Return of Reserve N Ride?

[TPJames]

Hi all,

I was just having a look at the thorpe website and I've noticed a feature on it.

https://www.thorpepark.com/tickets-passes/ticket-information/

When you click on tickets the options come up, RESERVE N RIDE, is the last on the list however risk still there. However, when you click on it, it comes up with an error message! My question is mainly aimed at thorpe however it takes a while to do a direct message to them so I was wondering if anyone knew if they had plans to bring back the system?

Many thanks.

[Mark9]

There will of course be all the non-major coasters to ride whilst you're waiting for your time slot.

If the plan is to roll this out as a replacement for queueing, then there's lots Thorpe need to do. Shows, side attractions, etc. Not something that will happen overnight. Maybe this trial is ready for a Thorpe Park of the future, not necessarily a Thorpe Park of tomorrow.

Of course, if Thorpe are planning this to be a Fastrack replacement, once all the techy-issues are sorted out, I see nothing wrong with. Also, Thorpe should try and focus on a total experience more - create queues that don't feel like queues. Things like Hex's pre show, NST's pre show. Create a total experience so, even though you're queueing for the main ride, it doesn't feel like it.

Presumably this system will move onto the major water rides as well if it proves successful. My problem is, you say queue for the other rides but say there's a surprise 15,000 people and you aren't allowed to spread people around the coasters so where do the 15,000 people go. It's going to put all the major flat rides under immense pressure because there just isn't enough to do at Thorpe besides queue and ride things.

[JoshC.]

Presumably this system will move onto the major water rides as well if it proves successful. My problem is, you say queue for the other rides but say there's a surprise 15,000 people and you aren't allowed to spread people around the coasters so where do the 15,000 people go. It's going to put all the major flat rides under immense pressure because there just isn't enough to do at Thorpe besides queue and ride things.

I do agree with you. At this stage, I think keeping it on just the major coasters is probably the most sensible thing (even if a bit ambitious), as the park just don't have enough other things to cope (as you say). And, in all honesty, they won't have enough to cope for a good 4-5 years, unless they invest in the likes of multiple shows, attractions and other non-rides in a single, extremely expensive year.

I totally get people's concerns with the system, and do share some of those concerns, but I do think that, if the technology works flawlessly, it has the potential to work.

[Coaster]

What you've got to remember is that most people won't think 'Let's got today so that we can get loads and loads of rerides'. Many people who choose to go today will choose to go because they expect it to be quieter / it's the only day they could go. Not everyone will have those intentions. Thorpe also mentioned this in advance, so it's not like it should be a surprise to anyone visiting today.

Only people who follow their social media pages. Whilst it's good to let people know things via the internet, not everyone who visits uses the internet, and even less follow their pages.

[JoshC.]

Only people who follow their social media pages. Whilst it's good to let people know things via the internet, not everyone who visits uses the internet, and even less follow their pages.

Good point; though I do expect most of Thorpe's visitors use the internet - very few people in the country don't (and even less who would be inclined to visit the park)!

However, I expect that more people than not will keep track via social media or the park's website. Given this day and age, it's only natural to expect that. I also think that Thorpe will have done a bit of research into how best to keep guests updated about future visits, especially to ensure guest satisfaction.

[Project LC]

Clearly something happened on park today as reserve and ride seemed to stop at around 3 and the park stayed open an extra hour.

Also in reply to an early comment the smiler has a through put of 1300 and storm surge barely ever reaches 400. The reason I didn't say the cinema because it was already there and the dodgems throughput will vary depending on who is riding. Throughput doesn't really depend on length of a ride either just look at oblivion with a maximum throughput of 1900.

[JoshC.]

According to TS, Smiler only has a throughput of 1000 (linky - http://www.towersstreet.com/theme-park/ride/the-smiler/), and since they're quite reliable, that's where I got that number from. Certainly feels less than that when queueing for it though!

