Thorpe Park Resort

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Swarm Chris

These Pepperami adverts have been pretty clever by Merlin. I wonder who is footing the bill for them.

In other news, Twitter is currently full of angry people stuck in the Thorpe Park car park. Most been there for an hour waiting and it's just grid lock in the heat. Some reports saying only 2 barriers working, most saying lack of staff and one picture shows people queing to leave via the entrance.

These barriers are a disaster across all the Merlin parks and I've seen grid lock caused even on off-peak days at off-peak times because people get to them and then can't get out because either they don't have a ticket or the machine simply doesn't work.

Angry rant time for all those currently stuck in the car park.

£7 per car. Most cars now contain very hot, angry, upset and generally unhappy people. Hopefully they all complain, but this will in turn clog up guest services and will no doubt lead to complimentary fast passes or return tickets being given out. Staff will no doubt get abused the longer people wait and the hotter it gets. Guests will be put off coming back and the word of mouth won't be what a good day they had but what a horrible experience they had trying to get out of that place. Total profit remaining from that £7...?

Merlin, you have some great people working for you doing everything they can to make people have a brilliant time at your parks week-in-week-out, no doubt working near minimum wage. The least you could do is start applying some management decisions that don't do their best to destroy all of that for absolutely no reason. There's absolutely no way you can defend this craziness. The idea that you believe there's a 96% guest satisfaction across your parks makes me wonder just how many times Merlin management visit their parks and actually experience them like their customers do.

Merlin £7 per car is about a £2.50 increase on a entry ticket if we assume an average of 3 people per car. Would people really notice that...?

Edit: Gates are apparently not accepting credit cards tonight even though people had been told to pay at the gate. They're now being redirected to the annual pass building to purchase a ticket, which has a huge queue of angry people.

Edit 2: Two hours and people still stuck.
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streetmagix
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A better solution would be to pay on entry rather than exit. People tend to arrive in dribs and drabs but, generally, they all leave around the same time. Not ideal but neither is the current solution.

At least at Thorpe the bus doesn't get caught in the traffic unlike at Alton Towers!
Swarm Chris

It sure would be and wouldn't require much work to implement as they have 2 lanes incoming and only use 4 lanes to get out anyway. They're already equipped for staff to take payments or scan prepaid barcodes. Allocating 4 staff to payments on entry would make the whole thing smoother. Plus if it's busy getting in then both lanes generally get clogged up anyway regardless of the overhead of taking payments.

Oh and the bus may not get caught in the traffic, but when they sub out the normal bus for a double decker, well it gets caught under the bridge instead...

https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey ... s-14720070
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Chris
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When you are Merlin and have a situation like that with a two hour queue, you would just screw the barriers and leave them all open so everyone can leave in a timely manner right? I mean, put the guest experience first?

Merlin seem to be the only company that causes guests to get angry OUTSIDE their parks.. Chessington mud, ATR plaza queues, and now this..
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Justin
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I was talking about this today with Dan and said exactly the same thing. I'm surprised they didn't just open the barriers and let people go, especially when the problem is their fault. To make people wait to make their way through a bottle neck on a bank holiday is a little unfair!!
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AltonOperator
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(Pretty much) everyone has already paid and got a parking ticket anyway so it’s ridiculous to make everyone wait 2 hours so they can check that everyone has one. They wouldn’t lose more than a hundred or so quid from people who didn’t buy one.
You’re not waiting to pay. You’re waiting for them to make sure you’ve paid
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Thanks Jack
Swarm Chris

They changed the barriers so that they take card payments now - or failing that the one or two staff manned there have the ability to take card payment. When I've been there a lot of people arrive expecting to pay at the gate. So even on a good day it can get jammed with the delay taken for the machines to accept payment.

But otherwise - yep, they ensure they upset those that already paid just as much as those that arrive and realise it's card payment only.
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AltonOperator
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Well that’s just ridiculous! It’s these card payments that’s making such long lines. They should have to pull out of the queue and pay near the barriers instead of holding up the entire queue
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Swarm Chris

Yep. Think the card payment system broke on Saturday making it the extra special chaos.

I got stuck on a quiet Saturday afternoon at Chessington at about 2pm, because people got to the gates at the far end of the car park without realising that they would either need to pay or that they had to pay with a card. Then too many cars behind (and general I'm not moving friendliess) for people to let them move out of the way. Oh and no staff stationed there, they had to come up from the ticketing gates then promptly got into an argument with the driver who only had cash.
Swarm Chris

The Swarm was listed as "Opens from 11am" today.

Anybody know if this was due to an event, or if Thorpe are now testing the Alton approach of staggered opening. It would be strange if it was the staggered opening case, given it's half term. Normal maintenance related issues typically get listed as "Come back later".
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Dom
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It could have been planned maintenance that they knew would cause the ride to open later and so therefore thought it was a better approach to say it was opening at 11. I wouldn't read to much into it for now. If it continues to say it everyday for the next week or so, that's when you have to worry. 
Swarm Chris

I shall keep a suspicious eye on it.

Pitchforks are at the ready though, because Swarm is an excellent crowd swallower in the morning leaving Inferno and Stealth empty for the rest of us!
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Robert.W
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I'd love to give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume there was something other than staggered openings to blame... but this is Merlin we're talking about, so... and planned maintenance should be done after park close, so even that isn't an excuse.
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Swarm Chris

They're never normally so forthcoming and helpful with information though :lol

It'll be easy to spot tomorrow. I'd be very surprised if they did try and implement staggered opening - but then management do like to be surprising at times! 

Looks like it might have delayed opening on Sunday, as there's a triathlon happening in the morning and previous year's pictures seem to show them using the field behind Swam and the path alongside the conference center for it. But we shall see - they might all be done by park opening.
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Robert.W
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I did just see a tweet saying something along the lines of they were sorry that it took longer than usual to get onto the island this morning, so are extending the opening to 7pm? 
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ThemeCrafter264

Yes, that's true.
Swarm Chris

Robert.W wrote:I did just see a tweet saying something along the lines of they were sorry that it took longer than usual to get onto the island this morning, so are extending the opening to 7pm? 
Yep. They messed up the annual pass collection so badly that it was taking two hours plus to get in. They ignored it for a fair while until a BBC and local reporter started tweeting those in the queue, then magically management arrived with water and more staff to run the ticket collection.

Which also means Swarm will be open until 7pm tonight :)
Swarm Chris

As a new way to scare riders, guests will occasionally be joined by a walker in their train.



It also looks like the ride will have actors more frequently now.
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Dom
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Ha that’s awesome
Swarm Chris

And to complete the set of the resort parks getting into the press: enough people complained about the time it was taking to pick up passes yesterday for BBC and local paper journalists to spot it and start asking questions. Haven't seen the BBC report anything, but here's the local paper:

https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey ... d-14734246

Quite fair on Thorpe article, I felt, and maybe giving them a little more benefit of the doubt than they perhaps deserve. From seeing this online yesterday it seemed queue times were around 2 hours just to get tickets.

These types of queues have been around a lot this year due to "new systems". The common issue I've seen is not enough staff assigned to ticketing with the secondary issue being the ticket system failing.
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