xstech25

I see what you're trying to say but I disagree with you that most dining passholders pass a point of diminishing returns when it comes to redeeming a full value. If you buy a dining pass for $85 and go 5x, redeeming your pass for 10 meals, thats $8.50 a meal. Now take a market like Chicago which has a metro area of 10 million people and you have more than enough people to make the food lines long even with people who are not redeeming it 20x a year. Sadly SFGAm's food service sucks major a** and the lines are frequently 30+ minutes, if there are people refusing to buy the dining pass because of poor service they are losing out on revenue from one of their biggest cash cows. Now you could make the argument that it doesn't matter because people buy it anyway and wait in line even though it makes them mad and I call BS on that. Once again it might be true for many people, but there are also thousands of people per day that walk across the street to Subway, Culvers, Burger King, Steak & Shake, or drive 5 minutes to Gurnee Mills to have lunch/dinner. This is evidenced by the huge swaths of people crossing the street in front of SFGAm in the middle of the day/at dinner time descending on those restaurants.

OK so a one day guest is higher margin but that doesn't mean Six Flags makes more $ off of them. SF needs their season passholders and they need to sell food to them, hence why they basically said that in their earnings report. Your theory makes sense at a place like Disneyland, which is so crowded all the time that they may actually lose out on money if there are too many annual passholders in the park (because tourists will spend more), but it doesn't make sense at Six Flags. And I don't know how many times the average person goes but I doubt its 10.

One time a yr people rarely care about the things the people in the last 10 posts are whining about. They don;t leave the park for food, in fact it's insane to leave the park for food b/c it's such a time suck. 1 or 2 times a yr visitors expect it to busy and just pay for the overpriced food. The 1 or 2 time people are the people parks love margin wise on profits. The season pass holder who goes 10 or more times a yr provides very little margin. Season passholders make up about half of SF's overall attendance. The dining pass is a huge cash cow for SF that has played a big part in restoring profitability, however it also causes much bigger crowds at the food service outlets. I know of a lot of people (including GP) that used to eat outside the park, then when the dining pass was introduced they started eating inside the park. However the food service is so slow at some of the major SF parks that I personally know many people who have bought the dining pass in the past that refuse to buy it now. They say the service is so slow that they say it ruins their day, and they have gone back to eating outside the park. And I don't know how you can say a regular day visitor "rarely cares about" slow food lines. If you are waiting to buy food, and the wait is 30+ minutes, you would definitely care. Straight from SF's annual report It really doesn't matter to me as I have no stake in the outcome. I never eat at SF parks, rarely visit SF parks nowadays (I actually could be considered you're once a year visitor), and really don't care. But I feel like the facts at least should be pointed out.

Six Flags no doubt would make more $ if they had better food service as customers would be less likely to leave the park to eat if there were shorter waits and lines moved faster. But you have to take into consideration that involves work. (Note I am not trying to suggest that the people working in or running these restaurants are lazy, what I am saying is that Six Flags would have to dissect a problem and go about fixing it, and that's just not what they do).

As I said before i've been to SDC many times (including during their Christmas event) and like the park, but I definitely don't like it enough to go all the way out there and buy a ticket without any of the rides or shows going . Glad to hear that most of the shows were going though.

No disrespect to SDC as i've been there many times and think its a great park. But if all the rides are closed, and you could count everyone in the park on one hand, it begs the question why even open the park in the first place? What if someone showed up that wasn't a season pass holder? Would they actually charge them admission? I can't imagine paying to go to a theme park just for the pleasure of walking around all day in 10 degree weather. Now if all the shows are going that's a different story but from your TR it looked like absolutely nothing was going on there.

I think this is a great and very relevant topic about what has happened in the amusement park business. Not that long ago parks would build these really unreliable coasters (X, DejaVu, Xcelerator, TTD, Kingda Ka, etc) and they would be closed for long periods of time and would chronically break down on days that they were open. The attitude of the parks was basically "so sad, too bad" and since most of the other rides were running you were not owed anything. While i'm sure they got a ton of complaints about it back then the internet wasn't as big of a trip planning tool and social media didn't exist. Consumer attitudes have changed bigtime since then. Now consumers can get literally anything they want, when they want it, and if they don't get their way they can do a social media rant which companies do not want going viral. I think this is a major reason companies like CF and SF aren't building big Intamin rides anymore. They have had it with the complaints. Herschend took probably a bigger risk than they anticipated with this ride and got caught with their pants down, I have no doubt they wouldn't have built if it they knew how unreliable it was going to be, they would have built it without the launched lift. Dollywood also had an old business model here and should learn a lesson: in today's new consumer marketplace the operations people need to be able to tell the marketing people to NOT market the ride when its not going to be open, the marketing people shouldn't have say over the operations people. The same thing happened a few years ago at BGT, all the billboards, commercials, taco bell ads, etc all over Florida said Falcons Fury opening May 1st. Well anyone with any experience operating theme parks couldve told them never, ever promote an opening date for an Intamin prototype before it's even finished being built. You're pretty much guaranteed to have issues. It opened in October and BGT deserved what they got.

