Cedar Fair Parks will start charging for Haunted Houses

I thought about Camden, too. It was my first amusement park, probably late 50’s and then through the 60’s. Admission was 10 cents. And you had to have an actual dime in your pocket as it was inserted into a slot in the turnstile to make it turn, subway-style. Inside the park, ticket booths sold strips of tickets and each ride cost a certain number of tickets.
Honestly, it wasn’t a bad system. The admission fee likely kept riff raff away and probably paid for a new load of gravel for the parking lot every spring. Then visitors had the choice of whether to participate in riding as little or as much as they wanted to afford, which has long been a complaint of POP detractors.

Touchdown:

Diamond and Diamond Elite are the old legacy memberships, and I believe the Haunted Passes have always been a perk. That doesn’t sound like anything new.

Yep and those products are no longer available. It's only those who have them from when they were available that get this and there is talk of how much longer will the chain support those passes before forcing the plans to end.

They are looking to be eventually going to the Cedar Fair pass model with less options of passes but with pay in full or EZ-pay to purchase.

***Copy/paste from the P-Buzz***

Did The Conjuring with one of my students on Sunday. It was around 6:00 and there was absolutely not a soul in line for it (pun intended). I will say that when it opened at 5:00 I was around the area and the queue had maybe 50(ish) people in it.

We bought our tickets and wound our way through the queue, and then we had to wait because they said ideally they want parties of 5-7. So, Tom and I waited until finally a couple emerged. They said 4 wasn't the norm but that it would work, so they finally let us go through. As we went through the rooms, each actor commented "WAIT THERE'S ONLY 4 OF YOU?!@!@"

I don't want to give too much away, but after doing it I understand why at least 5 would be preferred, as they make an attempt to get everyone in your party involved in some type of interactive way. You each have a "job", which is a nice touch.

Again, I don't want to give too much away, but we both thought it was worth it. The couple with us were split; husband liked it while the wife (who carried Annabelle) said she didn't, even though she seemed super into it during our journey. She was also weird about being the one to take Annabelle, while we were indifferent about it, so have fun, lady.

It's certainly way different than any other haunted house attraction at Cedar Point. Most of the effects are top notch, and they use the space in some really creative ways.

The only negative that sticks out is one of our actors seemed really, really bored, and not into it at all. Every couple rooms you get attached to a new "guide" (for lack of a better term), and all of them were excellent except one right in the middle. It definitely sucked the fun out of that particular room, but everyone has a bad day.

The pros:

1) Town Hall was a perfect setting for this. It's also just so nice to see it getting used.

2) The effects were (mostly) very high-quality.

3) The length of the experience. You definitely forget you are simply moving about Town Hall, and it's pretty impressive they crammed so many different rooms of varying theme in that space.

4) The fact that you know the actors are allowed to touch you changes the haunt dynamic.

The cons:

1) If your experience includes an actor who seems ready to fall asleep, it will really diminish the experience. They drive the story and instruct you what you need to do. Luckily we only had one in this category.

Overall, we just had a lot of fun with it. I would recommend giving it a try.

I guess I'll finally chime in about Halloween Haunt at KI. I hope this isn't a spoiler. When I did The Conjuring at Kings Island on Haunt opening day, I had two of the jobs, one having to with holy water, and one knocking on a closet door. The door knocking was ruined by me not being able to hear.

I thought I had a third job, carrying around a VHS tape. I still had it in my hand when the tour was over. I handed it back to someone standing near the exit. He didn't understand what it was or why I had it.

The Conjuring was chaotic in a bad way, and a lot of things were poorly timed. A few times the room or hallways big special effect happened after most of the group left the area. I only saw it because I was last in line a few times. I also could not for the life of me hear the tour guides because the background music was way too loud.

Another criticism about The Conjuring- I like that they are trying something different, but sometimes just like new rides, the capacity is a concern to me. As Lemongrab always says, unacceptable.

-Which makes it nice that they at least are doing something about the long line by offering reservations.

As for the Dragon maze, it might have been awesome if I could see where I was going. Too much fog.

The dragon maze was created by an outside company. The only way charging for these mazes is going to work now is if they replace one or two of the old Kings Island-created mazes with a maze designed by an outside company. This new maze was ten times better than the old ones.

All the other mazes were lacking actors. So many places I though someone was going to jump out of, but there was no one there. So many places were I was confused at which direction to go because there was supposed to be an actor standing in one of the paths. Unacceptable.

The staff they did have, on opening day at least, did not know to tell me to look for the green spider for the express entrance. I was so confused over and over as to how to get into the express line. Once I figured it out, I went back and told a few of them where the express entrance was, and to tell people to look for the green spider. You would think they would have been told this in training.

The old mazes still sucked, especially Killmart. And a lot of the monsters in the scare zones were just standing around talking to each other, or scrolling on their cell phones.

I still had a great time. I rode Diamondback once and Racer twice. Racer is really fun now that it has been retracked.

I've heard that after the first weekend, some things got a little better. With so many awesome Halloween events and attractions to do. I'm not in a hurry to go back. I recorded a lot of video, but I had a really hard time writing a positive script about the experience, so I scrapped the YouTube video. Maybe it would be a good idea to go back and see how much better it got, then I can compare the two experiences. Maybe?

LostKause:

I thought I had a third job, carrying around a VHS tape. I still had it in my hand when the tour was over.

Spoilers follow.

Not surprising the experience varies from park to park. I'm sure it varies from day to day at the same park, because like I posted above it is very actor-driven. Our final scene guide was pretty adament that all the artifacts were placed in the right spot or we weren't leaving. I misplaced the music box on the wrong shelf and got yelled at because I was putting my group's "life in danger". Then again there was just 4 of us and there was no one in line for the experience behind us, so maybe they were really taking their time with us.

