2025 Season

[Parm Pap]

sparkle might not be afforded, so names are new and cheap, and what is old is new again, half of 10 is fresh, half of 10 is hello, delivering the food, one day

 

 

bombombombombombombombombombombombombombom where's the bom bom?

[MattyMoo]

Going once, twice, 10 times and SOLD, auction has finished and there's money in the (paint) pot.

That track is a right bobby dazzler. Orange? No, just rust.

[Cal]

Passholder day has been announced for Sunday 16th March.

 

Park is open 11am - 7pm which is nice, interesting as don’t think I’ve ever seen them open after 10am.
 

Would love to see some more of this, opening later and staying open later. 11am - 10pm would be great for fright nights. 

[JoshC.]

21 minutes ago, Cal said:

Passholder day has been announced for Sunday 16th March.

 

Park is open 11am - 7pm which is nice, interesting as don’t think I’ve ever seen them open after 10am.
 

Would love to see some more of this, opening later and staying open later. 11am - 10pm would be great for fright nights. 

 

The last time I can recall the park opening after 10am was for Fright Nites 2003, when they did 11am-11pm. Still, a long time ago!

 

In any case, it's been a long time since the park did a passholder day, so it's lovely to see them do one again. The thing with these sort of days (ie ones at the start of season) is that the money they don't earn from standard entrance tickets is sort of recouped by the fact passholders tend to spend more than average on their first visit of the year due to new merchandise. Plus, it helps bring value to the annual pass (despite it already being great value) and added satisfaction. So it is win win.

 

A 7pm close giving the opportunity for a dusk ride or two is a lovely bonus too, and it's good to see the park continuing their experiment of offering later closing times. Hopefully that can continue. 

 

I also agree about Fright Nights: it would be interesting to see the park explore 11am-10pm at the very least. I don't know how realistic it is to happen, since one of the things that ties the park's hands is the number of under 18s working at the park. Equally, the park simply seem to have veered away from running rides till 10pm: they don't even do it for buy outs or their VIP/Press events. But it would be interesting to see.

[Benin]

Haven't the Passholder Days historically been terrible though?

 

For all the parks.

[Mark9]

On 2/25/2025 at 8:45 AM, Benin said:

Haven't the Passholder Days historically been terrible though?

 

For all the parks.

 

 

Yep, parks normally pretty quiet as they restrict numbers but the RAP queues are about there hours long now. 

[JoshC.]

Yeah tbf Thorpe have historically had mediocre Passholder days at the start of the season. Their Fright Nights Passholder events in the past were usually well run, but the start of season ones were a cocktail of some or all of the following: first day teething issues, being too busy, having too many RAPs, not everything being ready, expectations being too high.

 

Hopefully the park are aware of past mistakes and have better luck this time round.

[Cal]

I’ve had some good days at the Thorpe ones back in the day, and the Fright Nights passholder events I did were good too. 
 

Seen some terrible reviews from Chessington ones but Chessington is always terrible. 
 

I’ll probably go to this one with it being a 7pm close, depending on the ride availability they post nearer the time. 

[JoshC.]

Attraction Source visited Thorpe this week and have some updates: https://www.attractionsource.com/2025/02/18/thorpe-park-2025-closed-season-update/

 

-Beach work paused, with small side potentially opening this summer

-A small area by the Marquee has been designated as a rest area for Guide Dogs

-Ghost Train cafe is having more seats installed where the shop was

-Colossus repaint: airtime hill, corkscrews and turnaround to the quad twist

 

Definitely a quieter close season compared to last year, but not all that surprising

[MattL28]

In some sense it was going to be hard to beat last closed season.

 

However, it’s clear to me that budgets from Merlin have affected most of it.

The management at Thorpe have still tried their best with it.

 

For Example

- Landscaping looks really good

- They’ve built a fence around slammer and painted it to fit in with the existing fencing 

- Jetwashing all the areas of the park 

With existing equipment these are very easy upgrades but not always done before. 

 

Realistically need more money to be unlocked to:

 

- refurb entrance 

- new ride for slammer site 

- removal of rumba rapids

[Inferno]

A shame to see the Hyperia’s area is still a mess, even now.  Yes it’s better with the turf, but really fences are needed all the way around the plaza…  and there are still swathes of dirt shrouding the queue on the video there.

Interesting to hear that they’re deciding on the future of the splashdown shortly. 
Progress is progress though I suppose.
 

Overall though the park looks good! Pleased to see Colossus all painted (well mostly!)

 

Thorpe seem to be a long way ahead of the other Merlin parks when it comes to presentation and upkeep at the moment.

[Mark9]

Just so I understand, Colossus repaint is now a three year project whilst Six Flags have repainted multiple larger rollercoasters over the last two months (2 Goliaths, Panthera and Dominator just off the top of my head). Meanwhile at Thorpe, Inferno still looks like ass and they are deciding if a water feature that worked for about three weeks has any future. And this is the best of the Merlin trio?

