemed to be operated by teenagers, who just didn't have a clue what they were doing. Take for example the Bubbleworks closure - the boats came round towards the exit and backed up, leaving people at the back in a boat stuck underneath the fountains. The operators made no effort to check people were OK, no-one even walked back along the path to see them, and (despite being told by us what was happening, as we were in the middle of the queue so could see the front and back) they didn't stop the fountains running. Given their complete clueless-ness, I can genuinely see some sort of accident happening there. Finally, the queue times screens, app, and ride notice boards themselves, often all showed different information - rendering it completely pointless. Is someone just making up the numbers they display? When we finally got on Tomb Blaster (after waiting 45 minutes, when the screen said 15) the operator asked how long we'd waited and then went to amend the sign to match that - no taking into account how long the actual queue was! It was a massive difference to Legoland, where the park seemed well run, everything operated as said and the staff clearly knew what they were doing. I appreciate that in general the rides at Legoland may be smaller than Chessington, but not so much as to cause that amount of difference. We returned to Legoland the following day - we certainly won't be returning to Chessington!