robbalvey

OMG and this.... OMG!!! IT WAS A HOLIDAY WEEKEND YOU STUPID IDIOT FU*CKING MORON!!!! YOU KNOW **NOTHING** ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA! STOP PRETENDING YOU DO!!!! Seriously this guy has been tracking our YouTube channel for YEARS and then doing a "report' on how well or bad the TPR YouTube Channel is doing and it is COMEDY GOLD!!!! Everything he says is completely wrong, and everything he thinks he knows about social media is entirely backwards. But hey, he can go on with his little crusade because it's HILARIOUS!!!!

I'm just going to leave this mess of craziness right here... and these people legit don't understand why they've been banned from TPR. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Because they feel that since they technically PAID for it, they have a RIGHT to bitch and complain. Fu*ck these people. We are already giving you a crapton of fun on the trip even WITHOUT the perks, which in a way are all sort of bonuses. And I'll be honest, in the last few years of trips, 2011 - 2014, there were actually a few things more that we could have done that we didn't bother to do. Because we knew people would already be moaning and complaining about the stuff we already went out of our way to offer on trips, and we were right, they did. We saved some of those special perks for things that we did later on as a family on our own or with smaller groups of people that actually appreciated what we do. Screw the complainers. They don't deserve the cool stuff we do on our trips anyway.

The culprit is that people are assholes and they don't know how to control themselves, even when on a really kick-ass vacation.

OMG! Yes, I remember this. Seriously, I was NOT going to put up with our people "booing" the park management right after they just built a giant multi-million dollar amazing roller coaster! I don't remember exactly what I said, but I think it was something to the effect of "How dare all of you people BOO the park after everything they have just done for you, after having just built this amazing ride. Anyone here who feels the need to boo the park can get up and leave and we don't ever want to see them at one of our events again." Was that about right? I seriously won't put up with that crap and if people don't like the fact that I will call them out on their bullshit then they don't need to be part of our group. One common thing I hear from parks all the time is they tell me "Robb, the reason why we love you is because you say the things that we are all thinking, but we aren't allowed to say" and they usually are referring to when I'm giving self-entitled douchebags crap online for their horrible behavior. I'm happy to be the guy that tells the idiots of the coaster enthusiast world to piss off!

Yep. I'll go delete your registration...

Nope. They didn't give a crap. Because they didn't care about whatever it was Elissa and I were doing, they only cared about themselves and it clearly stood out to us on that trip that to many people what we were doing was no longer appreciated, and anything we did was never enough.

What you're describing and what we do sounds very different, though. Outside of ERTs and traveling, the group doesn't stick together and go through a park as one group on a TPR trip. Your experience and ours seems night and day, TBH. Eh, we do, but I really don't want to have to flash back to all that nonsense! lol

