2027 Dining Plans

Related to the Membership thread, it now looks like the dining plans are undergoing a significant change for next year. Based on information on the Canadas Wonderland page, there will be 3 tiers of dining plans. The lowest tier is listed as 20 meals at your home park, the middle tier is 30 meals at your home park, and the highest tier is unlimited meals at all parks where your pass is valid.

I find the home park statement interesting, as if the lower tier dining plans will not be valid at all parks. Also, the price for the unlimited dining plan is listed as (limited time sale) $399.00.

Hopefully this this an indication that Cedar Flags is moving away from giving away the gate, and pricing plans appropriately. Of course, there is plenty of time to prove me wrong.

The howls from the Kings Island locals are going to be deafening

It’s almost as if someone read our threads and went, “damn, those nerds are right”

CW pricing was $110 for 20 meals, $160 for 30 meals, and $399 for unlimited meals. The time between has been cut to two hours rather than four as well and the top two plans offer double discount on additional qualifying food and beverage.

There definitely was some complaining including some from a guy who said he had visited 57 times so far this season and was at 77 meals. He's on pace for probably 150 meals so at that rate, even the $399 plan would be a good deal coming out to $2.66 per meal. Some of these people just have no business or economic sense.

I probably have everaged between 20 and 30 meals a season at the park for the past several years so one of the lower two plans still appeals to me. Having the meal plan not work at the other parks is mildly disappointing, but I get that they need to gain some incremental revenue out of power users of the passes. If they made me pay for parking at other parks (as I heard a rumor they actually do at Canada's Wonderland), I'd probably be annoyed, but I can live with this.

I honestly hope they do similar with the all season Fastlane products. Make them good at home park only and that way they can be priced appropriately for the park/market and you won't have thousounds of people showing up at CP to power ride with their cheapo all season Fastlane from the east coast. If you need Fastlane at another park when you go, the daily one is your optiion.

Was there any mention of the daily-use options (all day dining, etc.)?

Interesting. I went to the site to check the daily options, and all listings for 2027 are now gone........should have taken a screen shot

CreditWh0re:

The howls from the Kings Island locals are going to be deafening

"I understand, and we'll be sorry to see you go."

MDOmnis:

I honestly hope they do similar with the all season Fastlane products. Make them good at home park only and that way they can be priced appropriately for the park/market and you won't have thousounds of people showing up at CP to power ride with their cheapo all season Fastlane from the east coast. If you need Fastlane at another park when you go, the daily one is your optiion.

I keep saying that prices at the Prestige level just needs to be universal regardless of market. If I can access all parks, my location doesn't really matter at that point because I could hypothetically visit Cedar Point whenever I wanted. But that means a higher price. You may pay for a $599 FL+ on your pass with regional access, but if you want nationwide including Cedar Point, it's $999. Doesn't matter if your home park is Six Flags Over Texas.

If they want to price it higher than that, fine. But nationwide benefits shouldn't reflect local pricing.

Yea I don't think what you suggest would necessarily be bad and it would be pretty similar to what they're doing with the meal plans. Having a tier where the benefit is only for the specific home park offers them the opportunity to price them differently without any unfairness or outrage. And then bump up the price on the all inclusive offering and keep it the same accross the board. It doesn't hurt to offer something at a high price. Even if the majority of customers aren't interested, there will be a few takers.

They could do similar with Fastlane as they've done with the meals, but offer more localized pricing on the lower tiers. So CP all season would be $999. Maybe $799 at KI or Carowinds. Six Flags New England all season might be $399. But then the all parks option might be $1299. With food, most parks might be $110 for 20 or $160 for 30, but in SoCal, where everything is outrageously expensive, they could do $140 for 20 and $190 for 30 or something like that. $399 would remain the price for all inclusive.

The problem they face right now is it's hard to take back pricing power when they've conditioned markets to the cheap pricing for decades. In an ideal world, they'd ease into the pricing changes over a couple years to get where they need to be. Activist investors probably want it all in one shot, but doing too much too fast risks having a big dropoff in attendance and sales and making a bad situation worse.

MDOmnis:

I honestly hope they do similar with the all season Fastlane products. Make them good at home park only and that way they can be priced appropriately for the park/market and you won't have thousounds of people showing up at CP to power ride with their cheapo all season Fastlane from the east coast.

One of the screenshots I saw from Canada's Wonderland showed the 2027 All Park, All Season Fastlane with an asterisk stating it was "Not Valid for Cedar Point"

That's probably not the strategy I'd use, but at least they've seemingly identified that they have an issue with Fastlane being oversaturated at Cedar Point and are going to do SOMETHING to try to correct it. I think they went the wrong direction when they decided, after Ouimet left and Fisher came on as COO, to start treating CP the same as any other park. That was after several years of trying to move upmarket and sell the idea that CP was more of a resort destination with the Breakers renovation, additional campsites, promotion of the beach, etc. Then all of a sudden it flipped to, "All the other parks have a $99 or less Gold Pass, so why not CP?" Well, CP is a bit of a unicorn. It's more of a vacation destination than a local drop in for a couple hours kind of place near a big city. They have unique challenges in needing to market to a wider area, challenges to pull enough staff in, challenges with the weather that comes from their location. As a result of all these things, it's important to consider them when making decisions.