Horrible Park Operations

[pgathriller]

This is a general discussion on some parks, or park chains that just have overall poor park operations. It could be a single incident like Cedar Points poor opening day, or something more broad like (this parks name) has really crappy customer service and ride operations because ______.

 

*Pretty much a thread to vent your angers from poor park operations.

[Tanks4me05]

SFNE. S:ROS. One train dispatched every five minutes. One train. What could have been a 25 - 45 minute line with two trains and good dispatching (1 - 1.5 minutes per train) it turned into a 2.5 hour wait - longer than my TTD wait, and officially the longest I ever waited in line for any ride in my entire life.

 

The ride itself is freaking amazing, though.

[Airtime&Gravity]

Mt. Olympus-the ride operators just don't care

 

SFKK-who came up with the brilliant idea was it to only run two cars with one not being sent until the other came to the station?

[CoasterEricHP]

Im sure all parks have a bad day every now and then... but as far as consistant crappy overall operations:

 

Six Flags America!

 

Everythiing from waiting way too long to get into the parking lot, to getting into the park, to crappy attraction operations, and then waiting 45 minutes to get a slice of pizza in a line 4 or 5 people long.

 

Awesome..

 

Only reason to go to SFA-- get a cheap season pass and use it at other Six Flags parks.

[SharkTums]

OMG I could go on forever on this topic...here are a few...

 

Dorney - Not letting you choose your seat on Laser.

Cedar Point - Not running the majority of rides in a light rain.

Any Mouse that runs one car at a time.

Tatsu - I mean seriously, how can you have such bad dispatch times and ops that just don't care.

[Meteornotes]

Fuji Q - The absolute worst operations I have ever seen at any park in the world. The park really needs to be replaced with something a lot more useful and fun, like a toxic waste dump.

 

dt

[mike541x]

Im sure all parks have a bad day every now and then... but as far as consistant crappy overall operations:

 

Six Flags America!

 

Everythiing from waiting way too long to get into the parking lot, to getting into the park, to crappy attraction operations, and then waiting 45 minutes to get a slice of pizza in a line 4 or 5 people long.

 

Awesome..

 

Only reason to go to SFA-- get a cheap season pass and use it at other Six Flags parks.

 

Couldn't agree more. While on the Wild One, these 3 hooligans were to busy texting to their friends about a major party that was going to happen and we heard one of them say the party was 6 months away. Jeez you have time to talk to them about it later when you're off. Not while you're operating a coaster. It took us about 5 minutes just to dispatch. The only time when operations get good there is near the end of the day. Operators were friendly to my friend and I when we went there for Frightfest in 06. Haven't been there in awhile though. Hopefully they've improved.

[coaster05]

Cedar Point because they used to me so good and now they just typlify what is wrong with American park. Triple checks, belts, bars, seat dividers and holding trains way too long.

 

Drayton Manor because they can turn a rainy light crowd day into a que line frenzy.

[ElToroExtreme]

Cedar Point- Not Running Coasters in the rain!

SFGAAdv- Wheres the flats?

[ginzo]

Mt. Olympus gets my vote for crappiest operations. They have the most disinterested and unfriendly ride operators I have ever seen. All 4 of their woodies have only one train, including Hades. A few of their coasters had grass growing up into the track. They don't properly fence off track area.

[FeelTheFORCE]

Cedar Point has gotten better with their rain policy. MF ran in slight rain on Monday. Magnum ran in slight rain Monday also, but only one train. Magnum was also testing this morning in rain. I'm assuming that they can run Magnum in the rain, because they always used to, just not with 3 trains so they don't run the risk of another crash. Skyhawk was running in the rain this morning as well. That's all I am aware of. Also, by "ran" I mean with people, not just testing.

 

 

On to my bad operations experiences:

 

-Cedar Point - Yesterday, at one time, about 5 of their major rides were down (WT, Mantis, Raptor, TTD, Maverick, and Skyhawk). The weather was perfect, too. They all eventually opened up again, but still.

-TTD - There have been many times where I have encountered slow operations in previous years, especially during it's early years.

