The closures being pushed forwards isn't surprising at all. Especially that the park has rarely been seeing queues over 15 minutes at all this month, it's a great shame to see all this happen especially how dead and quiet the park is currently (although good if you're visiting though).

 

Just back from Towers and Th13teen, AIR, Rita, and Oblivion were all over 15 mins. Th13teen and Rita reached 60. Understandably their struggling, but from what I saw around The Smiler, is that they could open it tomorrow, and everyone would ride it, there were plenty of people asking the poor host outside.

Well it's already got a group of my friends talking. They are considering cancelling their trip next Tuesday as they don't see it worth going if the park is closing at 5pm. I'm sure this will be a similar story for many others who were planning to travel from far. So their cut in hours actually leads to an even bigger decrease in attendance.

This is why Merlin having shareholders was/is a bad idea to be fair... They probably only look in terms of short term to keep the shareholders happy cutting costs. And giving a worse experience to the end guests which will probably affect them enough in the long term... Merlin have been doing this for way too long and The (albeit very unfortunate and to an extent beyond their cost cutting) smiler incident has just pushed them over the edge. I really don't want them to fail in the theme park industry but I can see it becoming very stagnent and dare I say non existant... They make plenty enough profit from mid way attractions and seem a lot more reliable.

The (albeit very unfortunate and to an extent beyond their cost cutting) smiler incident has just pushed them over the edge.

Maybe I've misunderstood you here, but are you suggesting that Merlin's cost cutting is a potential reason for Smiler crashing? Because if so, that's a very bold and extreme thing to say with no findings as to the cause of the incident!

Sorry if that was worded a bit weirdly... they were cost cutting anyway before... But it seems the smiler incident has potentially made it even worse to cut already appalling hours for the summer to even earlier closing times due to the parks being so quiet most likely due to the smiler incident.

An article to show how quiet the place is at the moment - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3180987/Heading-Oblivion-Alton-Towers-quiet-thrillseekers-barely-queue-popular-rollercoasters-park-shuts-early-hardly-s-there.html

It's all over the Sun front page tomorrow too (or maybe the Mirror, can't remember).

Fantastic free advertising there, bring the kids to the totally deserted queue-free theme park this summer. 

I feel like this coverage about lack of queues might increase attendance slightly!

RIdiculous. The first week of summer holidays is always quiet at theme parks. If it's still quiet in the last two weeks before schools go back then the parks need to be worried. Not right now.

Mark literally just said what I was going to say - first week or two of summer holidays are the quietest and usually the best time to go between June-August.

The park has been busier in the past couple of months, and will no doubt get busier. If anything, articles like this could hopefully act as a bit of free advertising for the park.

Congratulations to Congo River Rapids for being the headline of the Daily Star. 

I thought the same too, fantastic bit of free advertising if nothing else lol.

There is no denying that attendance is down, looking at this graph, and with the knowledge that the smiler crash happened near the end of week 21, you can immediately see a decline in wait times, which would be caused by less visitors - The spike you can see in week 20 was the Easter holiday, you would expect the summer holiday to be at least that busy.

 

 

Not at this stage of the holidays Zac. It's always quieter at this point in the year as people go away for their holidays at the beginning of the holidays. Now if the park is still dead in three weeks time, we'll know the Smiler crash had had more of an effect then we realise. But until that point, Alton in particular is business as usual.

I stand by what I'm saying, we're comparing the park that always runs full capacity on its rides against the one that puts one train on things to save electricity or puts up queue times to sell more fastrack.

I think August will be the decider on bad the Smiler has impacted this year's attendance.

On the plus side, hopefully this article may encourage some people to go to the park this summer.

With all due respect, a graph - presumably - showing average wait times of all rides is ludicrous. Alton Towers has many more rides and attractions than Thorpe (almost double), of which many have shorter wait times anyway. Thorpe have less rides and they tend to have longer queues.

The average wait time for queues at a park is no indication of how busy a park. To use it to compare two different parks is even worse and doesn't make any sense to be honest.

EDIT: Thinking about it, how exactly do you calculate an average queue time for a week?

You can use it to compare to itself of which both have a downwards trend. While the parks are normally quite at the beginning of summer they are never this quite.

I went to Thorpe on Sunday and longest queue I waited in was one cycle on slammer and that was because the airgates were closed. There was no one at all. The weather was a factor but it still should have had more people. 30-40 minute queues is what they should be getting but instead it's 15-30 minutes. It's the same story at Alton. Attendance is down significantly and while I expect it to pick up it won't hit the normal summer levels.

Surely the only relevant comparison will be compared to the same week last year. And then it'll take a lot of deciphering to factor in weather, holiday start times etc. Would be interesting to see though.

On top of that, you'd expect a slight drop off in numbers when there's no new additions of note this season.

Yeah the queue times are no different to last year really. Went to Thorpe first week of August last year, longest queue was 15 for Saw. This was a lovely Friday. It's just always been the case. Towers always seems quieter on Queuetimes than it is in reality as the Park is massive, rides always on full capacity and people just more spread out across the whole Park.

Aren't the water rides closed until 11 anyway (explains why not a soul around them). As for the coasters morning time is the best for no queues. Ain't no shock there, just twisted by the mail.

And some of them were at the back of the park...

I was on park on Sunday and the main carpark was nearly full when I arrived at 1pm. Queues were between walk-on and 30 minutes most of the day. Whilst it is quieter than normal for a sunny sunday, it is the busiest I have seen it since the accident.

I was also there the week before and this week was noticably busier. Things are picking up. and to be honest, the ghost town news articles probably made it busier as people thought, ooo chance for a lot of rides.

It certainly wasn't busy on Saturday.

 

The longest queue for a larger ride we waited in was around 5 minutes for Air!

 

I was shocked at how quiet it was.

Uh oh... we have (inevitably?) reached the era of lifetime Fastrack...
 

As part of our ‘Towers Tastic Summer’ we are on the lookout for the most passionate, loopy and dedicated fan of Alton Towers Resort to help launch our brand new website blog.

The chosen Superfan will win some fantastical prizes including the chance to write or video the first ever piece for our brand new blog. You will interview the creators of your favourite rides ‘Merlin’s Magic Making’. You’ll also be the first guest to experience and blog about our exciting 2016 news! Not only that, you will be the first person ever to receive our exclusive, money can’t buy ‘Fastrack For Life’ card!

 

https://www.altontowers.com/competition