The thing is, whilst the cinema was already there, it wasn't been open for a couple of years, so it's still going to get a lot of people through (and I bet it'll be more popular than Time Voyagers too). Think it's a valid thing to take into account.

Whilst length of a ride doesn't necessarily affect throughput, my point with Swarm is that they wouldn't have the space to make it have a higher throughput. Oblivion is a very short ride, can handle dual loading/offloading and has lots of cars. That makes it easier to get a higher throughput compared to many other rides. With Swarm, you've got a full length coaster, they didn't really have enough space to hold three trains, and they would have struggled to create an interesting layout which could deal with running three trains, in my opinion at least. Regardless, Swarm still stands as one of the highest throughputs on park, so I don't think having it at a couple of hundred extra pph would make matters any better.

[Marc]

Smiler does not hit 1300- you can tell that by standing in its queue, id be surprised if its much over 1000.

The amount of negativity here is pretty ridiculous, the park are trying a new system which has never been tried before which, if (and admittedly its a big if) it works will improve every ones visit to the resort in years to come - people are quite happy to sit here moaning about queue times at the park and suggest things like scrapping fastrack (which sorry being a realist is quite frankly ridiculous) and then moan when the park come up with an idea to improve things.

Sure its not perfect, the park will of course be aware of that but people who claim to be "fans" of the park wishing for projects like this to fail because it don't suit them personally is nothing short of quite selfish IMO.

[Project LC]

I was there on one of their trails and it really was that bad that I have taken up this absolute no stance against them. It turned what should have been a good day into a waste of 9 hours. I know they value the people who go there as a one off more as there more likely to spend meanwhile people which go there 5-20 times a year get pushed to the side and expected to spend huge amounts of money on each visit. I for one wont stand for that and I would like to think that when I go there I can re-ride the rides that I want to rather than book for rides and be expected to go shopping or ride their useless flats. I go there for stealth and swarm and that's it. I'm not running between the dome and those 2 rides each time I want to ride one. This entire reseve and ride has made me really quite angry knowing that the fun I used to have there may no longer be allowed by this stupid decision which Disney tried and failed at. If Disney failed I can sure dam tell that merlin will fail.

[Marc]

I was there on one of their trails and it really was that bad that I have taken up this absolute no stance against them. It turned what should have been a good day into a waste of 9 hours. I know they value the people who go there as a one off more as there more likely to spend meanwhile people which go there 5-20 times a year get pushed to the side and expected to spend huge amounts of money on each visit. I for one wont stand for that and I would like to think that when I go there I can re-ride the rides that I want to rather than book for rides and be expected to go shopping or ride their useless flats. I go there for stealth and swarm and that's it. I'm not running between the dome and those 2 rides each time I want to ride one. This entire reseve and ride has made me really quite angry knowing that the fun I used to have there may no longer be allowed by this stupid decision which Disney tried and failed at. If Disney failed I can sure dam tell that merlin will fail.

And I've been to their trials too (admittedly one of the later ones) and it seemed to work just as intended, we joined the virtual queue which was around a hour, did other things at the park, went to the Swarm once the hour was up and was on the ride in 5 minutes.

Now I know there have been times during the trail where this has not been the case and it has caused chaos be it the system crashed or to many people were allocated at the same time but thats what these trials are for, the park don't sit there thinking up ways to spoil peoples days, they have an idea which they (being people who run the park and know a lot more than we do on its operations) obviously have confidence in it to continue trying it and tweaking it. If it works great, if it don't then they have at least tried. Also I believe they opened up points across the park in the end not just the dome.

[Project LC]

I understand where you and Thorpe are coming from. Thorpe will cater towards the masses as that's where the money is but as usual they have overlooked things of which something swill be impossible to fix. This system will create 5000 people just wandering and they wont shop or eat at restaurants they will go to ride rides as that is what they do at theme parks. I have yet to come across a person who has gone to a theme park for its shops. All this system will do is move queues and prevent me from doing what I want to do. I know that Thorpe park read this and I doubt they will take on board what I have to say but its worth a try. Surely someone at the park must have seen disney tried a similar system and that failed for many different reasons. If Thorpe have set out to improve that system and make it work then the best of luck with that but I highly doubt that Thorpe have the resources and the knowhow to do it.