 

-Six Flags Magic Mountain - These were back in the summer of 2006, so I am sure they have improved since then.

-Tatsu - The last 4 rows or so were blocked off for Flash Pass users, making the line go slower than it could. Also not to mention the horrible dispatch times.

-X - I waited a half hour to get into the station, then waited an hour and a half inside the station with no breakdowns whatsoever, just very slow loading and restraint checking. No, I am not exaggerating.

-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.

-Other than those 3 incidences, my day there was great and everything else was run and operated greatly.

[andy_e219]

Cedar point- rain policy, rides being down.

Lakemont- running only 1 car on Leap the Dips, having huge empty spaces everywhere.

[bdstrom]

That's an easy one!

 

*drums rolls*

 

SFDL - *Only when it was under Six Flags. This might change under the new ownership

 

I would go there at least 5 times a year and they always, always, always run 1 train on S:ROS even though the wait was 45 minutes to a hour.

 

They would close half of the park during the Fright Fest. That means no Mind Eraser... come on, they closed one of the "good" rides at the park every year? Silly if you ask me.

 

They failed to add something major since after S:ROS was built. (Yay for new motocoaster under new ownership!)

 

The environment was just basically a hickville. The campers near Twister and the go kart track is just a major eyesore.

 

What's up with the pathway between Boomerang and the Twister? I never understand the purpose of that area and the gate seems strange sitting there unused.

 

The lake in middle of the park has slowly became a malaria lake, pretty disgusting.

 

The entrance for Viper is located on one side of the coaster. The exit is located on the other side. Talking about a long walk if you want to re-ride or need to meet with a non-rider in your party. Plain weird.

 

Predator has basically dislocated my pancreas, enough said.

[Looty]

Mt. Olympus HANDS DOWN!

I've never seen a park managed like Mt. Olympus. I have never encountered one friendly employee in all of my trips there. I only say that because it feels as if the ride ops go out of there way to piss people off. I feel like they antagonize people.

They have no fences around their rides and their rides in general are not very well maintained (grass growing through Zeus). I've witnessed them having to physically push our train out of the station before on Zeus and when we got back to the station, the seat (yes the seat that we were sitting on) came up with us as we went to exit!

I saw one employee one time walking around taking pictures of girls in bikinis (many of whom became very upset).

I think the biggest thing that bothers me is who rude their employees are. I've seen "supervisors" dealing with angry guests and they show no sign of sympathy. The few incidences I've witnessed involved the supervisor interrupting the guest and basically asking them to leave if they are unhappy. It's as if they feel like they are providing some type of experience that we all should be grateful for (like the Soup Nazi on Seinfeld). I don't usually rant like this, but this thread got me going... The only reason why I go back is because Hades is amazing (although from what I have heard lately it isn't so much anymore).

I would say SFA comes in a close second though.

[dpxtreme]

-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.

[XII]

Cedar Point-They close any ride in a drizzle and some of the operators were quite rude and unfriendly.

[southpuddle]

Hey guys, Cedar Point runs coasters in rain now, if you haven't heard (thank God), albeit with fewer than maximum trains on the track. They realized that it pissed everyone off and learned from their mistake. So cork it.

 

As for me, Deja Vu at SFMM pisses me off more than any other coasters' operations. Setting my stopwatch, it was more than eight minutes between dispatches on my trip last Friday. Plus they don't let you sit where you want. Me and my friend were the third group to be let in the station, and I asked politely if we could go to the back row. The girl said "No. Please go to row three." and pointed. There was nobody in the last row. It's not like I would be hanging around to wait another cycle, so what is the problem? Anyone with more than three brain cells can coordinate guests and still allow those who have a row preference to sit where they want. I know, I've done it thousands of times.

 

What pisses me off even more is that I think that this is the standard, required answer. Every time I have asked, I get a "There is no preferred seating. Go to row __."

 

On top of all that, in eight minutes, they still couldn't fill every seat, and there was absolutely no attempt to look for single riders. Bullcrap. I filled every seat for a half hour straight while working at Rock 'n' Rollercoaster, and we were dispatching trains every 48 seconds...

[WillMontu]

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.

