Revolucion

Congratulations on a great looking park! My thought on the season pass pricing is that you may want to start a little lower for the first 500 passes (or some other number). This could encourage people to buy it sooner instead of waiting. It could also help gauge demand. Most parks also get to charge passholders for parking so I think your season price is fair. Another idea is to limit the hours that the season pass is honored and then make it unlimited if the restriction is no longer needed. Building the park at a mall is a great idea. It seems like a great mutually beneficial arrangement. Most malls are built to handle Christmas season parking during which the park will be closed.

I was able to snag a room at the Hilton Garden Inn by bidding $50 on Priceline.com for 3 stars in Valencia-Stevenson Ranch. It's basically at the entrance to the parking lot. It was my first try, so a lower bid might get accepted.

What a fantastic deal! Thanks for organizing this go to SFMM, TPR, & Ride World. I'm not even bothering with Solace this year. I'm ready to go: I got a $50 room at the Hilton from Priceline and paid the registration fees through Paypal.

You should expect the cost to be between $40 and $55 based on the cost of this and other events in the past. WCB 2008 was about $45. Considering what was included that was a fantastic bargain. Is anybody interested in having a pre-bash gathering Saturday evening at Farrell's Ice Cream Parlour?

For those of you trying to get a reasonable room I was able to get $50 (+tax) at the Hilton Garden Inn Valencia Six Flags (3 stars) via Priceline by bidding $50 for three stars in Valencia/Stevenson Ranch. The hilton.com rate for the same night is $104 and the hotel is very close to the park (within several hundred feet of the parking lot entrance).

I agree with you 100%. If I want to see my kids ride toddler rides why drive two hours and spend $200 bucks for the day when I can drive ten minutes for Chuck E Cheese? Thomas Town probably only works as a agnet for people within 20 miles of the park. When Disneyland opened the Haunted Mansion in 1969 they broke attendance records that stood for twenty years! Several factors combined to make it such a big hit from the start: Mystery factor-the Mansion itself had stood empty for five years while curious guests waited for it to open. It wasn't intended to sit empty for so long, but it helped to build excitement. Family ride - it is a *family* ride. There are no age, height, or medical restrictions. Some kids may not *want* to ride, but they *can* ride. Magic Mountain needs more rides that families can not just ride together, but enjoy together. High hourly capacity - 2,000 people an hour with a decent crew, 1,600 with a horrible crew. Wow factor - forty years later the Haunted Mansion is still a highlight despite having relatively rudimentary animated figures that are much less sophisticated than the AA figures at Pirates.

I think the 'C' on the float stands for Camelot, not Cinderella. And the lady at the front is probably the Lady of the Lake.

Disney outsources a lot of stuff that you just don't hear about. Zamperla built Dumbo for Disneyland, for example. The one currently installed at Disneyland was intended for Euro Disneyland, but --after the original Dumbo literally fell apart in 1990-- Disneyland "stole" it since EDL/DLP wasn't due to open until April 1992. If you look at the color scheme of Dumbo you'll notice that the hues are a little richer than the rest of Fantasyland. Most of the parts are dyed rather than painted because EDL's Fantasyland used a different palette of colors. The bottom line is that unless WDI can build a superior product there is no reason to do it in-house.

Would hospital-style disposal paper booties be feasible? An argument could be made that shoes should be required for all riders in case of evacuation. Or why not have a storage pouch with a zipper ala Indy at Disneyland?

Are you kidding??? I honestly think that Wiggles World has a negative impact on attendance. NO MORE WIGGLES!!!

I'm a little surprised that Florida still has a runout brake. As I recall it was removed from Splash at DL because it made almost no operational difference but had the potential to cause severe injuries due to the rapid reduction in speed with no restraints. Splash Mountain at DL has a drop that most guest are unaware of: Drop 6, which is visited by cast members on their breaks!