Was it ever fun for you or was it always a pain to run the tours? Or did it start out as a minor pain that grew to be just unbearable after dealing with so many stupid people as time went on? I'd say our 2006 - 2009 tours were the ones we had the most fun on. Although they weren't "drama free" as there were quite a few bad apples and growing pains during those trips. But we chose to tolerate some of the bad apples during those years because we thought we had to. The "good apples" though actually showed more than ever during those years that they appreciated what we did. The perks came across as really "special" and it was nice to see people really enjoying themselves that kept us going. But in 2010 we really started to see the signs of people becoming more entitled and the behavior was becoming unacceptable. The "extras" were no longer appreciated as much but now "expected" and those expectations sometimes ended up being unrealistic which resulted in people being obnoxious towards us. This started to happen more often that we would have liked. We did a UK trip that year were we rented out rides at a park in the evening as a surprise bonus when the park had closed 4 hours before hand. We had people bitch and complain to us because we didn't rent out "all the credits" and they were going to miss a kiddie coaster or something completely stupid like that. We were dumbfounded. I seriously told the bus something to the effect of "are you fu*cking kidding me??? We make a totally bonus stop that we didn't have to, that we paid for out of our pocket, and some of you are COMPLAINING that we didn't do enough 'bonus stuff' for you? Seriously any of you bitching can go fu*ck yourself and leave the tour right now because I'm not having any of this crap." I don't think I was nice about it in the least. The same group also bitched later on in the tour that we didn't include Legoland as another bonus park. WTF??!?! This sort of attitude only got worse and by the Scandi 2014 trip, which is actually the tour that killed TPR tours with the most amount of appalling and obnoxious behavior, like the guy where I hand him the TOTALLY FREE TPR backpack and he tells me "this bag is 10% too small. I can't fit all my stuff in it." "Fu*ck you pal, carry less crap and try being less of an asshole" was pretty much my response. Another story was at Liseberg and Helix broke down during ERT so I was working with the park to allow us to use our TPR wristbands to get one ride in later on that day going up the exit. Some of the park people overheard our idiot participants saying how they would use their wristband to abuse that privilege and keep going multiple times. (seriously, how big of a moron do you have to be to actually talk about this IN FRONT of park staff?!?!) When I announced to the group that plan wasn't going to work out because a couple of our dumbass participants ruined it for everyone else the guy looked at me and said "Fu*ck you Alvey" like as though somehow it was MY FAULT that he was a dumbshit and said outloud that he was planning to abuse the system. And then watching some absolutely horrible, just flat out HORRIBLE behavior during what was supposed to be a totally fun "grand prix" go-kart race at Powerpark where this one woman sat there and spewed vile disparaging remarks about Elissa in earshot where we can hear her, because Elissa knocked her out of the final round, and then when we walked in the room, she pretended to be best friends with Elissa. Don't even get me started on the creepy af guy who wouldn't shower, was hanging around the kids areas shirless just a little too much, caused drama at just about every park we went to, and then during an ERT split off from the group and harassed a ride op to let him wear the maintenance harness and go climb a lift hill of a roller coaster!!! YES!!! I'm not making this crap up!!! And that was only a few examples of constant snowflake behavior on that trip. After that trip, we couldn't deal with these assholes anymore. We were done. Gone are those days, but hey, it was a great learning experience. We now do 2-3 trips per year with the people we CHOOSE to travel with. And that's much better! Getting rid of all those awful people made our trips fun again!

Ha! Good! Yet another reason not to make one!

The two aren't related. We stopped doing the DVDs and Blu-Rays simply because people don't really buy physical media anymore and you can watch all the content in amazing quality on YouTube now.

Welcome to the type of crap we had to put up with on every single trip. At every single event. Not from everyone, obviously. But from enough people who made us throw in the towel. And of course, none of these people will ever admit that they did anything wrong. So what ended up happening is that the fun ended for everyone. (But do send an email to Elissa if you think you aren't a horrible shitbag and can have a good drama-free time on one of our trips!)

I went back and looked at my personal Facebook page because I was curious to see what this guy was talking about. I don't delete posts on my FB page and what was interesting is that I couldn't find ANYTHING remotely matching what he was claiming I was posting about during the tour! I did post this after the tour was over: and I'm not exactly sure which trip reports these were referring but I don't think my comments in that post are terrible at all. At least no where near as bad as calling out someone's child! Seriously, I'm beginning to think that everything this guy wrote in that original post I quoted is just 100% made-up full of sh*t. Just like the majority of things we see written about us on the internet...

You all know how to contact Elissa...

Here. THIS! While I don't actually remember this happening, I can tell you that in 100% of the cases when someone emails me who is level-headed, mature, and professional, it always, ALWAYS ends up favorable for the person who has instigated the email to me. If you email me hot-headed giving me crap about something and being obnoxious, I have no time for you and your lack of presence here on the forums will not impact me in the slightest. I am now going to go look this up!

And gee, you know what else is interesting about that trip he was on? Out of the 48 people who were on that tour, 44 of them are still members of TPR! So wow, you know, if there was such a huge turnover of TPR members on that trip and so many problems or drama or issues, wouldn't there be more people blocked? Congratulations, dude, you were one of 4 people on the trip that didn't make it on TPR! So the problem clearly isn't with us...

