Horrible Park Operations

[coaster05]

Seatbelts on raft rides are freaking stupid anyway. If anything they make them less safe in case of a freak accident. Give me Europeon raft rides anyday.

[Angry_Gumball]

-Riddlers Revenge - On Mantis, they check to make sure everyone is in the proper position before dispatching. On Riddlers, they locked the seats and whatever position you ended up in, is where you stayed. A girl in the row in front of me was almost sitting down because she was fooling around, bouncing up and down. The op didn't say or do anything when he checked her restraint. On top of all that, two ops on the other side of the train that were supposed to be checking restraints, were chasing each other, fooling around, and kicking each other.

 

I actually have thought about that before. At Vortex at CGA, we will not dispatch the train until everyone is standing up straight. I remember when I went to SFMM on Riddlers, people were in whatever position they wanted to be in and the train was dispatched.

 

Also at SFMW, before it was SFDK, a ride op at Medusa was just munching away on her french fries not even paying attention to dispatch the train.

 

Last couple visits to CGA we had a couple hiccups. Most recent one was the slow dispatch Grizzly trains every 5 minutes...Yea, I know Grizzly is pretty slow on it's turn-arounds, but not slow enough to delay a train dispatch. I think it was mainly because the people (including my cousin) sat on their secondary lab belts not realizing it until they couldn't get them on.

 

Before, my bro was screwing around along with one of his friends on Vortex and decided to ride it 'floorless style.' I was embarrassed as they came to our row, had to run back, reset the restraints and try again.

 

Lastly, there was no one in line for Drop Tower at the time we were on it, and we wanted to do a marathon like we had done before but the ops wanted us to get some exercise and go back through the empty queue again.

 

Other than that, I've always seem to have good experiences at the local parks. (CGA/SFDK employees, take this as a compliment!)

[jpdupuis]

La Ronde!

 

The crappiest operations EVER!

Let me give you some examples:

 

Vampire: (Batman: The Ride) : Running 1 trains with 2 ops and 2 train with 2 ops...I stayed in the brakes almost 10 minutes....

 

La Pitoune (Log Flume) : The ops was taking to the other one, the double station was full, there has been a collision on the other extreme side, right after the drop!

 

Cobra: (Stand-Up coaster) The operator never says when he lock the seats; I've rode it ne, my feet weren,t touching the ground...Aouch!

 

Goliath (Hyper): Always 2 trains but, operators are so rude with our lap bar, if they ae not sure it is enough tight, they sit on it...

 

Disco Ronde-Twister-Maelstrom (Flat round rides): 1 operator, checking the harness AND controlling the ride...

 

Le Monstre (wood coaster): 1 train per track with 2 employees...once, the line was about 2.30 hours...

 

So...DON'T GO AT LARONDE!!

[VivaLaVibora]

Seatbelts on raft rides are freaking stupid anyway. If anything they make them less safe in case of a freak accident. Give me Europeon raft rides anyday.

 

I don't agree one bit with that statement. There are times when I rode Roaring Rapids, and felt like I would have left the seat if I did not have the seatbelt on. It really happens when it bumps into the boundaries, or they have these turning things it bumps into.

[coasterfreak101]

^^According to SFAFANS.com, they believe it is still getting work done off site. They hardly ever run two trains anyway.

 

I agree about Batwing though. I've never really noticed the cussing/texting/etc, but it just seems that the ride is either always down or runs a horrible capacity. I've never seen more than one train on any of my three visists from 2003-2007. In fact, I've never seen one whole train; a row or two is always roped off! The line jumping is completely out of control on Batwing. It seems like SFA never has many long queues, but when they do, the general patron's mindset is that line-jumping is completely tollerable. SROS seems to always have a bad crew, but as Larrygator said, they do seem to employ SOME decent human beings.

 

Really? I've never seen rows roped off. Just really slow dispatches. And out of my 15+ visits in the past four years, I've seen Batwing run both sides of the station (seems to be the only way they run two trains) twice.

 

Thanks for the info on the red train. It did seem to be shuffling worse than the blue these past couple years.

[SharkTums]

Gwazi - with the stupid seatbelt check first.

Everything at Fuji Q including the food stall operations!

Thunder Dolphin with the pat down policy!

Holiday World no longer even allowing hand slapping in the station!

 

Yeah...I think I'll be posting to this thread once a day as more comes to mind!

[alpengeist04]

Seatbelts on raft rides are freaking stupid anyway. If anything they make them less safe in case of a freak accident. Give me Europeon raft rides anyday.

 

I don't agree one bit with that statement. There are times when I rode Roaring Rapids, and felt like I would have left the seat if I did not have the seatbelt on. It really happens when it bumps into the boundaries, or they have these turning things it bumps into.