Uk theme parks are years behind the US ( in a certain sense, they sort of are and aren't but maybe that belongs in a different thread) so my question is that if this is so revolutionary why isn't there any other park doing this?

[Marc]

I wouldn't quite say they are impossible to fix, I personally think a key aspect of this working as they would like is to have a good mix of other things to do across the park , your right expecting these people to all go into the shops / food places is unrealistic and won't happen so some will end up in other ride queues which will make them longer which is why I think for it to work as the park would like they need something which is both good and worth doing but also high enough throughput to eat these people up.

After that I think their second biggest problem will be getting the general public to understand the whole concept of the idea which is vital for this to work - when it was just swarm last season they had staff at the entrance, on the bridge in the dome and on the Swarm island its self trying to explain the system and how it works but of course doing it on all coasters is a whole new scale.

That said ive no doubt they will take all feedback into consideration be it from here, Facebook, twitter and of course (arguably most importantly) those who use the system at the park whilst these trials are happening but saying they don't have the recourses and knowhow seems a bit harsh, this is after all their own idea to use it to this scale so they will have a understanding of whats needed to make it as successful as possible, as for no other parks doing it, well theres always got to be a first!

[OldFarmerDean]

Going Friday... Glad I can use a smartphone to do this, but apprehensive how its going to affect my ride count, as I ended up riding stealth 3 rimes in a row and saw the ride twice in a row on a quiet day which I'm hoping this Friday will be, so am somewhat annoyed. Although can't I just get all 4 of us to register our phones and get 4 lots of reservations for different coasters at similar times?

[Cal]

Going Friday... Glad I can use a smartphone to do this, but apprehensive how its going to affect my ride count, as I ended up riding stealth 3 rimes in a row and saw the ride twice in a row on a quiet day which I'm hoping this Friday will be, so am somewhat annoyed. Although can't I just get all 4 of us to register our phones and get 4 lots of reservations for different coasters at similar times?

I don't think you can. You have to enter your merlin pass id or your ticket number when you reserve for a ride, so I am assuming you can only enter your ticket number once.

Sent from my iPhone 5S using Tapatalk

[OldFarmerDean]

Ah okay that's a good way to do it to stop people doing several ones as I thought others would do it so might as well myself. I did look at it yesterday and tried entering my pass number actually and it said it was too many digits? :S

[pluk]

The amount of negativity here is pretty ridiculous, the park are trying a new system which has never been tried before which, if (and admittedly its a big if) it works will improve every ones visit to the resort in years to come - people are quite happy to sit here moaning about queue times at the park and suggest things like scrapping fastrack (which sorry being a realist is quite frankly ridiculous) and then moan when the park come up with an idea to improve things.

Sure its not perfect, the park will of course be aware of that but people who claim to be "fans" of the park wishing for projects like this to fail because it don't suit them personally is nothing short of quite selfish IMO.

Some actually ridiculous things...

-thinking a whole theme park can be queue-less. However good the system, the world around it does not run smoothly enough for this to ever happen.

-trialing this system in the first instance with enforced 100% participation instead of alongside a physical queue and giving people the choice.

-this statement "like scrapping fastrack (which sorry being a realist is quite frankly ridiculous)", because parks didn't operate just fine for decades without it, did they?

-claiming that as fans of the park we are wrong to criticise them when they do things this badly.

I don't dislike this because it 'doesn't suit me personally', I dislike it because I think it is genuinely bad for the park and its reputation. Yes, it's good to be ambitious when trying to solve a problem, and the thought process behind what they are doing may well come from good intentions, but when it comes to implementation it has got to be realistic or they are doomed to failure. Even if your ultimate target is not achievable you start with something that is and work towards it to see how close you can get, not jump straight to the end goal and see how far you fall backwards.

