Fred

Schools week - rammed. Stay until the very end and you'll get on a fair few rides particularly in the last hour. Just take your time between like 1130-4 or queue for a ride cos you wont do much else during that time

It's all to do with value really. Blackpool are heavily promoting £20 entry, Drayton Manor heavily promote £25. As they're two smaller parks they get smaller queues and do well out of it. Most distaste comes from the pricing structure from Merlin it seems. Everyone basis the value of the park to be £49 or whatever, whereas everyone basically pays £25. They expect a £49 product from a £25 pricing range because of it. You don't get those feelings with the smaller parks. But it's good on them. Hopefully the whole change in pricing with thorpe and cwoa this year will be pushed to all merlin and they start doing sensible pricing.

Next week? You mean tomorrow? It's open until 6pm now on website! Foundations are for a preview thingy apparently

Surely it'll get quieter at first? 750 free annual pass holders this time round, you won't have those next time.

Dunno why anyone thinks Merlin food is expensive. £7 is an average meal without discount and that comes with a drink. You'd be lucky to have similar quality for that price in the other parks - and go disneyland paris it's £13 euro for an equivilent!

15 million? They've gone absolutely insane.

Why would an event which costs a fiver have a free BBQ... Come on now.

Merlin took over in 2007. We knew that Thorpe was rubbish since 07ish

Only has an hour queue because it only does around 288 people per hour (that's probably maximum - 48 people every 10 minutes is what I've said there, which sounds a maximum realisticness).

Storm Surge was closed all day on my visit in May

As mentioned above - clearance of trains. Why they didn't replace it? Blame the owners. YOU GERRRRR.

Disney do it also - I follow waltdisneyworld on Snapchat and they're purely awesome!

Thing with boxes is the chance for **** to get nicked (the very reason they introduced baggage holds in first place - and to try and speed up throughputs). Though a perfectly rotating safe system which suits perfectly where you load and offload in same place - sorted!!

Speed is lovely. Go oakwood and ride speed. Or Rage.

The difficulty is that none of the rides at thorpe have any sort of decent capacity to hold a really good working reserve system (or free fastpass system). If they had rides doing 2000pph, they could allocate a good 1000pph to the fastpass and it'll be absolutely fine, lovely. Instead they have rides (if we say now they've included flats) which can do 400pph... so even 50 people using reserve will make a big difference to the main queue. Fuuuuun. May as well change to Qbot if they wanna do this (oorrrr stick to allocated fastrack timeslots, of which you'd make far more money even when managed properly unlike a revenue share Qbot!)

That's because it's a pizza... not a rollercoaster.

Yes I do remember the American themed BK! Outside the wonderful old Flying Fish. Oh those days..

Niglos benin!

B&M building something which looks like an SLC? ****s gonna go down.

The first weekend of Scarefest is gypsies. The first week of Scarefest is dead and a great time to do if you can. Fireworks are utterly fantastic too, and well worth it. Just don't expect to ride much unless you arrive in the morning (as everyone arrives for one ride and fireworks, literally).

They're getting an Air Race for that spot. Pretty sure that's what it's called? Benzin can back me up here!

Pfft The Smiler has had no downtime the past few days!

Repaint was on the cards over winter.. repaint is still kinda on the cards this winter. Hopefully it gets it.

Rita's is awful purely because of the entrance positioning - it's literally there shouting LOOK AT ME I AM AN ENTRANCE whereas the real entrance is nowhere to be seen. Therefore it can be known on occasions to have the gate open for as little as 10 minutes before closing again because its longer than the main queue time.

Yeah fair enough with the area theming - that's the thing when lego own 30% of merlin, they kinda want their product to look the absolute best (and not really interested in anything else). Lego is just ridiculous for 2d signs anyway - I hate how all of their signage is either on plastic or with perspex infront of it, no creativity or variety (and usually no difference depending on area too).