NEWS: Merlin announces agreement to open LEGOLAND Korea

[Garet]

Legoland has switched their rides to the 'split' style on weekdays with one ride per area running morning only and another next door afternoon only on weekdays. Everland also uses this style on weekdays, although in their case it's due to their water park absorbing most of the crowds to the point that water park guests can go into Everland for free.

Legoland also announced their water park expansion will be a water maze from next Friday along with the return of Legoland's fireworks shows.

[Anything]

Great photos and insight into the place. I have never seen one of these brand new Legoland parks and I always wondered how sparse they are, at least at first. I have to say this one does look a little sparse in barren surroundings but hopefully it can fill out very nicely soon.

[Garet]

Hmmm, even with the busy 6-day public holiday coming up and the Fall season, Legoland has now switched some rides to weekends/holidays only, including its flagship attraction, and has now added delayed openings and split shift rides to the weekend schedule as well compared to July (see above)

 

[Garet]

After closing for the winter last year, Legoland will be running Fridays-Sundays after Christmas, bringing it a bit more in line with the rest of the parks in Korea that run 365 days a year.


Mini-TR: I held off on this TR because although we had fun, it's going to come across very negative. However, I also think that it is important to set your expectations before you visit a park, so you can plan and adjust accordingly.

After delaying our trip during the Bring a friend thanksgiving event from a weekday, due to them wanting to experience the Factory Ride (see schedule in last post) went to the park on a Saturday in mid-September to finally experience Legoland's Starry Night. Was the park being open until 9PM worth it? Err, it was cool to see all the models lit-up and enjoy the park at night... but not sure the operational cuts to match the extra costs were worth it.

As per routine, my son made us arrive stupidly early to be near the front and try and get noticed to open the park and win the yellow brick and certificate. The Legoland characters had been switched out for Halloween.

Your word of the day is.... capacity. Despite it being a busy Saturday, nearly all rides that could run half a side did just that. We ended up bailing on the Wave Racers because only one staff was working the ride and there was also a broken car roped off. We were told the line was 30 minutes, but after seeing the time taken for unloading, checking the cars, loading, checking the bars were locked and seeing the line move by about 3 people (one family split up and a fast-pass group boarding) we bailed.

I assume this is to cut costs due to the longer hours. However, as Tim has mentioned in another thread, the Korean media has been playing up Fast Pass anger recently, so we heard some grumbling here and there throughout the day of people thinking it was to drive up sales. However, the real fury was aimed at.....

...The Driving School. In 12 years of covering parks in Korea, I've never seen guests actually confronting staff about operations until now. And it happened more than once! Usually pre-show is run while the ride is going so next drivers are always ready to go.

The view above was the norm, on this visit.  For whatever reason, the operation that day was to count the people into the pre-show and make them wait. The movie wasn't allowed to be started however until the ride had completely finished, unloaded and cars checked. So we saw people in the queue confront the staff as their kids fidgeted and cars sat empty outside without riders for almost 10 minutes, as the staff stood around outside, then we saw different people confront staff in the pre-show after spending 10 minutes looking at the screen logo above.

I want to give the park the benefit of the doubt and say this is the only way to get the batteries on the cars to last the 11hour operating time, but then be honest! Asking angry guests to be patient and understand just makes it worse.



Outside of the two restaurants, and despite the heat, the only snacks were Churros or Coffee, outside of the apple-fries stand which was the only place selling slushies which meant a long line at that stanf. Unfortunately despite the long line and 4 slushie machines, they weren't staggering the machines, and an employee topped up all 4 at the same time, we and some other annoyed guests found this out the hard way, when we got to the front of the line to be told we'd have to wait 20-30 minutes for the drinks.

My son took most of the operational issues in his stride but this one hurt him. For whatever reason, the app hadn't updated in the store in time and was still set to Summer. We tried constantly to get some meet and greets on that day hoping that the times had at least been changed in the app, but never found a character after opening.

All the on-ride photo counters have also been ripped out and removed, and we didn't see any licenses for sale anymore at the driving school.

Now onto the main reason we were here:



So despite all the operational headaches, I'm happy to say my son had a great day, he always spends a lot of time around Mini-Land, and getting to see the models lit up and in night-time mode made all the headaches worth it.

So we grabbed a night ride on the Lookout to see it from above, notice how busier the car-park is compared to the previous TRs.

We had planned to head out since the Saturday fireworks were not happening (moved to the Thanksgiving public holiday instead) but we saw a show and headed over.

Dracula was hanging out mostly in the background, its been an awkward year for theme parks, due to the Itaewon disaster, all of them have had to relabel events to Fall or Thanksgiving despite the use of monsters.


We ended the day checking out one of the new 4D movies to arrive this year. City 4D was still the favorite by far however.