I don't think this system has no place, it could do wonders for how much time people spend queuing, but it will never replace it entirely. A buffer of physical queue will always be required to absorb the unpredictability of people and machines that a timed ticket system can not react to fast enough. If they want to be sensible about it, and find out what is actually possible, they need to run this alongside a normally functioning park with a 'stand-by' physical queue and slowly increase the percentage of available seats that are allocated to r&r over the physical one. Then they will see what works best for their guests and what percentage is possible queue-less. The answer will not be '100'.

[th13teen]

Why can't people just be happy!?

I have no opinion on this system, but things take time, they take a very long...although I would prefer the 'old fashioned' Disney Fast Pass way of doing it if they were to do it...that does make it easier for someone like myself who hates technology...but we have all got to move with the times. So lets not rule it out yet, Thorpe Park probably know a lot more than we do, they are not just doing this because they have nothing better to do, and it obviously has caught some attention in the ranks of Merlin!

[Benin]

The amount of negativity here is pretty ridiculous, the park are trying a new system which has never been tried before which, if (and admittedly its a big if) it works will improve every ones visit to the resort in years to come - people are quite happy to sit here moaning about queue times at the park and suggest things like scrapping fastrack (which sorry being a realist is quite frankly ridiculous) and then moan when the park come up with an idea to improve things.

Sure its not perfect, the park will of course be aware of that but people who claim to be "fans" of the park wishing for projects like this to fail because it don't suit them personally is nothing short of quite selfish IMO.

You should see the negativity on other sites if you think it's bad here...

People suggest scrapping Fastrack because of the way Thorpe operate it I reckon... It's oversold and causes the queuetimes for the average guest to be substansially longer, which of course leads to further complaints... Of course the best way to deal with that would be both to limit the numbers available per hour (20% of theoretical throughput per hour perhaps?), not throw Fastrack at every complaining guest, and level the playing field by bringing back free Fastrack for all...

Reserve and Ride as an idea from the off seems flawed, as the park are (as mentioned) trying to acheive the rather unacheivable, especially flawed in a park where the only thing to do is go on rides... Parks like Chessie or Towers would probably benefit from this scheme a lot more because there is a lot more non-ride things to do in both of them...

Where do people go in Thorpe if they're waiting for their time slot? Into other ride queues, which will of course build up immensely given that most of the 5 coaster queues tend to get between 1000-1500 people per hour, so you're going to have 5000+ (assuming an hour long queue worth of people) more people milling around the park itself 'queuing' for those coasters whilst queuing for other rides at the same time...

It's almost like they're trying to fix what isn't directly broken (I.e. normal queuing, Fastrack methods ARE broken)... Which confuses me as there's many better ways to actual make the queueline part of the ride experience... Look at the way Disney are doing queues with interactive features for one end of the scale, or making heavily themed queues, or making queues that interact with the ride, or making the queues more interesting that flat cattlepen mazes... There are lots of ways that any park can take a queue and make it an interesting, fuller experience, it's just a case of simply bothering to do that...

As for being 'fans' and being negative about this project being selfish, that's a daft viewpoint to have, as criticism is part and parcel of the whole game, and quite often it is the fans who will notice things that are wrong (some are worse than others, Disney fans for example, they complain about carpet corners being turned up)... I would say most of us have a decent understanding of how well the park can run and operate, and a few on here know this from working at parks and seeing what certain attributes of a park's operational standard can cause issues with... There's nothing wrong with fans of anything being critical of something that they like which is doing something (in their opinion) wrong...

With this scheme, the park needed as pluk said to test this in combination with a normal queue... Forcing a trial scheme upon everyone is a daft idea indeed, especially if the idea is to phase out the original concept... Hence why the London buses have been taking contactless cards for ages, to get people used to the idea first before eliminating the monetary method...

That, a the park needs to improve the non-ride offerings available, which it's been failing at ever since they got rid of the farm quite frankly...

[JoshC.]

