Chessington General Discussion

[dragon2000]

^ With the old seat belts trucks would end up leaving around every 3 minutes = 20 trucks an hour.

Roughly 25 people on a truck = 500 people per hour

With the new lapbars, a truck every 2 minutes = 30 trucks an hour = 750 people per hour.

[jjh123horry]

I was there wednesday, and I tell you what,the queues were stupid. The staff had no control and werent doing anything to help save time and then you had it that there was only 1 person handling a ride slowing down dispatch further. I only managed to do 3 rides on wednesday and fit in lunch which I think is appauling.

Rides done:

Safari skyway

Bubbleworks

Sea storm

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[Mark9]

Wow. Not even the busy (Or what I would have considered busy rides back in 2005) rides done.

Crazy.

[jjh123horry]

Wow. Not even the busy (Or what I would have considered busy rides back in 2005) rides done.

Crazy.

Yup. I think skyway took 45 minutes, Bubbleworks was an hour and seastorm was an hour, which is a joke if I'm honest. Apparently vampires queue was 2 hours and zufari was 90 minutes. They really need to get things sorted because its just stupid, especially when the park is more catered for familes with young children, where the children dont exactly want to be queueing for hours on end. I did forget to mention I went with 4 7 year olds, and with the heat and the queues they were extremly restless.

[Coaster]

I can't understand why Chessington haven't upped their game. It's rammed, so how can they justify not running rides at full tilt?

As for Vampire, that might as well be closed considering the service it's offering.

[jjh123horry]

I can't understand why Chessington haven't upped their game. It's rammed, so how can they justify not running rides at full tilt?

That was something me and my mum were both saying. This is their peak time of year, and they just dont have enough staff to make the park run properly. The adventure services also had a huge queue, stretching past the drinks unit. So whether people were complain or what I'm not sure but anywhere you couldve made a queue, there was one.

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[Matt 236]

Getting three rides in an 8 hour day is ridiculous, especially as two of those aren't major rides and none of them are coasters.

Chessington has really gone to the dumps this year. Theming, staffing and the overall experience and 2 hours for Vampire? I queued up an hour for the Swarm at Thorpe on one of its busiest days of the year (where even the grass car park is almost full).

Chessington need to build newer higher capacity rides and personally they should remove toadies, truckers and replace them.

[Mark9]

Getting three rides in an 8 hour day is ridiculous, especially as two of those aren't major rides and none of them are coasters.

Chessington has really gone to the dumps this year. Theming, staffing and the overall experience and 2 hours for Vampire? I queued up an hour for the Swarm at Thorpe on one of its busiest days of the year (where even the grass car park is almost full).

Chessington need to build newer higher capacity rides and personally they should remove toadies, truckers and replace them.

The difference is Matt, Thorpe has had the Lions share of the investment over the last ten years whilst Chessington has been left to crumble into the state its become. It's all coming to a head this season. Ironically, the one year where they get a new attraction and good weather is the year that Runaway and Rameses becomes SBNO. If it was at Thorpe, it wouldn't matter if Flying Fish spent a year out but because it's Chessington where Runaway is one of the higher capacity attractions (at 650 pph), having it closed has a major knock on effect.

Of course, I'm not saying its just Runaway, it's a culmination of Vampire being condemned to two trains, lower attendance's when the park opened in March leading to budget cuts through the rest of the year and a park that is basically falling to its knees.

What they really need to do is get a high capacity rollercoaster like Pegasus or Juvelen in, a ride which gobbles through people but the park won't do that so it's a waste of time going down that road and even if it did get one of those rides in, it would be run so dismally that queues would be two hours long and it wouldn't help in anyway.

Talking about Chessington just brings people down in other words, lets discuss a park that gives a toss like Thorpe or Europa Park.

[Benin]

1 hour for Seastorm?

I'd go home... Or the zoo... At least the zoo is ok... Aside from not upgrading the bloody Monkey Garden t'other year...

And what are they planning on doing? Expanding the hotel... Urgh, so much WRONG at that park these days...

[dragon2000]

Clearly letting too many people in through the gates. I suppose they take the attitude of once they've got your money at the gate they don't care how long you have to queue for rides. Plus more fastrack sales...

[Benin]

To be fair, too many people for Chessie is about 7'000 people...

[Matt 236]

Clearly letting too many people in through the gates. I suppose they take the attitude of once they've got your money at the gate they don't care how long you have to queue for rides. Plus more fastrack sales...