Actually, I personally feel Dollywood is understaffed and lacking in customer service (from my last experience with their CS). if you send them an email it takes 10+ days to respond and while they try to help in person, most of the time their hands are tied until a manager comes. I have received far better customer service from Disney and even six flags! Dale (park president of SFOG) responded to one of my emails personally on a Holiday due to a T-Shirt with a hole in it. Overnighting a new shirt! My last complaint to Dollywood was due to a cinnamon bread associate not taking my Gold Pass because it had a date from several years ago.. I renew it online so yeah the pass had an old purchase date on it, but she never scanned to see it was good (I posted the complaint on this forum).. I finally talked her into taking it but I then went to the season pass center to print a new one so I didn't have the issue again with other new associates.. They wanted to charge for the "replacement" because mine wasn't broken.. They finally said they would have to call up a manager who approved it but it took 30 minutes for the approval.. I sent Dollywood and email with my complaint.. 12 days later they responded saying they love receiving comments both positive and negative and use those comments as a coaching tool.. That's it no apology or anything.. Just a canned response after waiting 12 days.. That's not really the best customer service.. Now I don't use Dollywoods customer service often, this was the first time in a few years, but it only takes one time to make people think the customer service sucks. As for the raincheck tickets, I have never needed one but I do like that Dollywood does offer them.. BUT Disney gave me a full refund on tickets in October due to the hurricane.. No raincheck ticket offer or anything, just a refund.. Raincheck tickets are good but not helpful for people who traveled long distances. Disney even refunded the hotel and deposit. I would have actually taken raincheck tickets for Disney because I am going there next week but I received a much better deal to Disney next week anyway Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk I agree that's really bad customer service on the Dollywood employees part to not accept your pass even when you told them you had renewed it, and there is no reason for the season pass center person to have to call a manager for something so silly when it was their fault in the first place. No business should have issues like that, Dollywood or not. I also agree that Dollywood has become more corporate over the years however nowadays I consider Dollywood a corporate mega-park and go there knowing that. While yes the company that owns & operates it is privately owned, and yes it is themed to represent Dolly Parton's old school smoky mountain upbringing yada yada yada, the truth is nowadays it really is a corporate park and I think they overall have done a good job blending the new with the old. On all my visits (5 in all) the park has always been clean, well maintained, and friendly. I will agree with the rest of the forum on the Disney topic though. If there is a natural disaster coming Disney will issue refunds to everyone just to keep all those people from calling/writing letters and tying up their customer service people for an extended period of time. Disney World has over 20 massive resorts in addition to all the day visitors of the parks, when everyone is going to need something, its worth it to them to just lose millions of dollars and wait for people to come back later rather than spend weeks and weeks in correspondence with a hundred thousand people who all want something suited to their particular situation.

How was Hair Raiser this time around? When I rode it last year it was by far the roughest B&M I have ever been on, it was like Mean Streak bad, and we were in the front row. I don't know if I got a bad train or something but it was running 1 train so I wouldn't have been able to find out (and wasn't about risk getting my a** kicked again anyway). Ocean Park is a place I was really looking forward to but was kind of a let down. Not only because of Hair Raiser but also we couldn't see sh*t from the cable car because of all the smog. You always hear that HK Disney struggles because of competition from Ocean Park which has a cheaper gate price, but found Disney to be a far superior park. Ocean Park does have a few nice animal exhibits though.

BGT's problem not with infrastructure, it is slow ride ops. The park is massive and the rides are mostly high capacity thus theoretically handling big crowds really well. However sadly ops have always been hit or miss with mostly being miss. You just happened to go on one of the busiest days of the year which is going to be miserable at most any park. There is definitely a talent gap when it comes to operations in Florida: Disney and Universal have very fast operations and Sea World/Busch Gardens have always been slow to mediocre.

Shades of Green has its own buses for the parks, but for MK all the non Disney resort buses drop off at TTC. So basically the Shades of Green shuttle will drive you across the street and then you have to take the monorail or ferry. Or as the poster above said I guess you could walk to Polynesian and take the monorail if you like exercise. Also Shades of Green buses are on schedules so sure to pick one up from the resort when you check in, because the intervals aren't nearly as often as the Disney buses.