-trialing this system in the first instance with enforced 100% participation instead of alongside a physical queue and giving people the choice.

-this statement "like scrapping fastrack (which sorry being a realist is quite frankly ridiculous)", because parks didn't operate just fine for decades without it, did they?

-claiming that as fans of the park we are wrong to criticise them when they do things this badly.

-I'm a bit confused as to how it would work with giving people a choice? Are you suggesting that during the trial, there should be a physical queue as normal, as well as a RnR system, which would allow people to virtually queue, then get straight on the ride? So essentially just making RnR a free Fastrack service? (Not criticising or anything, just curious )

-I think with Fastrack, the thing is, it's never going to be scrapped in its current form. Yeah, parks coped fine without it, but these days, it's just a profit scheme. Yes, it's disappointing, yes, it shouldn't be like that, but that's how it is. Fastrack, at any park where it's now a paid-for system, is here to stay. I think some people sometimes overlook that, and I think that's what Marc is getting at. Fastrack definitely needs improvements, and maybe a RnR system could be those improvements, but it's a slightly different issue I think.

-Agree with you here, pretty much. However, there's a difference between criticising the park for doing things wrong and saying that they 'hope the park fail'. I think many here see that the system could work in one way or another and, similarly, most think that a queue-less park is not feasible. But when some (and by no means all) people say that they hope this completely fails, you have to question if they're really someone who wants to see the park at it's best.

One thing which I'm confused by with this is why Thorpe are trialling this now. June is a relatively busy period for the park, school trips are starting it, some students have finished for the year, etc. Now seems like a bad time to trial a system which is so ambitious and has potential to go badly wrong. They trialled it last year during August too; another very busy period. Talk about jumping in at the deep end ey? I just don't get why Thorpe would be so willing to try such an ambitious (and no doubt, technologically complicated) system when the park is busy. This sort of thing should be trialled during in the likes of March, early May or mid-September (on weekdays), so if it doesn't work, it causes minimum impact.

I think in general, Thorpe have been very ambitious with this. Probably too ambitious. And that's my biggest criticism of the idea of RnR really. It's ambitious, and I fear the park are being too ambitious, too quick with it all!

[pluk]

-I'm a bit confused as to how it would work with giving people a choice? Are you suggesting that during the trial, there should be a physical queue as normal, as well as a RnR system, which would allow people to virtually queue, then get straight on the ride? So essentially just making RnR a free Fastrack service? (Not criticising or anything, just curious )

-Exactly that. An hour wait, or a two hour virtual wait, you chose.Then they can keep upping the percentage to r&r (in turn increasing the physical wait time and reducing r&r wait time) and the system will find its natural balance. It's the only way the system can realistically function.

As for fastrack, I would love for this to be its successor, its replacement. Pay to use the system as a whole, but the time users have to 'virtually' wait reduces its destructive impact on everyone else and tightly controls allocations..

[Marc]

-thinking a whole theme park can be queue-less. However good the system, the world around it does not run smoothly enough for this to ever happen.

I agree it would never be totally queue-less but if they can get it to work as they wish it could potentially make things a lot better - It worked well on The Swarm on some of the trails and admittedly it sometimes didnt and it went totally wrong - although it seems most of the time these problems were more caused by things like the Wi-Fi on park struggling to deal with the extra demand it causes, which I guess is why we are seeing more and more Cloud Wi-Fi hotspots pop up across the park.

-trialing this system in the first instance with enforced 100% participation instead of alongside a physical queue and giving people the choice.

Surely its better is trailed on the scale they intend to use it? Its worked fine on Swarm for some (admittedly not all) trials and I think then this went onto Swarm and Stealth so I guess this is the next logical step.

-this statement "like scrapping fastrack (which sorry being a realist is quite frankly ridiculous)", because parks didn't operate just fine for decades without it, did they?

Your right they did - but times have some what changed give it another 5 years or so I bet you'll be hard pressed to find a park which don't offer fastrack in some form or another

-claiming that as fans of the park we are wrong to criticise them when they do things this badly.

