Lightning Rod Officially Getting the Chain Lift Treament

Suckville

Ritchie Richland
If you have to ask, you can't afford it.

PhantomTails:
not a ton of people do them, except at Cedar Point

You've not been to a Six Flags park recently. On most of the Six Flags coasters, one car tends to be reserved for Fast Pass riders depending on the ride. I'd argue that somewhere between 15 and 25% of the capacity is gobbled up by fast pass on many days.

LostKause:

If some of you ran an amusement park, it would be Six Flags.

FTFY

Trust me, you're not getting into, let alone enjoying, my park for SF prices.

SFMM is selling a season pass good for the rest of 2023 and all of 2024 for $99. I couldn't even get a one-day ticket into Disneyland for that little when I was in California last month.

Gonchy World will absolutely follow Disney's pricing lead.

I bought a one day bring-a-friend ticket to Six Flags Great America last month for $9.99. I went with a fellow CoasterBuzz friend. The park wasn't busy, capacity was fine, and I had a pretty good time. It was worth way more than ten bucks.

Demon was not open, and the train closed early, but still...

First time there. Pretty fun visit.

I suspect Gonchland would not be as good as an experience as Six Flags. LOL I'll say it again... A customer not standing in line is a customer spending money at the gift shops and food stands. A Happy customer spends even more money. A good experience causes repeat vi$its. I thought this was common sense, but I guess not. (Shrug)

That depends on which option you buy:

Admission $149.95
Admission plus Enjoyment: $209.95

LostKause:

I suspect Gonchland would not be as good as an experience as Six Flags. LOL

Are you serious? Having never met the man and not having a clue what kind of imaginary rides will be at his imaginary park, I know for a fact that I would have the option to pay $1,000+ for a simple two or three day ticket. And he would absolutely create an experience worth that price. While also creating a darn good experience if I chose the $400 option.

Gonch - the name means quality.

And, holy crap, we've totally outdone ourselves here with where the line of conversation has gone.

I accept the nomination. How soon can we get me some real power around here?

LostKause:

A customer not standing in line is a customer spending money at the gift shops and food stands.

This isn't what happened---at least, it's not what happened at Disney. When you go back and look at their reported results, there is no big jump in per-capita spending that happened when Fastpass (the first, free one) was deployed. People don't buy a second lunch because they are not in line. Mostly, they get in another physical line when they are in virtual line somewhere else.

You know what did bump up their per-captia spending by a nice chunk? Charging for it.

Ah yes, the line skip passes, so I was wondering something about them a few weeks back. Does the existence of the line skip passes incentivize the park to have slower ride ops? I was standing in line at Hershey, and the regular lines for quite a few rides were pushing 45-60 mins and often the paid line cutting was about 15-20 mins for those very busy rides, some were less. Now, if ops were faster they could get the whole lot of both lines through in the same 45 mins easily, maybe even sooner. I think back to 2001 CP when a 45 min wait on Millennium filled almost all of the waiting area save for the last one by the overbank. I doubt today that they would clear the amount of queue in a similar time. I also don't even get music to listen to like we used to.

If those ride ops were hustling at Hershey, would anyone actually pay for the line skip? Or is it because they have slowed the normal lines to a crawl that everyone pays, could we conceivably get to a point where the only way to enjoy the park is to pay extra for something that not that long ago did not exist?

Is this a case of things used to be better back in the day?

I don’t think it’s that nefarious. I mean, nobody at Hershey is telling employees that they’re required to slow things down because Pay-to-Cut revenue is experiencing a downturn, and if numbers are met they can look forward to a nice chocolate pizza party as a thank you.
Employees don’t care. They get their ten hours in regardless of throughput. The only one who might care is the loader who bears the brunt of complaints as they turn standby riders aside while they load FL customers and still it’s not a reason to intentionally slow down operations.

Hershey ride ops weren't hustling 20 years ago. Cedar Point ops would still be tied up with IROC nonsense, even if they didn't have Fastlane. WDW & UO still have the fastest ops in the industry, even with paid line skipping.

Knoebels would like a word, phoenix was ripping through trains in roughly 45 seconds.

Interesting. I wonder is a cable lift could accomplish the same general "speed up" behavior that the LIM's provided, though I don't know if there has been a coaster with a cable lift which has not engaged the cable directly in the station. But, I could also see a nice red, yellow, green light sequence starting at the bottom of the hill.

El Toro goes around a curve and then engages with the cable lift.

With that said, I really don’t think a cable lift adds much value but adds a ton of complexity which is probably why even Intamin seems to have moved on. The chain lifts on B&M gigas are pretty damn fast.

Walt S:

I wonder is a cable lift could accomplish the same general "speed up" behavior that the LIM's provided

I've got an idea--they could use hydraulics!

/s

Weren’t the cable lifts used because they couldn’t achieve the incline at the time with chain?

SD2K has a split chain if i recall because they couldn’t run one due to weight?

what changed with chains?

Cedar Point ops would still be tied up with IROC nonsense, even if they didn't have Fastlane.

I was there Friday on Labor Day weekend and SV, VR, and GK beat the stack clock almost every time. Obviously, it helps that SV and VR are the only coasters with the timer and open restraint screen on the platform.

And WildMosue was 15-20 all day long, and rolling.

Only Maverick having typical Intamin launch issues and MF having just a slightly overzealous seat belt and bar check speed were the only slowish ops I saw all day.

The Steel Vengeance crew was the fastest I've seen in probably a decade, although they greatly benefit from having no loose articles whatsoever to deal with.

I doubt parks intentionally tell their ride operators to slow down. But it's possible that they intentionally refrain from telling them to hustle. Park management can make adjustments until they find a sweet spot between guest satisfaction and profit. But what if they lose focus on what the majority of their customers expect?

I suppose Dollywood understands that capacity is important to guest satisfaction, and this is why they are spending even more money to allow for their most popular coaster to run with more than one train.