Cedar Point Announces Fast Lane On Facebook

You could end up with all of the Fast Lane users in the same queue while another is empty.

It was quite busy for sure, but it was still a pre-season Saturday in the park. I can count on one hand the number of times I have been to CP on a Saturday, so I don't have the best basis to judge one Saturday against another.

I do know that there were a lot of school bands and choirs, but I didn't see them with fastlane wristbands.

I agree they are selling too many wristbands for this to be effective. Actually limiting them would keep the fastlane lines short and have less of an impact on the regular queue. I know they say they are "limited" but since this is a low tech system that you can purchase every where you turn around, I don't see how it can be.

I have always been against pay to cut in line systems at parks. I always used the Freeway when it was offered but disagreed with that too. I always felt bad when you walk in front of someone who has already been waiting two hours or more in line.

DaveStroem said:

I know they say they are "limited" but since this is a low tech system that you can purchase every where you turn around, I don't see how it can be.

It'd be incredibly easy to sell X number of wristbands a day and keep track of that. Seems they need to reduced the number further (either through pricing or just a hard limit) and find a better way to spread the users more evenly between all the available rides.

I mean, of course there's a demand for MF ot TTD. When some of the offerings are things like Corskcrew, Giant Wheel and Antique cars, obviously the demand is going to be higher at the marquee attractions.

Why does Cedar Fair seem to have such a hard time with this concept?

Lord Gonchar said:

Why does Cedar Fair seem to have such a hard time with this concept?

Years of having a Dinosaur steering the bus.

I could see having a fastlane card that would be punched each time you go through the fastlane queue. Maybe 10 rides for $20 with one lap each on the marque rides. When your card is punched, buy another.

It seems to me that they need to sell it at a higher cost (I thought it was too cheap from the start) and cap it lower. Right now it sounds as if they're not capping it at all.

I don't think an artificial hard cap is ever the right solution because it means you're leaving money on the table across the board. If you have decent data to draw from, you should be able to anticipate sales volume at a given price point and set it so that it caps itself at the number you want.

Of course, this is assuming you're willing to adjust the price point on a daily basis.

In terms of a "you just get to use a different line," what advantage does that have over the Six Flags implementation? Like Gonch, I'm much more interested in not having to wait in line than I am in getting on a ride faster, but this system does neither.

They should've left well enough alone and advertised the VIP experience more. That was priced to the point of not having an impact on the regular line. If you want to skip the hour long lines pay the high dollar, not this 30-50 dollar BS! I never heard any complaining about it on here or at the park. Plus you couldn't marathon.

"The VIP experience is too expensive", well, there's the entrance, get in line!

People will abuse this system because they can, there is nothing stopping them.

Well, nothing except the 40 minute line of people in front of them.

Lord Gonchar said:

For me it's more about not standing around in line, I'd rather pay to wait the same as everyone but do it elsewhere than pay to wait in a shorter line.

But why wait at all? Isn't the best system to ride what I want to ride when I want to ride it? Why do you want to wait at all?

Shades said:

But why wait at all? Isn't the best system to ride what I want to ride when I want to ride it? Why do you want to wait at all?

Which is why I finished the thought with:

"Ideally you buy both - again Q-bot wins."

The point was that if I'm buying one or the other, I usually feel like I'm buying the priviledge of not standing in line. Sometimes that involves a wait, sometimes it doesn't.

Buying no wait rides is a different offer altogether. That's great too, but I'm fine with just the 'no line' package being offered.

In this case, it seems you're buying neither...

...as long as you want to ride MF or TTD, of course...my guess is the same purchase would have gotten a ton of rides on Corkscrew or Gemini or Mean Streak. Which brings up another potential angle - shouldn't this sort of be self regulating? Perhaps the expectations were that people wouldn't be dumb enough to spend $50 to stand in a 40 minute line and that supply-and-demand among the Fast Lane users would spread the Fast Lane users between rides a little more evenly.

Who knows? There's tons of angles on this. All I know is that something is broken (prices, number of wristbands, people's attitudes, something) when you pay $50 to physically stand in a 40 minute line. Who does that?

I was surprised that it looks like Fast Lane pricing is the same at all CF parks and they weren't charging more for parks like Cedar Point. With Six Flags, a park like Great Escape is $45 for unlimited Flash Pass (or whatever they call it there) access with no waiting like Fast Lane but at Great Adventure $45 is for a regular Flash Pass for 1 person with Platinum $120 for 1 person. They probably should have charged less at parks like Michigan's Adventure and more for Cedar Point (at least $75). I have been to Dorney twice and haven't seen a single person using Fast Lane.

OK. I missed the Q-bot perspective.