I'm sure all of that was fixed during the 2015 rehab, but that's normal for Disneyland Paris to spend a lot of money refurbishing something to have it fall back into disrepair about 5 minutes after it re-opens. But DLRP also lost 100 million Euro's that year so this shouldn't really surprise anyone.

I'm sure that the degree of difficulty Mt Olympus made it to get to the slide will decide whether or not there is a lawsuit due to attractive nuisance law. I am 99.99 sure the parents have no case here and would be 100% sure if this were any normal park that follows ASTM standards. But considering this is Mt Olympus, as one of the previous posters said, if there is a big hole in the fence or not adequate "danger" signage, there is that 0.01% chance they could be liable. Remember that guy that jumped the padlocked fences at SFOG to get his hat and was struck and killed by Batman, the dept of labor decided the signage was inadequate and said the ride could not operate unless security stood there and watched the fences until "Extreme Danger" signage was added. And yes, the dept of labor (which somehow got involved in this) literally told Six Flags the signs should have said "extreme danger" instead of just "danger" because somehow that was going to prevent the accident. A related ridiculous note: I remember after this incident SFGAm put up some signs next to their rides that said "Extreme Danger: If you enter this area you will be arrested and banned from Six Flags" complete with a picture of handcuffs! I have no idea if those are still there.

Hate to be "that guy" but the sun is from the movie Tangled. And the reason I remember this is because of these lovely restrooms at WDW

Sea World is in no way bending over backwards for peta, that would involve releasing all the animals into the wild and going out of business as they are against all zoo's and any kind of animal captivity whatsoever (including pets). Peta isn't really Sea Worlds problem as most people don't take that organization seriously, it was that movie that turned public opinion against whale captivity. Its stupid to boycott Sea World for ending orca breeding and phasing out the shows because it's now illegal (at least in California). Sea World is struggling financially as it is, it's best that they move on and try to do something else because they would go bankrupt trying to fight the government for years and years. If anything you should be going there and spending money to support animal rescue/rehabilitation, educating, and protecting endangered species, instead of crossing your arms and huffing expecting them to do something that is illegal.

I'm glad to see this park is still around and has some visitors, I went when it first opened in 2002 and there was nobody there. We were riding all the coasters with mostly empty trains which was sad for a park that was still in it's first few months of operation. Six Flags at the time was in a rough spell and I remember thinking "wow this is actually really well themed for a Six Flags park!" (I guess its easier when a bunch of foreign investors are paying for it). I think Warner Bros had high hopes for a European park that could compete with Disneyland Paris and Port Aventura and pretty much fell flat on their face. Sadly the only new coaster they've gotten since then is a kids coaster, although they did get a waterpark in 2014. I wonder if the place makes money.

I find the Chinese big mobs of people pushing and shoving fun in a cultural experience kind of way. Its one of those things that probably won't last another generation or two, so its cool to be able to say you went to China in that time in history. I'll never forget being in line for the tram ride at Ocean Park and an old grandma literally knocking me off my feet to get further ahead in line (it was a weekend so lots of mainlanders there). You know you're in China when an old person knocks you over then just look at you like "come at me brah." Its definitely off-putting to many westerners, but when people from the east visit the USA imagine what they think when they see the massive amounts of obese people and scooters at theme parks . That is truly embarrassing as well.

This isn't really a complaint, more of an observation of other peoples (in my opinion) unjustified complaints. I am constantly amazed by how much people complain at airports. Air travel gets such hate from consumers but I travel quite frequently and rarely ever have any problems. Other than an occasional delay, usually caused by weather (which you would have to be complete moron to complain about), air travel is extremely smooth, efficient, and safe. While yes many services have been cut or upcharged over the past couple decades, in the past 30 years airfares have been cut bigtime adjusted for inflation. So while air travel is not as nice as it used to be, and yes it basically has become "buses in the air," do you take transportation for luxury or do you take it to get where you want to go? If you still want food then nothing is stopping you from buying food on the plane. I would rather buy snacks at Walmart and not have the price of food included in my ticket. Carrying, preparing, and serving food is a big expense and domestic flights aren't that long anyway (I can't think of any that are longer than 5-6 hours and that's cross country). Yes, airlines charge for baggage for domestic flights now. But its also true that people take way too much stupid **** with them when they travel, so I don't feel bad for them . Ive gone on month long trips overseas and taken 1 duffle bag with me, therefore no bag fees (when you book your flight it includes the bag with the price of the ticket if you have a domestic transfer). Travel bags for suits usually are made to fit in a suitcase. Flying is safe, efficient, takes you huge distances in short amount of time, and relatively affordable if you're not a complete idiot. Security lines usually aren't as bad as people make them out to be (i'm looking at the lines at LAX right now and they are 5-10 minutes). People make it sound much worse than it actually is.