I'd say its more staff operations that's causing this, in addition to two major rides being SBNO and rides being run to fewer cars. In Chessington's current state, there will even be lengthy queues on quiet weekends at the park. Even Legoland is better at throughputs now with high capacity rides like Atlantis, Viking Rapids, spinning spider, jolly rocker and the Dragon (which takes around 900 on 3 trains (which it often runs weekends & busy times)).

[Mark9]

Clearly letting too many people in through the gates. I suppose they take the attitude of once they've got your money at the gate they don't care how long you have to queue for rides. Plus more fastrack sales...

Literally just explained that isn't the problem. You can have 15,000 people in a theme park getting on several rides but if the operations are rubbish then they aren't getting on anything.

[BigBobJones]

I was there wednesday, and I tell you what,the queues were stupid. The staff had no control and werent doing anything to help save time and then you had it that there was only 1 person handling a ride slowing down dispatch further. I only managed to do 3 rides on wednesday and fit in lunch which I think is appauling.

Rides done:

Safari skyway

Bubbleworks

Sea storm

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First of all, love the hair!

I seriously doubt it was that bad you only did 3 rides in an entire day.

45 mins for Skyway, an hour for Seastorm and an hour for the bubbleworks is 2 hours 45 mins out of an 8 hour day.

I fully agree Chessington can't get the throughput they should be doing, but I have to ask what were the queues for:

Black Buccaneer, Rattlesnake, Monkey Swinger, Jungle Bus? These don't tend to have massive queues.

For me if I got there, I would not queue more than 45 mins for any ride at Chessington, I'd rather do the smaller rides than the bigger ones to do less queues.

I guess the question is did you just give up on the rides and do the Zoo or were you not at the park for the full day?

I was at the park two weeks ago and it was 2 hours 20 for Vampire 90+ for coasters, 1 hour for Bubbleworks/Zufari, we managed, Dragon falls, Bubbleworks, Vampire, Dragon's fury, Monkey Swinger and Skyway+ Lunch. Oh and the Rattlesnake.

[jjh123horry]

First of all, love the hair!

Thanks, ive had it done 3 times now for £16 including a haircut

I fully agree Chessington can't get the throughput they should be doing, but I have to ask what were the queues for:

Black Buccaneer, Rattlesnake, Monkey Swinger, Jungle Bus? These don't tend to have long queues.

I think rattlesnake was around 1 hour, not sure on the others, but I do remember seeing black buccaneer with a slightly smaller queue than the others, and when I got the chance to go to wild asia, both monkey swinger and jungle bus had smaller queues, but guests had already started to leave the park at that point.

For me if I got there, I would not queue more than 45 mins for any ride at Chessington, I'd rather do the smaller rides than the bigger ones to do less queues.

Unfortunately I was with a group of younger children so the bigger rides were out of the question, leaving us with the smaller rides which still had stupidly long queues.

I guess the question is did you just give up on the rides and do the Zoo or were you not at the park for the full day?

Sorry yeah I forgot to say I was at the park a total of 6 hours, taking an hour to get in the park leaving us 5 hours to do the rides and lunch.

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[BigBobJones]

Well if you had younger children I guess Legoland would have been worse. I only ever go to Lego land well out of the season. A good combination to do is Chessington in the morning, followed by lunch at Chessie (As it's so much cheaper to eat at Chessie than over priced Legoland) then Legoland in the afternoon. If done on a quiet day you can get both parks in and a good ride count. We did this in May and got 16 rides in over the two parks including lunch and travelling between parks.

I also noticed that Lorakeet Lagoon was closed the other week (at the height of the season...) Chessie do have some serious running issues with the park at the moment.

It has been said by many they do need some attractions which eat large numbers of guests, the Vekoma Madhouse would be ideal for Chessington, good low height requirement, 80 people every 4-5 minutes, not noisy for neighbours, not too tall and fits into such a small space.

A good rapids ride and even a tea cups ride would all be ideal for Chessington.

[jjh123horry]

Well if you had younger children I guess Legoland would have been worse.

We were planning on originally going there, but when we rang up to purchase tickets on the 22nd August, we were told they couldnt sell any tickets with the merlin annual pass discount until the 1st of September because they had over booked.

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[Benin]

Animal attractions I can let off being closed at times because of the fickle nature of animals being unpredictable...

Of course, it might have been closed because it closes every day for lunch...

[Mark9]

I'm reposting this from Dar on Towers Street, it represents and epitomises the problems that are like a rampant curse at Chessington these days. it's proove that the park desperately needs another high capacity rollercoaster more then any other investment currently.