I don't think the self regulating thing works, at least not in the beginning of the year. The park advertised that for $50 I can skip the lines. That is what I would fully expect. Now as time goes on and people stop buying this thing because of Fast Lane lines then yes it will regulate.

At least the Fast Lane people got something for their money. They only waited for 40 minutes instead of 75-90 minutes. That has to be worth the $50 they paid:P

Time of year shouldn't matter. What they advertised shouldn't matter.

If I paid $50 for the wristband, I simply would not stand in a 40 minute line. I can't believe that aspect doesn't fix itself.

Or maybe it says a lot about the true value of thses things. $30-$50 to cut the line from 120 minutes to 40 minutes is a fair value to these customers.

If that's the case, it has potential to get WAY uglier than what the VQ/FOL haters already complain about.

But I don't think the self regulation works the way they want it to here.

You don't want to lose customers because "We paid to skip the line and now we have to wait 40 minutes anyway" when what you really want to be selling them is skipping the line on everything but MF and TTD.

In short, you could generate happier customers and probably sell more wristbands if they didn't work on MF and TTD at all and stated such right off the bat.

Or they could just use Lo-Q and solve all these problems that have been solved for 10 years.

The people distribution at Cedar Point with Fast Lane is the same as the distribution was before Fast Lane, and it isn't going to change any time soon. The biggest reason for this is the park's extremely long layout and the resulting flow of guests throughout the park, as well as the placement of the park entrances. If they thought distribution would magically change because of Fast Lane and help even things out, I could have told you way back when it was announced that it wasn't going to work. In fact, I don't think anything short of drastically rearranging where the majority of your guests enter the park can ever change it, so the lines (especially at MF) aren't exactly a surprise, and there's nothing they can do short of limiting the ride's availability to alleviate the issue.

Simply raising the price or lowering the amount distributed is really kind of foolish and leaves money on the table (which they don't want, and really don't need to do), because the same thing is going to happen with less people; they're all going to end up seeming to pool at MF and TTD.

The only fix is to limit these two (and probably as a result, Maverick, as the end result will likely have people more willing to walk back there), and its pretty impractical to do so with the cheap wristband system.

EDIT: Or do what Andy suggest and make them invalid for MF and TTD, although I suspect that would artificially increase Maverick's demand and just shift the problem to another ride. After Maverick, though, I don't see much of a "pooling" problem with the rest of the rides. And that might be the biggest flaw of the entire system; those are the only three you would ever really "need" a VQ system for in the first place, because all the other rides and future rides will follow the same line time/people distribution as the park has always experienced (i.e. Raptor has no line or a negligible one by about 2 or 3, back of the park stuff doesn't see lines until about 1 or 2, and they're gone again by about 5 or 6). And that situation doesn't lend itself to a "need" for VQ if you ask me

maXairMike said:

If they thought distribution would magically change because of Fast Lane and help even things out, I could have told you way back when it was announced that it wasn't going to work. In fact, I don't think anything short of drastically rearranging where the majority of your guests enter the park can ever change it, so the lines (especially at MF) aren't exactly a surprise, and there's nothing they can do short of limiting the ride's availability to alleviate the issue.

I'm not suggesting overall traffic patterns would change, I'm suggesting that the money being paid would change Fast Lane users behavior. Perhaps I'm giving too much credit.

I'm having a hard time understanding choosing to stand in 40 minute line and paying for the right to do so. I would think that would be enough of a deterrent to move people to other Fast Lane lines and disperse crowds using the wristbands better. Hence my comment that I would have expected this sort of situation to be a bit more self-regulating.

The more I think about it, the more I think it may be a pretty solid statement on what the reduction in wait times is worth to guests.

Lord Gonchar said:

I'm having a hard time understanding choosing to stand in 40 minute line and paying for the right to do so. I would think that would be enough of a deterrent to move people to other Fast Lane lines and disperse crowds using the wristbands better.

I think it would lead to less people buying the wristband in the first place, which is a lose-lose.

ApolloAndy said:I think it would lead to less people buying the wristband in the first place, which is a lose-lose.

Definitely. Let's be honest, the main motivators behind the sale of Fast Lane right now are 3 rides, anything and everything else is just gravy. Most people see it as a way to ride those 3 rides more often and immediately, and that's pretty much it. There's nothing to the system that would suggest to people that it's anything but that, which is far different than Lo-Q implementations from what I understand of that system.

I doubt anyone bought the pass expecting to wait 40 minutes. That expectation was not set.

Capping doesn't leave money on the table if its absence leads to pissing people off enough that they don't return. Agreed that a high enough price finds a sweet spot, providing value for those who buy it, without harming the experience for non-buyers and providing the "revenue enhancement" the park seeks.