 

I have to agree, and could you image how many idiots would get up from their seats trying to avoid getting wet.

[Meteornotes]

Yeah, let's not forget Holiday World's complete lack of understanding of how a cargo pocket, zippers, gravity and physics work. If Cedar Fair took this place over, would you be able to tell? Other than the extra trash cans?

 

dt

[coastercrazed49]

Thunder Dolphin with the pat down policy!

What are they doing that they have to pat you down?

 

Superman Ride of Steel at SFNE. The trains are always stacked and I was sitting on the track at the end of the ride forever one time.

[SFAfan#1]

SFA - One of my worst park experiences ever. At least it had a No Smoking policy.

 

We got in line for JJ and Erik was the only one who got to ride. After that, the ride broke down (though it wasn't the only coaster down on opening day, as the Invertigo was also closed). They gave us exit passes to ride another ride so we headed for Superman. Running one train, dispatches were every five minutes or so, and they were not filling it with Flash Pass people anyway. At least we got to see "BT Wing" run three trains in 45 minutes (and two of them even had people in them)

 

In general, much of the park was run down. Trash cans were overflowing, there were beer bottles in a station for one of the rides, and the queue for annual passes was extremely long with all the self-service computers down. Didn't they have all winter to fix up all these problems?

 

Olympus was also fairly bad, but not as bad as the SFA experience. All the coasters run only one train because that's all they have (why they don't build them with more beats me). Of course, all the coasters had at least one row roped off, and the only rule that the park seemed to enforce was the "no adults on the kiddie coaster". To add to that, there were people smoking everywhere, since the park does not have a No Smoking rule.

 

SFA is always like that on opening day. But by about the 3rd/4th week, the park is alot better. Also how come all of you guys have such a terrible time at SFA? Everytime I go, they are nice and the only long wait is for Batwing.

[cfc]

^You're not allowed to carry anything on Thunder Dolphin, not even in your pockets. So, if they think you've got something in your pocket, you get patted down.

 

"Hey, is that a wallet in your pocket, or are you just excited to be riding Thunder Dolphin?"

[mcjaco]

^ What about meatloaf?

[clewis4u]

I would have to say Canada's Wonderland. There's an entire thread on this at CWMania. Apparently last weekend at the rope drop it was like "running of the bulls". A kid was trampled. Also people were apparently refused ERT with their season pass (even though it was a day where ERT was offered)! 3 hour line for Behemoth was cut off cause it was getting too long. I guess that's what happens at the #1 attended seasonal park in North America. CW really needs to step it up in terms of controlling crowds.

[kraken613]

Well it dosnt happen often but one day at Dollywood they ran 4 trains on Mystery Mine with an hour wait......

[sam06pr]

Wonderland: Someone puked on a coaster (I forget which one, but I rode it after) and it took them 20 minutes to clean it up and get the ride running again. Luckily, we were near the front of the line, and nobody wanted those seats, so we snagged em'

 

where I work, depending on the severity of the puke it can take us an eternity to clean up. For example at Sandstorm (orbiter) We had some puke like 3 times in the damn car so we brought things to clean it up. firts the kitty litter(not so much help) so we used the hose...yeah that thing was nasty so the whole car was full of puke so we had to wait till it drain, which took forever and then we hosed it down again, used a cleaner thingy and wiped it down finally, i swear it took us like 20-30 minutes it was a nightmare

 

anyways...I see that everyone hated Mt Olympus and SFA...can they really be that bad? I am shocked to see what I found on one of the photos of a girl sitting in the station on the edge of the brakes.

 

I think the place where I had the worst time was probably SFOT. Employees where generally rude. Except for the older ones. the younger ones just did not care.

[mike541x]

Oh yeah I forgot about Mt Olympus. We went their over the summer and I remember when I was on Zeus, all the op did was look to make sure we just had our seatbelts on. Didn't even touch the belts or the bars. Some of the trains were missing lap bars.

[pgathriller]

I remember some bad experiences.

 

California's Great America- I was riding the Grizzly, and after 3 rides without getting off, they didn't allow me to ride the ride anymore. I was 12 at the time but I was like WTF. People would trickle into the station every now and then and the ride ops would allow me to stay on the train, but after three rides they said I wasn't allowed to ride anymore. I was one pissed off 12 year old haha.

 

Six Flags Fiesta Texas- I waited 2 1/2 hours to ride their Vekoma Boomerang. I know i hate Vekomas, but I had not been on a Boomerang prior to this so I had to ride it just for the sake of riding a Boomerang, but it took 2 1/2 hours. Dispatch times were horrible.... on a Boomerang? I don't get it.