I'm not saying its wrong to criticise when they do things badly but comments suggesting hope that a system fails just because they don't like it are the ones I disagree with.

People suggest scrapping Fastrack because of the way Thorpe operate it I reckon... It's oversold and causes the queuetimes for the average guest to be substansially longer, which of course leads to further complaints... Of course the best way to deal with that would be both to limit the numbers available per hour (20% of theoretical throughput per hour perhaps?), not throw Fastrack at every complaining guest, and level the playing field by bringing back free Fastrack for all...

Realistically we don't or wont ever know the actual %'s of fastack sold I agree in the past it has indeed been oversold and caused problems - with prices going up this year things have seemed better but we wont really know till the real busy times kick in. I don't personally see what free fastrack achieves, as a paid for system if anything those who pay extra are assured of a better service.

Reserve and Ride as an idea from the off seems flawed, as the park are (as mentioned) trying to acheive the rather unacheivable, especially flawed in a park where the only thing to do is go on rides... Parks like Chessie or Towers would probably benefit from this scheme a lot more because there is a lot more non-ride things to do in both of them...

Where do people go in Thorpe if they're waiting for their time slot? Into other ride queues, which will of course build up immensely given that most of the 5 coaster queues tend to get between 1000-1500 people per hour, so you're going to have 5000+ (assuming an hour long queue worth of people) more people milling around the park itself 'queuing' for those coasters whilst queuing for other rides at the same time...

I agree with this - the park lack things to do other than rides which would be essential for this to ever realistically work long term, but I expect that would be something they would be able to address when / if they decide they are happy with the concept going forwards.

It's almost like they're trying to fix what isn't directly broken (I.e. normal queuing, Fastrack methods ARE broken)... Which confuses me as there's many better ways to actual make the queueline part of the ride experience... Look at the way Disney are doing queues with interactive features for one end of the scale, or making heavily themed queues, or making queues that interact with the ride, or making the queues more interesting that flat cattlepen mazes... There are lots of ways that any park can take a queue and make it an interesting, fuller experience, it's just a case of simply bothering to do that...

Again I agree although apart from a few of the rides I dont think thorpes queues are actually that bad in this respect, they are obviously not Disney like queues but there are much worse queues around IMO.

As for being 'fans' and being negative about this project being selfish, that's a daft viewpoint to have, as criticism is part and parcel of the whole game, and quite often it is the fans who will notice things that are wrong (some are worse than others, Disney fans for example, they complain about carpet corners being turned up)... I would say most of us have a decent understanding of how well the park can run and operate, and a few on here know this from working at parks and seeing what certain attributes of a park's operational standard can cause issues with... There's nothing wrong with fans of anything being critical of something that they like which is doing something (in their opinion) wrong...

I didn't quite mean it like that - I was more getting at the comments "hoping it fails"..

With this scheme, the park needed as pluk said to test this in combination with a normal queue... Forcing a trial scheme upon everyone is a daft idea indeed, especially if the idea is to phase out the original concept... Hence why the London buses have been taking contactless cards for ages, to get people used to the idea first before eliminating the monetary method...

Ive actually thought the same - the thing with trying it with the normal queue though is it just adds another level of complexity to the queues, unless they considered halting fastrack sales on that particular day on that particular ride, but then that would no doubt cause complaints that they are not offering fastrack and you risk the uptake being so small the trail isnt really a fair one to see if it can or cant work.

Id like to point out I do agree with some points being made - for this to ever work the park does need to offer things to do other than rides to help soak up some of these people who would otherwise be in queues - whislt at the weekend they have live music throughout the day I still feel it needs more, and then the next problem they will have (and possibly the biggest hurdle) is actually educating the every day guests so they understand whats happening, how it works and how it will ultimatly ever benefit them.

[Flipper]

Reserve 'n Ride stopped at around 11 yesterday I believe; there's also green gazebo's by Colossus, Inferno, and SWARM to register for rides as well as the dome. And a hell of a lot of staff knocking around to help implement it.