 

We really are desperate for any good news at all at this point aren't we. 

[JoshC.]

5 hours ago, Mark9 said:

We really are desperate for any good news at all at this point aren't we. 

 

 

 

The Hyperia water feature scenario is pretty rubbish. 

 

-It's a Creative vs Operations debacle. Creative / MMM seemingly put in a water feature, with little consultation with the park on whether it will be sustainably manageable with their budget / restraints

-Of course, why something as relatively simple as a set of water fountains isn't sustainably manageable (it's the same with Swarm) is something which needs asking

-The jets haven't worked since...June/July? Why are the park still making a decision of its future?

 

I fully understand how we've got here, but it doesn't make it particularly excusable. 

[Inferno]

It’s not great is it…

 

However Merlin strikes me as the sort of place that employs just about enough people to keep the wheels turning on a day to day basis… it could be the staff are simply saying “no more” if they physically don’t have the time or budget to deal with this sort of thing.

 

I get the impression that this sort of stuff relies on good will to get it sorted - with the redundancies and general shocking management at Merlin of late, good will is probably in short supply.

 

If I put myself in their shoes for a moment - think about how Hyperia was handed over from the project team - it was shambolic. Late, unreliable, and a huge burden in its first year, not to mention the fact that the area was completely unfinished. It looked to me like a bit of a ‘dump and run’.  I would be very annoyed if I was in operations and expected to take it on, on top of running the rest of the park.  It seemed a battle to just get and keep Hyperia running each day, so this poorly thought-out and unreliable water effect that only worked for five minutes could be the cherry on top I suppose.

 

Either way - what a load of rubbish…

[MattyMoo]

I fear for the HyperiaTurf if a fence isn't installed before park opening - but one would imagine a fence isn't coming because you probably wouldn't put the turf in first (although there is a gap where I guess one could be put in before start of the season. Hope so...)

 

I will not allow any complaints about a lack of splashdown effect on Hyperia until the new fire effect on Tidal Wave is operational, as this should be Merlin's - as a whole company - number one priority at this moment in time. The 2025 season depends on it.

[MattL28]

According to the app- Rumba Rapids will not return until May 2025 🎉😂 

 

 

I love the 3 months of operating it gets every year.

 

It’s an Opex saving clearly which makes sense queue times wise. However the amount of winter maintenance to operate for 3 month, is it even worth it?

 

They can get away with it because it’s location, I bet they’d love to do the same with tidal wave but that’s in the middle of the park.

 

Poor decision, the beach is open longer.

[JoshC.]

1 hour ago, MattL28 said:

I love the 3 months of operating it gets every year.

 

I can't remember the last year it opened late into the season? Definitely not any time recently? Closed early in season, yes, but opened late?

 

And if it opens early May and closes late September this year, that's 5 (out of effectively 7) months it's open, not 3. Although yes, theoretically it could end up being open for 3 months.

 

Ultimately this isn't a surprise, although disappointing. Requires a huge number of staff despite low ridership. Massive internal H&S headache given how much fear there is over Rapids ride by H&S folks. The boats still aren't in the trough.

 

I don't think it requires a lot of winter maintenance, and it does add to the park's claim of the "UK's wettest theme park", so it still has a place and value to the park. But they really need to do something to make it a bigger priority for guests to ride.

[Inferno]

I really think Rumba’s days are numbered to be honest…

It’s not even that good either is it… I really think it will be gone before too long.

 

Of course I don’t want to see it close, but I’d much rather the budget be used elsewhere, and eventually the space used for better things, especially considering there’s also a huge amount of space on the island behind it.

[owenstreet7]

Now Towers have announced their Single Rider Queues for 2025, I'm hoping Thorpe Park follows suit and announces a few more joining Saw, Samurai, Walking Dead and Hyperia.

 

Could we be anticipating something like what happened at Towers happen at Thorpe?

 

Realistically, possibly but which rides I'm not so sure? 🤔

[Cal]

Not fussed about Rumba being closed till May, its crap anyway.

 

If cuts need to be made then I'd rather this than cutting staff elsewhere, less capacity on coasters or cutting opening hours.

 

2 hours ago, owenstreet7 said:

Now Towers have announced their Single Rider Queues for 2025, I'm hoping Thorpe Park follows suit and announces a few more joining Saw, Samurai, Walking Dead and Hyperia.

 

Could we be anticipating something like what happened at Towers happen at Thorpe?

 

Realistically, possibly but which rides I'm not so sure? 🤔

 

It would be nice, but realistically the only coaster they can add it to would be Stealth. There was plans to do this but it would've required them to do some work to the queues to implement, and they were worried it would impact throughput. They don't currently assign rows on Stealth and it works fairly well, so I doubt that will change. 