Huh.... so this is very, very interesting. I just found the trip report that this guy made from the New Hotness tour that he attended. Take a look... http://themeparkreview.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1218348#p1218348 Isn't it a little strange that he says things like: "I was a little hesitant to throw down the money I did for the New Hotness tour, but let me tell you, once my 12 days was over and I was back home relaxing in my chair, recounting the experiences I had, the coasters I rode, the friends I made, the trip was every bit worth the money I spent on it" and "Robb and Elissa go out of their way to make these things eventful for the participants, and deserve more kudos that I can possibly give." and "hands down it was one of the best investments I have ever made" to end up making such horrible comments about us on a page dedicated to hating us??? And if you read his report, just listen to all the amazing things we got for everyone on that trip. Between the ERTs, the backstage tours, all the additional perks and cool stuff, how could anyone possibly complain? But they do. And that is why we will not do tours like this anymore for people like this guy. It's no longer worth our time or effort to put together something we feel is so fun and amazing for everyone to be ruined by some guy who ends up holding a grudge for five years over an insignificant argument and then suddenly changes his tune making us look like the bad guys (and our child on top of it!) So many of these people have such serious mental issues and we will not put up with it any longer.

Thank you. And this is 100% correct. Any actual issue that guy may have had with us loses all credibility and respect when he takes a shot at someone's child, especially when what he is saying isn't even close to being true. Another shining example of why we stopped doing tours. Or at least stopped doing tours for people like that guy.

We used to have only one rule on our trips besides "don't be late" and that was "don't do anything stupid" which also pretty much encompases what you said. By the time we stopped doing trips, we had to have a list of about 25 rules, every single one of them created due to some stupid obnoxious thing someone did on our tours. I just couldn't take it anymore... I'm sure in your profession you can relate EXACTLY to what I'm talking about!

As someone who has also worked in parks, you know what I mean when I say the normal guests can sometimes be challenging themselves, but then you throw "coaster enthusiast" mentality and attitude on top of it, and 90% of the time you get someone who have zero interest in dealing with.

Oh, god, there is more! lol Let me make something perfectly clear. Absolutely ZERO of the drama "came from the person in charge." 100% of it came from tour participants where I then had to get involved because people were doing stupid crap that were against trip rules, park rules, common decency or sense, or in some cases outright illegal! So don't blame any of the drama on me because we don't have drama on our trips any more after we got rid of all these horrible people, so clearly the problem didn't come from anyone in charge. And again, maybe you shouldn't have asked to join my personal FB page if you couldn't respect or understand the way I vented about things. So now, instead of venting about them in private, I might as well just vent about them in public, because, it will just all get made public anyway? Did I mention how I hate people? What was someone saying in this thread about how most roller coaster enthusiasts are self-entitled sh*tbags? And sure, you can say whatever you want. You have freedom of speech, but you don't have freedom of consequences, so perhaps this person should learn to take personal responsibility for their own actions? I mean, a simple email saying "Hey Robb, sorry about that blow up in the discussion about line jumping. Let's just wash that under the bridge and start all over?" Is this asking too much? It is asking too much, isn't it? Honestly, I have not seen this guy once since the trip he took. Maybe he has me confused with someone else he hates? We have not been to a non-TPR "coaster event" in at least ten years, maybe longer. So he must have me confused with someone else. The eleven million, eight hundred and forty nine thousand, five hundred and fifteen people who all posted comments to TPR content in the past 28 days also agree with you! I also just want to point out that this was posted to the TPR hate page in response to someone else who was arguing over HOW they should be hating on TPR. So not only do these people have issues with TPR but they also are in-fighting with their own group because they can't agree on how to hate us! I'm serious, you couldn't PAY the best comedy writers in the world to come up with this crap!!!!

They do, yes! lol It's hilarious!

OMG! Don't even get me started on this! His "injury" if my memory serves correctly had more to do with the fact that his ex-girlfriend showed up at the event with her new boyfriend and he was trying to play the "oh, I'm hurt" sympathy card on her. I wanted to be all "Um, this is WHY she's not your girlfriend anymore!!!!!" Ugh, I hate people. This is so true. Every single word of this. And for us personally, we made the conscious decision that we were no longer going to put up nor welcome the "entitled sh*tbags" into TPR anymore. Yes, this has been met with resistance and lots of crap thrown our way, but we don't care. Because reading stupid comments from them on the internet complaining about us is SOOOOOOOO MUCH BETTER than having to put up with these horrible people for a day at an event much less an entire week on a trip. You get this. Many people don't. People do not realize that when we do a tour, and that tour is ten days for example, that is ten days of 24/7 working on the trip. We don't really have that much "fun" on those trips as it is mostly all work, and it's all work so that everyone else on the trip can have fun. So when we have entitled sh*tbags like the guy I quoted above and all his horrible friends that we cannot stand, and then we do this for 10 years, you can bet Jurassic we are going to say "screw this" and no longer do those tours anymore. In 2012 we were on the road for something like 120 days that year. That's a LOT of time putting up with horrible people. And we just aren't going to do it anymore. Sure, we'll still do trips, but we'll pick and choose the people we WANT on our trips.