This is another topic for another thread, so I'll leave it with this: It's just amazing to me that any park would take the 10,000 guests they managed to get for granted like that, when operations would suddenly be different if those 10,000 all brought a friend with them. Joey I know you're a manager, and I'm not, but it seems to me like being smart with your money is giving those 10,000 people the time of their lives so they'll come back AND bring a friend with them. Might cost a little more initially, but that money will come back if done right. Making them wait 45mins when they don't need to doesn't accomplish that goal. That's all I'm going to say in principle about that. Fortunately, it looks like Magic Mountain is at least trying to show that in some places, they're taking more of the 'give the 10,000 we have a great time' route. They're not perfect at it. There are some gaping holes still. But I hope the kind of 'invest in WOW' thinking they've been using eventually finds its way into all facets & all nooks & crannies of the park. That will be nice to see. !Aye Carrabba! Every dollar spent running more trains is money that is lost to somewhere else. *All* amusement parks need to budget carefully. If MM, for example ran three trains on Goliath that were only running half-full, that means that not only does the park have extra direct labor hours, there are also indirect costs such as extra maintenance for the track and train. I know that Pirates at Disneyland sometimes only loads the front boat when crowds are light but it only saves 2 positions and halves the capacity of the ride. So if the ride has a twenty minute wait it's probably worth it to add two positions to increase capacity by 1500+ riders per hour. At MM, however, if Collossus is already running three trains on one side capacity can only be doubled by adding a full crew to the other side. There is also a hidden cost of having lines that are too short--nausea and headaches. Maybe they should wait to run more trains until they make the Revolution OTSR's less painful!

All of the following pertain to DL: The ride opened over six months late. A promotion was planned for SoCal McDonalds Restaurants ("Splash for Cash!) and among the prizes was a trip to Disneyland to ride Splash Mountain. My recollection is that since the free tickets expired before the ride was going to be open they gave winners an extra ticket to come back that summer. Shortly after the ride opened the portion of the queue thats loops between the side of the Haunted Mansion and the post-big drop flume originally was not kid proof and a kid climbed and fell in to the flume. The rider in the next log was able to pull the child out and the kid suffered only minor injuries! The original logs (OD Hopkins?) sat 8 people but would get stuck in the curves of the back show building. The cause? I've been told the original blueprints were scaled down to reduce the cost of ride construction but that the size of the logs was not taken into account. More than 15 figures didn't come over from America Sings because there were at least 6 Sams and Ollies (and didn't one scene have 2 sets? Plus two geese went to Star Tours, the Gay 90's Pig. The original "photo review" was begun shortly after the ride opened and was staffed by an attractions cast member. The system had the ability to "block out" a portion of the photo with a brown dot or to dump the entire photo. For some reason it was designed as a passive system, and thus no authorization was required for a photo to show up. It probably would have been better to design an active system where each photo was individually authorized. Shortly after opening the belt for the big lift broke and the ride was shut down until a replacement was flown in. There is a sign at the bottom of Drop 5 that says "Drop in again sometime." Michael Jackson and his entourage broke down the ride in the mid-90's when they were adding his boat to the flume from boat storage so he wouldn't have to go through the station. Space Mountain also has this capability as I recall. When Splash Mountain opened I don;t think the snoring bear had a name next to his cave. Shortly after opening a Rufus sign was placed there, and several years ago it was replaced with "Br'er Bear" "Br'er" is a southern term for "Brother". The Brer Rabbit heads were removed in 1989 because they kept getting knocked off. They came up with a way to keep them on after a year or two. Splash Mountain was the first Disneyland ride to use such a system. Prior to that no water rides (such as Pirates) could be drained or refilled so quickly.

The carousel at Balboa Park in San Diego (outside the zoo entrance) still had a brass ring dispenser fifteen years ago. According to Wikipedia it's still there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass_ring

A sunk cost should not be a factor in making a decision. That often leads to pouring good money after bad. A prime example is the gambler who won't walk away from the table after losing a lot of money; the opposite is when New Coke was developed and launched at a huge cost to the Coca-Cola Company, but basically shelved because of customer dissatisfaction. A theme park corrolation would be Windjammer at Knott's, which was scrapped shortly after being built. Time will tell if spending $10 million on X2 was worth it. If it brings in an extra million people over the next five years it will be.