 

It would work well on some of the flats too, Rush and Vortex would be nice. I don't see why these couldn't operate the same way that Samurais do using the same queue as the Fasttrack queue. Vortex used to have one and it worked well. 

[JoshC.]

Yes Stealth they've discussed (re-)adding an SRQ before, but the current batching system works well for the efficiency of the ride and doesn't lend itself to SRQ.

 

And this is the thing. SRQs serve two purposes:

1. Improve utilisation scores (the percentage of seats filled)

2. Give a mild improvement to guest satisfaction scores

 

The first point is the bigger one. SRQs simply do not improve throughputs meaningfully. Let's say Hyperia sends 40 trains an hour, and 1 person from the SRQ goes on each train. That's an increase of 40 people. And without an SRQ, a good batcher could probably fill some of those seats anyway. So it's not really significantly meaningful.

 

Improving utilisation does ultimately look good, and will increase the total ridership, and so ever so slightly improve the "rides per head" score - the average number of rides ridden per guest. But it will be marginal.

 

As for improving guest satisfaction/experience. The number of people using or benefitting from SRQs is generally a tiny proportion of the number of guests. That's not to say parks should ignore them, but it should be remembered that it's again minimal gains.

 

SRQs need to properly and sensibly integrated. That's why Hyperia works. How does one, for example, introduce an SRQ on Nemesis Inferno? There's no clear pathway to the station for it. Any potential batching point is too far away. Similar stories for Swarm and Colossus.

 

As mentioned, Stealth has that natural point, but the current operation of the ride doesn't lend itself to having an SRQ. You could put it into some flat rides, and share the space with Fastrack, but that requires good batching. And bluntly put, Thorpe don't have enough staff who care to be good enough batchers (a trend common at many parks, for the record).

 

So yeah, I don't see any rides having SRQs retrospectively (re-)added any time soon.

[Inferno]

Interesting to look at it in detail isn’t it! (I love this sort of stuff on this forum!)

 

Honestly I think they’re doing really well and trying very hard to make a difference using what they’ve got.

They seem to be trying to bring this stuff in because it’s seen as a positive thing by lot of people, and it’s something they can do with their very limited budget.

 

I think it’s the same with Rumba etc. clearly they’ve got a low budget, but they’re making the best of it and prioritising keeping the main rides running well all year. It’s a lot better than having coasters on one train on quieter days, or opening some of them later in the day everyday.

 

I can’t imagine running a theme park is an easy task at the moment - I’m trying to see things differently this year if I can.

[owenstreet7]

With Swarm, I kinda see them merging RAP/FT and doing assigned batching which works for Mandrill Mayhem. I'd say the non-existent batching is a mess in my opinion. 

 

Stealth, I'd argue that the batching system doesn't work as well as they're filling the gates with multiple train loads of people after bags are put aside. The baggage hold would be better but I think assigned batching is needed for Stealth for a guest experience point of view (especially for bag security).

 

Colossus needs work to integrate one and Nemesis is a non-starter due to the design.

 

I think the most realistic win on SRQ would be getting it on Rush and Vortex (possibly Detonator too). It'd be nice to get it on other rides such as Storm Surge and Tidal Wave but I think the former can only work by merging FT with it and the latter doesn't seem to need one as much as the flats.

[Parm Pap]

*gates opening*

 

 

what's that merch, where's the paint, oh that music but is it THAT ONE?! where's that stall gone, it's not been removed, but it's different. why's that got a seat out, do we have a spare?! RELEASE THE SOUNDTRACK but not that one! the proper one! oh that's new grass it's nice but I hope it stays nice WHERE'S THE GATE GONE why's it opened gradually no more waiting for phones come on get on with it before the train's gone. where's the dancing gone, are the actors on, cutbacks cutbacks cutbacks we're pushed for time! will it be ready we don't know enforced daytime hours bus times will the bus be running WHEN WILL THE BUS BE RUNNING why's the driver been rude to me?! I have a pass you know! a BUS pass! which hut is which it changes all the time. why's it still a campsite THE PARK NEEDS MORE TABLES or better tables! endless tables! turn the tables before the main day BUT THIS IS A MAIN DAY no it's not YES IT IS I HAVE A BUS PASS!

 

 

we are, dear visitors, a few days away.

 

 

good luck.

[Cal]

The app has updated a couple of food and drink outlets for this season. 

 

Grannys Apple Fries has been replaced by Harbor Deserts Co. serving soft serve ice cream and waffles on a stick. 

 

Doughnut time by Colossus and Vortex have been replaced by Planet Doughnut which seem to be very similar products to Doughnut time. 

 

20% AP discount accepted at all 3 outlets.