So this was brought to my attention today... Let me just break this down for a moment because I want you all to understand that it is exactly people like this is why we stopped doing our TPR tours because we quite simply just could not stand putting up with people like this anymore.... So while we thank this person for spending their money doing a trip with us, *they* also requested to join my *PERSONAL* Facebook page (something that I used to be more open about, but again, here is an example of why I no longer will allow people I don't know that well into my personal private life) which I put trust in them and accepted. It's also a lesson that I think everyone should learn here - If you don't really know someone that well, DON'T ask to be their "friend" on Facebook and don't accept friend requests from people you don't know. (I had to learn the hard way.) And again, THEY REQUESTED it. No one was forcing them to be part of my page. No one put a gun to their head. This was THEIR CHOICE! I'm sorry my posts on my personal Facebook page didn't fit their personal preferences of what they felt my Facebook page should contain, but again, this was THEIR doing. No one else made them send me the request. So if this person were to have really KNOWN me personally, yes, I vent a LOT on my Facebook page, much like other people do about things going on in their lives or "work." And in case you didn't realize TPR is my "job" and I choose to use my PERSONAL PRIVATE Facebook page to vent about things that happen on TPR to my FRIENDS who know me and know that it is my channel to release frustrations. There is nothing wrong with that. If someone on one of our trips did something annoying or stupid, I would write about it. The mistake I made here, and openly admit to, was trusting someone who was on the site for three years to understand that my "venting" doesn't always mean "I hate this person and hope they get hit by a truck." This is probably true and I probably called him an asshole because he was being one. Big deal. Are we twelve years old here? Are you going to cry to mommy because you got into an arguement with someone? Please. Grow some balls. Weird. I just did a search for his email in my inbox and I have nothing like this... I mean, it's POSSIBLE this conversation took place? Maybe? I searched his name, his email address, his TPR screen name, even Facebook Messenger and NOTHING like this came up at all that I could find. And even if that conversation DID take place, is he trying to make it out somehow that this was the first time him or anyone else has ever been "cussed out" over some pointless argument on the internet? Again, are we twelve? Do we not have balls or any sort of thick skin? Do people not even realize that when they post that reads like "This guy cussed me out in an email and called me names and I'm so sad and it really really really hurt my feelings" (keeping in mind that I'm sure he also did he fair share of cussing out, too) and you're a grown adult that just makes you look super insecure because none of any of that matters in the grand scheme of things anyway? So let me get this straight. You feel like resolved the issue by going to my wife (who I'm going to place a Las Vegas bet here that if I asked her to check her emails she wouldn't have anything either) and then you solved your problem by insulting her and our child?!?!? WHAT DID I JUST READ?!?!? I have not seen this guy since the 2012 trip. I have not seen this guy since the 2012 trip. I have not seen this guy since the 2012 trip. This is probably true. And I still maintain that TPR is much better and our lives have been by far more "drama free" since many of those people left. And trust me, any people who have "left" over the years that WE actually felt highly of, we have righted any wrongs and made good, you know, just like mature adults would do. Those people who we didn't, don't let the door hit your butt on the way out! You're just like this guy and we are better off without you! We just had one of our best months ever on social media in December and so far in January. I admit, we aren't that cool. I'm sure some people will come on here and say "Oh, this is just Alvey creating drama" blah, blah, blah, but I legit felt the need to post using this as an example of exactly WHY we don't do our tours anymore, or I should say don't do them open to the public anymore. Yes, we still have fun traveling the world with our friends and TPR members who weren't terrible humans like this guy. I still maintain I did NOTHING WRONG to this person. I mean, what? We got into an argument over line jumping apparently? And that triggered all of this? Or was it that he didn't like my personal private Facebook posts and then later held that grudge to start an argument? Who knows. All I know is that we are way better off without this person, better off without doing public trips, and we are happier and our lives are more drama free. And you know, that all being said, if you are a person who could be exactly *NOT* like this person here, and would like to do a trip with us, you should send either Elissa or myself a message!

It got down to the 30s and 40s most nights.