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2017 Season General Discussion


Marc

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On 4/10/2017 at 7:01 PM, Marc said:

but saying they "don't care" is wrong.

 

Exercises in damage limitation do not show they care. Showing they care would be not putting themselves and their guests in the same situation repeatedly. Seriously, it's like groundhog day at the start of every season. You can go back through the forum and find the same posts year after year. The actual reasons might differ, but the disaster the guests face remain the same.

 

This always comes down to who is this 'they' who are supposed to care or not. The staff on the ground don't want this, the park management don't want this, HQ won't want this, and I'm sure in their own way each level does actually care. But yet it happens again and again. There is something rotten within the structure of Merlin which allows this to happen. I don't know who it is, but an important person somewhere who has the ability to fix this at a high level, clearly does not care, and that ends up reflecting on everyone in the uniform.

 

Good to see they seem to have turned a corner now.

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3 hours ago, pluk said:

 

Exercises in damage limitation do not show they care. Showing they care would be not putting themselves and their guests in the same situation repeatedly. Seriously, it's like groundhog day at the start of every season. You can go back through the forum and find the same posts year after year. The actual reasons might differ, but the disaster the guests face remain the same.

 

This always comes down to who is this 'they' who are supposed to care or not. The staff on the ground don't want this, the park management don't want this, HQ won't want this, and I'm sure in their own way each level does actually care. But yet it happens again and again. There is something rotten within the structure of Merlin which allows this to happen. I don't know who it is, but an important person somewhere who has the ability to fix this at a high level, clearly does not care, and that ends up reflecting on everyone in the uniform.

 

Good to see they seem to have turned a corner now.

 

For me, it comes down to responsibility and accountability. You can work your way up the hierarchy at the park, but do they even know themselves who to hold to account for these sorts of issues? In such a large park, with so many dependencies to get right before the beginning of a season it is a huge task with so many managers / team leaders involved to ensure everything goes to plan.

 

I've seen it first hand before and when things don't go to plan like this, from the ground up, you cannot really see anything that changes. The only hope is that senior management are held accountable for these mistakes, regardless of why they happened as they are responsible and look to improve their process's to ensure that it does not happen again, but from the outside looking in (and from the inside when I worked there) this seems to be a very rare occurrence. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I get your point about Slammer, but listing in the same manner as the other rides a bit unfair given it's been dead all year and removed from the website..

 

Timber Tug Boat did have a sign put in front of it saying it would open in Easter, bit that was changed to 'Coming Soon' after 2 days.  It seems word got out quick about Easter opening but not the change in time scale.  The other ride isn't listed on the map and has never been said to be opening at Easter  (or indeed given any opening date).

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Not a great day in honesty, ended up leaving at 2pm.  A few late openings is sometimes unavoidable, I get that, but it seems that Thorpe were very unprepared with several rides down in the morning, then when they opened others went down, it appeared to be unadvertised rotation however may have been coincidence.

 

It feels like a half-open park at the moment with the SBNO's, late openings and "new" rides for this year still not open.  Genuinely had a great day at Thorpe back in March but today just wasn't enjoyable.

 

Nemesis Inferno's operations were slack, what happened to the days of seeing a train on the lift as the other entered the brake run? :(

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I wouldnt put it past them to end up doing something like that, considering how understaffed/underbudgeted the parks are all the time, but probably not out of direct choice, just general disorganisation really in my & other people's expeirences? But if it was between all the major rides, then likely just coincidence or stretched technical assistance.

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Today was one of those frustrating days where the flats were one cycle waits but all the coasters were about twenty minutes due to one train operations. I have no issue with one train on dead days where the trains barely fill up but when you're standing in a queue that barely moves waiting for 4-6 trains it saps a bit of enjoyment out the day. For a park that charges similar prices to Europa Park and Phantasialand I feel the operation standards should be higher.

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I just don't get why the management of this park and Alton Towers is so different. Alton Towers runs its coasters on more than one train, even when dead. This picture taken today by Pleasure Beach Experience shows that!

 

This one train business during the week actually makes waiting for the coasters painful and sometimes longer than overall busier weekends when two trains are running. Madness.

 

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