Fred

Like a ride that is running, but not open to the public...

Cos it costs them an absolute fortune to staff each and every hour. I imagine they kept today at 5 to try and claw back the losses they must've been making the past few weeks. Though, they should really have closed at 530 (even though the rides closed with a maximum 10min queue excluding the usual spinball).

Bank Holiday Weekend = possibly busiest day so far of season. Surely that equates to higher queue times.

It's pink now, that photo was taken literally as the dye was put in. Let's see if they make it red..

Oh they've only got 52 rooms? No wonder they're doing "well". It doesn't take a lot to fill those rooms.

Yeah, but that's their own problem then. They've been warned, ignorance is not an excuse. Which is good, otherwise theme parks would be incredibly boring.

I always thought a bucket list was rude - like who you'd want to have sexual relations with. Presumably cos thats the only answers people ever gave when someone was asked. This forum has changed me for the better.

All those wonderful anamatronics. How fantastic. Bloody tomb blaster.

http://www.thorpepark.com/downloads/plan-your-visit/ride-access-guide-2013.pdf This is actually the best thing for you - it's from thorpe and says absolutely everything you need to know

Pretty impressive scaffolding can survive years and years and years in the same state.

Liking the area fencing. Lovely and airy and like they don't really exist. Thanks for the photo update!

The car park (including the grass ones) only has capacity for 5000 cars. Obviously you usually get way less. On 5 trains, even on the busiest of days at the end of the day, the queue is never more than 20mins, usually a fair bit less. 1800pph is on 3 trains which'll be the minimum during the morning/evening peak.

Having worked on Rita, it'd work well for stealth to an extent. The main issue with them is everyone thinks SRQ WILL be quicker. Therefore, if the queue is easily accessible everyone will join it, making it long or making people try and abuse it. Ritas was closed more than open because it'd gain an hour queue within 2mins of opening the gate. Then you'd have people moaning at you because the queue barely moves. The only one I think it generally works on is thirteen, or spinball (wet weather ONLY) as it's a long length queueline and you'd have to make a serious judgement before joining. Though, people in singles get irritated if they queue more than 5mins, so it's really not worth the hassle whatsoever. It doesn't work properly on Air, Nemesis, Rita, Spinball (unless wet weather) and completely and utterly pointless on Sub Terra, so can only imagine Smiler could be as bad. Waste of money installing and staffing.

Tis a balance however. The business obviously relies on decent, speedy and happy staff to ensure guests have a good day out and will return - they cannot simply find enough staff for a short period of time to work these hours which are decent enough. I remember a good old fright nights year when it was majority agency and staffing was awful, and a year when they had like no staff after 7pm. I've equally worked times when no matter how many recruitment events and assessment centres they had, noone was actually good enough to employ. Difficulties with minimum wage, short term contracts I suppose!

Yeah, I meant it doesn't have too much room to provide for more guests anyway. It's capacity is rather low, and they seemingly struggle to gain anyone during term time.

http://www.altontowers.com/hotels/hotel-guest-benefits/ - although not the best page, as it's for guests in the hotel, they do advertise it. Towers has always had it - before the monorail, they had a coach style transportation system. It's been unique and quirky. Dunno how you find a queue (longer than the walking time of 10mins) during ERT. Monorail has a pretty decent throughput - 500 every 10mins. So 3000/hour on busy days. It's minimum is 1800/hour!

Chessie will naturally have a lower high level of expenditure. It barely gets any guests when compared to the other parks. Why spend when you don't get the same returns?

The underlining of ERT - although a non-point, it's not just Exclusive/Extended (a thorpe name).. it's classed as Early at towers init. That's all.

Express parking was the last carpark to the built, way after monorail actually. But continue moaning about the wonderful monorail system. Turn up earlier, it opens at 830 which is half hour before ERT even starts. Christ!

Smiler definitely has Single Rider. Shame, hate the system.

It's a towers thing - they won't sell fastrack for new attractions until they know precisely its average throughput and works through any early teething problems. None of the prizes are fastrack for smiler, but they are offering normal fastrack discounts or free fastrack as prizes.

They let everyone in from 9, and most rides don't check for tickets so everyone can go on the rides before 10! Wonderful!

Not selling fastrack for smiler this year, it's not thorpe

You realise all ride hosts work the most amount of hours out of any dept in a theme park? You won't see any work any less than 42hrs a week, that's before the extended ride closes. You'll have to find extra staffing to do these events, as I've mentioned. You cannot expect to find enough to work shift work, and you cannot expect or find your staff doing 5 days a week if you demand 15hr days from them. You won't get the staff for the bare minimum amount of hours, trust me. They've tried it before, it fails. EDIT: Just wanted to add, retail and supermarkets especially live on their staff doing 12hrs/week. Of course they'll be able to get staff doing evenings. Theme parks are full time jobs especially in operations side, so good luck finding those extra staffing hours.

Plus, what you forget is its temporary - a whole week or two of these closes. How the hell is a park meant to staff, and find staff able and willing, to do these hours for this short amount of time? You won't. Hence why the parks do full day shifts as it's "only" two weeks or so of long hours. Thorpe used to have a lot of issues with 10pm ride closes, regarding staffing which led to a lot of agency workers, which leads own problems itself.