I don't think the prices are as big of a deal as the fans and enthusiasts make them out to be. WDW caters to upper middle class/higher income demographic and most of those people know what to expect price wise when they go. Getting a hot dog or beer at any pro sports stadium is about the same, if not a little more, than what it cost at WDW. And for major markets ticket prices are comparable as well. I'm looking at the Clippers website and a single ticket for lower bowl is a little over $100 and for that you're getting like 2 hours of ubiquitous entertainment. For that same price at Disney you are getting all the rides, parades, shows, fireworks, etc. Now granted WDW is a lot more expensive because the length of stay aspect, but I think most people realize its a vacation that they're going to do once every 5 years or so, so whatever. In regards to doom & gloom that is the internet for you. There are a lot of people out there that don't really understand the way the economy works. Companies are going to charge what they can charge to maximize profits. Period. If someone doesn't understand that then they're going to have problems .

If parks are insistent on not allowing loose articles in line then selling sports bottles in the first place is a dumb idea. What do people spend most of their time doing at a Cedar Fair park anyway?

Of the ones i've ridden Top Tier: Goliath SFOG Superman SFNE Mako Intimidator 305 Upper Tier: Fury 325 Superman SFA / SFDL Diamondback Nitro Phantoms Revenge Goliath Laronde Steel Dragon 2000 Mediocre Tier: Raging Bull Apollo's Chariot Millennium Force Intimidator Silver Star Behemoth Wild Thing Steel Force Mamba Hollywood Dream Thunder Dolphin The Big One (Haven't ridden this in a long time, I suspect it would drop down to crappy if I rode it now) Crappy: Desperado Magnum Goliath SFMM Titan Fujiyama

I went to BGT yesterday and as I was leaving at around 8pm the line to get through the metal detectors was crazy, it had to be 20-30 minutes. The whole entrance plaza was full with a crowd and then a line snaked back past the ticket booth, past the tram dropoff, back to the Nairobi gate and looked like it was growing. Full trams were still being dropped off at the front of the park and hordes of people were skipping the tram to make the walk towards the gate. Parking lot looked full as well like it was in it was "drive around until you find someone leaving or a token empty spot" mode. I know it was a Saturday night during Christmas Town but I found that amazing considering the park closed at 10, so by the time all these people got in they would only have 1 1/2 hours or so until the park closed.

I've been to Chongqing on business and would never willingly go there again, the smog is way worse and more consistent than any other city i've been to. I literally could not see anything out of the hotel window even though I was downtown in the middle of a fully lit-30 million people metropolis. It makes Shanghai seem like Switzerland.

I kinda liked Iron Wolf and Vortex, yes they were rough around the edges but those old B&Ms seemed to have a kick to them that the newer ones lack. Not gonna lie though its been awhile since i've ridden either of those and the roughness bothers me now more than it used to so I may not enjoy them as much now. The most dissapointing one i've ever ridden was Montu. The first time I rode it was in like 2000 and after hearing so much hype it just kind of let me down, I had ridden BTR a bunch of times by then and the large elements just didn't seem as intense. I have had a few good (minimum trim) rides on Montu since then but I still wouldn't rank it highly. The worst B&M i've been on unquestionably was the floorless coaster in at Ocean Park in Hong Kong. Holy crap that thing was rough as ****....I swear it was 10x worse than Iron Wolf, I don't know what it is about that park but all of their coasters are terrible. Worst GCI by far was Gwazi. Even after it got the new trains it was still a terribly rough ride, Wildcat is rough but Gwazi was a lot worse. Also I don't know why but I remember Gwazi always having really slow dispatch times as well, which just made it that much worse, and for some reason it was always like that even back when it was new. Not only was it the worst ride in the park but it also always had the longest line because of the slow operations. Intamin...hmmm...I guess the only one that jumps out at me is Green Lantern at Magic Mountain. That ride sucks bigtime: painful, rough, nauseating, low capacity, and not only that its in a park that already has a 4D coaster so they already had a much better version of something similar. My friend wouldn't even go on Batman at SFFT because of this ride (I realize its a different ride model - but after riding Green Lantern when he saw Batman he was like hell no).