[Holtskee]

And for the person complaining about Dollywood.... I'm sorry but I don't think it's possible to have a bad there.

 

Actually it is. I've had several. My April '07 visit was a nightmare, from the ticket booths at the beginning of the day to the tram line at the end of the day.

 

You have to accept that on some days things just don't work out, no matter what park it is.

[pgathriller]

^^ I guess having gone to the park 18 times and not having one bad day, it's hard to remember that even some parks have their off days. Dollywood is one of those parks that actually strive at customer service etc, but as you said they do have their off days, i've just never had one at one of my many visits.

[Coasterlvr_nc]

I remember some bad experiences.

 

California's Great America- I was riding the Grizzly, and after 3 rides without getting off, they didn't allow me to ride the ride anymore. I was 12 at the time but I was like WTF. People would trickle into the station every now and then and the ride ops would allow me to stay on the train, but after three rides they said I wasn't allowed to ride anymore. I was one pissed off 12 year old haha.

 

Yeah i can understand that, but you must also understand what it is like to be a ride op.

 

Until about a week ago at Afterburn, our policy was that you could ride again in your row it no one was in line for it. So we would have most of the people in those rows staying on, but when the others realized that, they would jump into any empty seat, which was usually someone's who happened to be putting their stuff into one of the cubbies. This caused a lot of chaos and confusion which greatly slowed down our operations.

Now our policy is that you must get off no matter what, and if you want to reride you have to get back in line. It decreases our dispatch times greatly by doing this.

[Swimace]

I've only been to Dollywood once and if it weren't for Mystery Mine I wouldn't have a desire to go back. But supposedly I just hit it on an off day and am open minded about my return back sometime this year.

 

Really? I thought Dollywood was amazing! Joe and I went up when Mystery Mine opened last year and the park blew me away with how nice it was. We went on a weekend and it was pretty busy, but the only thing that had an unreasonable ride was Timber Tower and the Disk-O.

 

I hope you have a better time on your next visit, Dollywood is awesome.

[palmerleeberry]

Six Flags America is probably the only park I have ever visited that ever made me wish I was at another park. Believe me, I've been to many parks and enjoyed my visit, but from the numerous visits to SFA, I counted only three or four times I actually enjoyed myself.

 

Way back in May 2005 (cue the sad violin music), I absolutely had the WORST park visit I ever had. Long dispatch times on several coasters (some coasters had some seats that were locked out, i.e. nobody could ride them) and some of the most annoying ride operators I ever encountered. Ever worst, parts of the park wasn't just dirty, THEY WERE JUST PLAIN FILTY!!! Plainly, this visit was so bad I wished I were someplace else (like KINGS DOMINION- a park I visited many times and never had a bad trip).

 

As for other bad visits that comes in at a distance second and third place, I will say my visit to Ghost Town in Sky (2007) and Universal Studios Orlando (1990). For Ghost Town, half of the rides were either down or still being built, but all the shows were great; for Universal, although half of the park was in operation, at least they passed out free tickets. And I should add that both of those parks were on their opening season when I visited them (Ghost Town was reopening after a few years hiatus), so the situation was understandable.

 

In conclusion, it can be a dark day in any park whenever a ride you wanted to ride isn't running, but it shouldn't be the worst visit you ever had.

 

"Come to my park and I'll give you the worst visit you ever had. HA HA HA!!!"

[QueenCityBoy]

I have visited SFoG atleast 10 times and i have yet to enjoy my visit. Weather it be slow & lazy ride operators or getting into screaming matches with retarded line jumpers. The park has a major problem with line jumping and the park has pretty much become a ghetto hangout not to mention it smells and is just dirty ever time i go.

 

Heck they can't even open their rides, shops & snack stand on time. Seriously all 10 trips i have had to wait until 11 for anything to open. The restrooms were open atleast.

 

The same goes for SFA but i have only been there once.

 

Of all the theme parks i have been to SFoG is by far the worst and now that i have ridden Goliath i really don't care to visit ever again and i basically tell everyone i know not to go there. It's not safe and you could get killed.

 

Now if i were able to take my gun into the park then i would be more that happy to go again.

[coaster05]

^If you hate a place that much, why would you go back 9 more times?

 

I really dislike Valleyfair, so I am not making plans to go back. Same for Beech Bend.

 

I totally believe you could have had a bad experience, although both of my trips to SFOG were amazing, I just don't understand why you keep coming back.

[Erik Johnson]

Now if i were able to take my gun into the park then i would be more that happy to go again.

 

Renting a Qbot would be easier.