I think 'standby' queues would still be beneficial with this system, but I do think this could be a really amazing step for the park to have the world's first queue-less theme park. No, it's not going to just 'work' overnight, and yes they'll need more side show things to do; but give them a chance!

[pluk]

I agree it would never be totally queue-less.

Surely its better is trailed on the scale they intend to use it?

Well then! It's all about the buffer, one is needed.

I still don't for one second believe that they believe they will ever be operating a queue-less theme park, it's the gimmick they have attached to it to justify the trials either internally or externally, or a bit of both. If they do actually believe it they are deluded. It's probably how they are justifying it to those on high considering the disruption in fastack sales this will inevitably cause.

I'm not saying its wrong to criticise when they do things badly but comments suggesting hope that a system fails just because they don't like it are the ones I disagree with.

I do hope it fails, because it is a bad idea. In fact I know it will fail, what I mean is I hope it does soon enough. That's not a bad thing on my part. I don't want the park in general to fail, I want this to fail, because I believe that in the long term it is a good thing that they realise it is a flawed idea as early as possible and stop it. The longer they drag it out the worse they will look.

Your right they did - but times have some what changed give it another 5 years or so I bet you'll be hard pressed to find a park which don't offer fastrack in some form or another

Realistically we don't or wont ever know the actual %'s of fastack sold I agree in the past it has indeed been oversold and caused problems - with prices going up this year things have seemed better but we wont really know till the real busy times kick in. I don't personally see what free fastrack achieves, as a paid for system if anything those who pay extra are assured of a better service.

Just because everyone is it at doesn't make it good or right. Fastrack 'In some form or another' is the key here. I don't like fastrack at all and would rather everyone was equal in theme park land but that's not to say I do not see the advantage for infrequent visitors etc. But the privilege of jumping should come at a heavy heavy price, or be managed tightly to ensure it doesn't adversely affect everyone not using it severely. This r&r system could really be the answer if they used it sensibly, as an out and out two tier ticketing system for with and without. Everyone knows what they are getting then. An end to this one shot instant access set up can't come soon enough where as waiting outside of the queue is fair enough, it can be managed and charged for a whole days privilege accordingly.

R&R may well be the future, not as a replacement to queuing, but maybe as a 'replacement' to fastrack instead.

[Marc]

The thing is your right there certainly are arguments as to why this won't work - but if between us on a fan site can come up with them then you can be sure that people who run the park will have come up with the same and no doubt more arguments against the case.

The majority of the trials seem to have gone wrong when the wifi at the park couldn't cope, I've seen more and more points pop up so I guess we can only wait and see.

The park have said they are tweaking the system for another trial Friday - after looking today I've noticed it's a totally different system now where you choose when you want to ride or you can ride right away if available - I assume the choice will become limited thought out the day as people "queue"

I've no doubt the park have massive hurdles to get over if it ever has a chance of working how they wish too, and I'm sure they are well aware of that too.

It would be intresting to see if they could trial it on a day when they could provide more entertainment across the park to see how it worked then.

[Project LC]

I would like to see the system cope with a Saturday in august with 15,000 people all in the morning clicking the swarm. All the guests would be in the same place all trying to use it at the same time. That will have to be one very good WiFi hub to live that sort of demand. Then of course it will run into problems like the later trails where the ride becomes fully booked before lunch so anyone who turns up late cant use it.

I don't think the park has massive hurdles to cover they have an infinite amount of colossal hurdles. I'm quite sure it will become a thing where they solve 1 problem and create 2 more.

[Fred]

Ah okay that's a good way to do it to stop people doing several ones as I thought others would do it so might as well myself. I did look at it yesterday and tried entering my pass number actually and it said it was too many digits? :S

Btw, you can put any random 9 digit number in and it works .

Smiler doesn't get more than 1000, infact that's it's absolute maximum. Hence it's constant queues.