[Hercules]

Six Flags America by far. The ops just don't care, and they do nothing but swear.

[DBru]

I can't believe I'm saying this, but...

 

DOLLYWOOD!

 

In early April, we visited Dollywood to find the worst operations I've ever seen. It must have been a bad day, because usually they run things smoothly down there...

 

But they were only running 1 train on Thunderhead, 1 train on TT, and were only loading 1 train (instead of 2) on Mystery Mine. Plus, dispatch times were incredibly high, and the employees didn't even seem to care!

 

I couldn't believe it...

[CoasterGuy06]

Some of the biggest complaints I have had about parks:

SFA- on my visit in 2002 everything was running 2 trains, except for S:ROS. Mind Eraser's trains were going out with 5-10 people on them. Yes, they did eventually run 2 trains on ROS, but it should of ran them at opening.

 

SFFT- On both of my visits (2002 and 2006) they were running all three trains, but they only had 3 people running the ride (Op and 2 attendants). In 2002 they were dispatching about every 4-5 mins, so all three trains were stacked, but at least they improved this in 2006 but they were still stacking because 2 attendants are not enough to check quickly (and they were checking as quick as they could). I even read about this subject on the SFFTnet website, where an operator said you can not "safely" put more than 3 people operating in the station. Give me a break.

[okinawaboy11]

SFA hands down.

 

Long story short. Slow everything. Dispatches, Employees, blah.

 

Oh and I don't know if it's just me but, if a ride op is lolly gagging, I personally will yell at them. Not yell but a, "Uh hello? we're waiting" or a "What are you doing? Hurry up" I have thrown in a "Get off your ass, stop talking and dispatch the train. We don't pay to visit this park to watch you sit on your ass, we pay to come to this park to ride your rides and have fun."

 

To the last remark, on S:ROS 2 employees were sitting on their butts, talking and eating, while the air gates were opened, all passengers had taken their seats, and buckled their seat belts (I know, a BIG accomplishment for the GP). We were all just sitting there giving them blank stares like WTF? It was about a good 3-4 minutes before I spoke up and said something. Of course I just got attitude right back from the employees, but at least I got them up.

[Kennyweird]

The worst park operations I ever encountered was at the now defunct SFWOA (aka Geauga Lake). First off, the park did not have a family friendly atmosphere at all, instead it had a "We have deep management/financial issues" feel to it. This became apparent when I ordered a pizza from some food place in the Gotham City themed area. I had to wait 30 minutes for them to cook what turned out to be the worst pizza I've ever had. 30 minutes for a freaking pizza that sucked! Crappy management like this was no doubt one of the contributing factors in the closing of Geauga Lake. Thanks, Six Flags and Cedar Fair, thanks for killing Geauga Lake with your craptacular management.

[ParkTrips]

as far as big corporate parks go, add another vote for SFA, and Knott's sure can suck too...

 

 

 

I can't believe I'm saying this, but...

 

DOLLYWOOD!

 

In early April, we visited Dollywood to find the worst operations I've ever seen. It must have been a bad day, because usually they run things smoothly down there...

 

But they were only running 1 train on Thunderhead, 1 train on TT, and were only loading 1 train (instead of 2) on Mystery Mine. Plus, dispatch times were incredibly high, and the employees didn't even seem to care!

 

I couldn't believe it...

hmm... let's look and see what you reported in your TR...

 

 

In the early afternoon, the coaster was only running one train, but the crews were moving the trains out as fast as they could! They really seemed to be having a good time, and I was very impressed! But things changed when a second train was put on later in the day. The crew slowed down, and weren't very lively at all. In fact, I'm willing to bet there were less pph with two trains than there were with one. Sad...

Sounds like they added a train to Thunderhead! hmm..

 

So we entered the station after about a 5 minute wait and sat down in the front row of the VERY comfortable (IMO) train. After all of the restraint checks were done we were given the "all clear" and took off.

You only waited 5 mins and you're still complaining?

 

I've never seen Tornado run 2 trains, its a pretty short ride anyways and rarely has more than a 3 train wait!

[snoodog]

SFA!

Certainly on this roller coaster.