Chessington was an absolute shambles yesterday.

I expected the place to be busy (and it must have been close to capacity) but it was really beyond a joke. There shouldn't be so many people actually allowed into the park and operations on the day were really quite laughable.

Vampire went down about half an hour into the day (it didn't reopen), having already built up a queue of over two hours, and (from what I can gather) all guests in the queue line were redirected to guest services where they could get a free fastrack ticket valid on any ride of their choosing. The queue for guest services then stretched back through market square back to Pizza/Pasta buffet at one point.

The park was already heaving, fastrack had clearly already been oversold, and these additional 'free' fastrack tickets meant the main queue lines ground to a halt (the likes of Kobra and Fury were definitely running at at least a 70-30 ratio in favour of fastrackers at the merge point). On top of that the disabled/exit queue for most attractions was a constant flow, and they were getting 50% of all rides. No doubt this meant that people standing in the main queues then complained, and probably also received a free fastrack in response to this.

Here's a sample of ride queue times at the peak of the day:
Vampire - Closed
Fury / Zufari - 90mins
Kobra - 120mins
Tomb Blaster - 70mins
Dragon Falls / Bubbleworks / Seastorm / Tuk Tuk Turmoil - 60mins
Rattlesnake / Hocus Pocus Hall / Bubbleworks / Monkey Swnger / Black Buccaneer - 45mins

I can appreciate a park being busy, but when there isn't a single family / thrill ride on park with a wait time less than 45 minutes you know you're doing something wrong. The response to Vampire going down should have been "stop selling fastracks" not "give away lots of extra fastracks" because the park clearly couldn't handle it on top of the crowds. Ride close was extended until 7pm but the queues were still of a very similar length at this time (understandable, nobody had gotten on more than 5 or 6 rides, not accounting for the zoo) so this was really quite inadequate.

On top of this, the people operating the rides really didn't seem like they could give less of a toss about long queue times and throughput on the majority of attractions was abysmal. I usually have sympathy with ride staff on days such as these, but the way Dragon's Fury staff seemed to stop working to have a chat, Zufari staff didn't bother trying to fill cars and Monkey Swinger staff had nice, long chats with fastrackers when they should have been batching the ride left everybody with bitter tastes in their mouths yesterday I think.

I have experienced 'bad days' at Alton Towers due to overcrowding and fastrack, but nothing quite as laughable as this. I was with a friend visiting for the first time, his opinion? "This place is a joke", on that evidence, I'd have to agree. Not impressed.

On a sidenote, very disappointed with Zufari's "finale"... what the heck was that? A sprinkler?

[Matt 236]

Well this is definitely worse than last years summer at Chessington and last years was pretty manic too. Although two rides are down, the staff aren't managing everything properly too, over selling fast tracks and laid back attitudes and this is coming from one of the uk'smain parks.

The impact of Vampire's closure sus up how badly chessie need a new coaster as when three major rides are down, the queues go berserk where even hocus Pocus receives a hefty queue.

I personally don't hold much hope for 2014 at the park, there's no mention of new rides and rides are now running on ridiculous capacities. At the way they're going, maybe they should open the zoo only next year and rebuild most of the park.

[BigBobJones]

45 mins for bumper cars! LOL

If anything both Chessington and Legoland have been sending the message out that the parks are going to be very busy.

In my opinion when the parks are like this, yes they make a ton of cash, but the number of guests they annoy and who won't return must really damage their reputation.

I'd rather they turn guests away and say they are full or put on their website pre-book only and limit the numbers.

[Doc]

Sorry if this is the wrong thread (I did look for another one), but I was curious to know what kind of queues I could expect for tomorrow.

I know the holidays are over for most now, though will this make a difference in the long run? We were hoping to get a somewhat quiet day tomorrow but judging by the comments above, I now have my doubts.

[pluk]

I don't know for certain but I'm pretty sure all the kids have gone back now, so it should have very suddenly died.

I hope for you that it has!

[Doc]

Thanks Pluk!

I deliberately chose this week as I assumed all the kids would be back at school. Fingers crossed!

I haven't been to Chessington since 2010 though by the sound of it, things have certainly... changed.

[Merry-go-girl]

It won't be rammed but I wouldn't bank on quiet. The colleges and Uni's are still out, then there's the random school's that are a week later then the rest. But you definitely won't have to put up with this 2 rides in 5 hours nonsense of the summer holidays.