Strange, I don't recall any overly loud background music at all, and for those final moments in each room we were purposely prevented from leaving until it was revealed. It's what forced us into the next scene. I was also in the back most of the time so I got touched the most, lol.

I thought the holy water scene was the cheesiest of the whole experience. I get what they were trying to pull off, but it would have been a thousand times better with an actual actor getting exorcised. I am, of course, assuming it is the same prop from park to park.

Never bothered venturing into the older haunts at Cedar Point; just ran out of time on our trip.

Minimal spoiler ahead...

So I was supposed to place the tape somewhere in the last room? Makes sense. They had just the one main prop placed to stop the scariness.

Loud music... Just to elaborate, The tour guides had mics and a hidden speaker under their clothes. The spooky sound effects and music was so loud, I couldn't hear the amplified actor.

The scene I remember the most being rushed through so fast that no one saw the effect except for me because I was the last one, was in a hallway where something huge reveals itself. There was a loud noise behind me, so I stopped and looked at it. It was really cool.

We were chased out of most of the rooms by what was revealed, which was very cool. But it still seemed like we were being rushed. There were a few times that a loud noise rushed us out, and I looked back to see what we were missing, and there was the scary thing that was supposed to be the thing rushing us out.

I see what they were trying to do, and it might be a lot better now that they have ran it a while. I bet it's really great when it is run as expected.

They should have had doubled the attraction and actors to get more people through. I think they would have made double the profit from it, and double the customer satisfaction. But what do I know?

The official sites for Kings Dominion, Dorney Park, Valleyfair, and Worlds of Fun have banners stating that haunted attractions will be included in admission for the remainder of the Haunt season.

No mention yet at the official sites for Cedar Point, Kings Island, Carowinds, or Canada's Wonderland.

Went to Scary Farm this past week, still one of the best. USF and KBF are the kings of Halloween. The screamsters at KSF are super aggressive, most of the zone monsters are sliders and the fog is always thick. I love the creativity in the mazes and the dedication this park has to this event. If you love Halloween you need to plan a trip to the theme park that started it all.

TimChat2:

The official sites for Kings Dominion, Dorney Park, Valleyfair, and Worlds of Fun have banners stating that haunted attractions will be included in admission for the remainder of the Haunt season.

Just one more piece of evidence that the people in charge are just flying from the seat of heir pants. If charging for the haunts was going well in these markets, I doubt they'd switch course now. Is putting a banner on their website going to be effective at getting the message out there? Will they do anything else to promote the change?

I wonder how bad the fall attendance is at these 4 parks. I have been tracking KD a bit (upcoming trip next weekend) but I haven't been following the other 3.

When they announced the additional costs, I had wondered what the impact would be at each park and if the one size fits all approach would work. Each market is unique. For KD having BG not charging for their haunted attractions probably made it a tougher sell (Pantherian being closed is not helping along with other factors).

With regards to the general public, I underestimated how big of a draw / importance the haunted attractions are.

Lastly, if the attendance is way down, now the top tier parks have to perform even more to cover the additional lost revenue. This merger just keeps getting better!

More people are flying by the seat of their pants than you probably realize. That said, I don't understand why Cedar Fair doesn't experiment with different pricing models at different parks. They could have introduced pay-for-haunts at Carowinds and not KD, or KI and not Carowinds, to see what the impact was. But noooo, let's do this chain-wide and then have to scramble.

See also pay-to-cut, season passes, etc., etc.

Just an anecdote, but the season pass situation is confusing as hell. My kid wanted to go to SFOT with a large group of friends over the weekend, so we decided to get her a pass since they all had one and, you know, it's cheap. Trying to figure out what we needed to buy to get her access to the haunts was ridiculous. The kids in the group all had a variety of passes, some with haunt access, some without, some with passes that listed haunt access but they couldn't actually get in when they tried. In the end, they didn't go to any haunts and just made it on a few rides because of the crowds.

It seems the parks that got the cost for mazes dropped were the ones that did not get The Conjuring. Kinda makes sense that not getting that new experience and also charging for the previous mazes failed to drive financials for those parks. So now they hope to get people in the gates for 3 weekends and get profit elsewhere. Will it work? Probably not.

It was a double edged sword- not only did these parks not get the revenue they were hoping for on maze admission, they also cannibalized skip-the-line revenue because no one was in line. They are hoping to pack the park again to recover that fright lane revenue that was straight profit.

The only issue is they have now converted the season maze pass they sold to a season maze fast lane. So less revenue gained there.

I wonder if they will give those who bought a season maze pass a refund, or a partial refund? Probably not. It really does seem like they are making it up as they go along.

LostKause:
I wonder if they will give those who bought a season maze pass a refund, or a partial refund? Probably not. It really does seem like they are making it up as they go along.

I am wondering the same thing.

What should be an easy, straightforward way for guests to experience parks and escape from the chaotic day-to-day world and technology has become a cluster. For years not charging extra for haunts, now charging for haunts, add on season passes for haunts, up-charge fees for certain haunts, back to not charging for haunts; seriously? People have CHOICES to experience Halloween elsewhere, especially knowing how insanely popular the parks are with great weather, and Six Flags mgmt is making the choice to go elsewhere easy for what could have been potential guests.

Yeah, when I said many people are flying by the seat of their pants, I was underestimating this situation. I’m not clear they have pants at all.

They gave the people who bought the season maze pass an upgrade to the season express maze pass. Not sure what they are doing about the season express maze pass other than probably saying you got what you ordered.

This was at Dorney and Kings Dominion from what I saw.