Now Six Flags "hates poor people?"

OhioStater:

Someone just posted this on the "In the Loop" Facebook page. Just for a walk down memory lane...

Wow. I don’t understand how they can continue to operate like this??

I guess this is why we get “no frills” service anymore. Sad. It’s why I spend most of my theme park money these days at Disney and Universal

OhioStater:

Here’s my receipt from my 2000 (yes not a typo, 25 years ago) pass.

*in walks the devil's advocate*

I have a few ideas, but am not sure how to frame them into a coherent post.

1. The year 2000. Wasn't this pretty much peak amusement park stuff - and close to peak CP?

2. In 2015, you could go to CP for $40 - so something fell off by then. If you go further back through time to that 2007 post referenced in that thread and do the math, that appears to be a 20% decrease between 2007 and 2015.

Based on the info in those posts the online gate at CP over time generally looks like this:

2000: $46
2007: $51
2015: $40
2025: $50

3. Chicken/egg. Are the parks forced to lower the gate because they're cutting the experience or are they cutting the experience because they're being forced to lower the gate?

4. There is no #4

5. The 'destination' parks (I mean Disney) don't seem to be having a problem keeping up with (or outpacing) inflation. Then again, the Disney machine has it's fingers in everything. There's a million reasons one could want to visit those parks (including the rite-of-passage/family ritual thing).

That's a lot heftier than the local (or even regional) park's list of "Come ride some rides for the day...and eat a corn dog too!"

6. It's interesting that the "come ride some rides" parks' pricing struggles (as perceived by the power vested in our collective braintrust) coincide with the rise of the internet (2000-ish) and later full-on-connected world smart phones brought. I still think they struggle to relevant to a kid who grew up in this always-connected world.

...or was the pricing fine then because we weren't online to complain about it? If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to complain about it...

This is where I just kind of stop. I don't have a summary. I think this room's perception of parks is skewed, I think what humans find entertaining is changing (or has changed to a degree), I think I'm kinda hungry, I think we might put the blame on the wrong end of the price/quality (aka Value) thing. I think a lot of stuff. Most of it would get me jailed at worst, studied at best.

Sometimes it's just not as simple (or as complicated) as we like to make it. I'm just going to quote myself from June 7, 2007 (6631 days ago):

"Which parks are being the best received? The ones that are gradually, steadily, persistently tacking on more and more dollars to the entry fee.

Which are people pissing and moaning about? The ones looking for additional revenue streams when the easy one (ticket price) is right there in front of them lying half dead in the sun."

So who knows?

Lord Gonchar:

Chicken/egg. Are the parks forced to lower the gate because they're cutting the experience or are they cutting the experience because they're being forced to lower the gate?

There is no uncertainly in my mind. The pricing bull****tery today is a direct result of the quantity of people who want to go to these parks declining since the late 90's. Not necessarily turnstile clicks, but unique humans. They never would have let off the gas if the demand was there.

The attendance is the attendance, we said that somewhere awhile back, you are not going to get much more by dropping prices through the floor. Figure out how to extract more from what you have to work with.

Questioning attendance and why people may not be going, as of the past decade or more there have been too many instances of gangs of kids causing trouble in parks, shootings in parking lots, and an overall degradation of the type of guest attending, especially at legacy SF parks. Is it typecasting people? Yes, but you can’t reverse negative trends if you ignore the impression people have about certain parks out there.

Of course the other trend for many years has been a consumer focus on unique experiences; Six Flags can’t compete given their static attractions that last decades and decades….unless they got smart and re-imagined certain attractions with newer technologies/trains/audio-visuals, etc.

Not to mention the greying of America with the drop in birth rate meaning that there are simply not as many families with kids, the prime market.

The successful parks (I’m going to lump in Herschunds with the Disneys/Universal) have expanded their market by creating demand from older guests. That means shows, special dining/drink festivals. SIX completly abandoning entertainment now is especially thick headed given the demographic headwinds.

Well, where to begin here. Let’s talk about static attractions. Six cannot compete because of static attractions that last decades? Have you ever been to either of the Disney properties? There are plenty of rides there that were built for opening day, or not too long after that still exist. For giggs I look up longest average waits too.
MK- Tron/Dwarves/Splash

Epcot- Guardians/Remy/Frozen

DHS- Slinky/Rise/RnR

AK- Avatar/Navi/Kilimanjaro

Whole lot of attractions on that list that aren’t exactly technical marvels.

What about declining birth rates? That is certainly been shown as a trend via population data. How much does it affect the parks? I suppose it depends on how much your park caters to that audience, and cedar flags does not strike me as catering to that audience. Why? Because kids can’t ride **** at their parks unless they are over 48 inches. They aren’t the only offenders. You know what parks I go to with my little one? Disney/Uni/Knoebels/Lagoon are some that come to the forefront of my mind where he can ride things. Knoebels requires 42 for Twister, for PTC individual lap bar trains, if he can ride safely there why can he not ride safely at every single park with a woodie with PTC trains with the same restraints? I can list a slew of other rides with the same arguments. You want more attendees, build more stuff with 36 inches minimums. Not 48, not 54. It can easily be done. But they don’t because they aren’t targeting families, they are targeting older kids and adults. I’ll agree with your statement about the old peeps too, they neglect a huge portion of the market.

Are you going to get shot in the parking lot? No, you aren’t, it’s statistically zero. Stop acting like an American all the time. Yes this country is fairly ****ty compared to many other countries in the world, but we still aren’t nearly as dangerous as everyone makes this place out to be. You aren’t walking around Gary Indiana at night, you are in the parking lot for the amusement park, set your expectations accordingly. Stop listening to the propaganda feeding this country so much.

This company is running parks without giving a shred of concern for what they want to achieve, market accordingly, build a range of experiences, give good food and cool souvenirs to buy, make it an interesting experience you can’t get elsewhere, focus on your history and your region, stop trying to blanket the same goods, services, and marketing to all the parks. It is not very hard, unless your interests aren’t exactly in growing your business and producing a top notch product. Then it is really hard.

TheMillenniumRider:

Are you going to get shot in the parking lot? No, you aren’t, it’s statistically zero. Stop acting like an American all the time.

Okay, but are you going to get cut, yelled at, bumped into, or disrespected in some other way? Probably. And maybe even by the staff.

Clipped from my trip report from Warner Bros. Movie World, Australia:

"Incidentally, there was a kids ride with very slow go-karts where the kids were free to drive around a mock town with intersections, rotaries, and traffic patterns. All the kids obeyed the traffic laws, were polite, and nobody crashed into each other. It was like if Bluey was real. My kid and I commented that if this were in America, it wouldn't take 5 minutes before they had to add all kinds of warnings, directions, and threats. 'This is why we can't have nice things.'"

On a semi-related note (mostly just because I don't want to write a trip report), just got back from a day at Kings Island and I was super impressed. Operations were phenomenal (well, aside from Drop Tower closing about 30 minutes into the operating day, and Windseeker and Invertigo never opening). Everything was running three trains and generally not stacking. Staff was friendly, policies were coherent and didn't impact the throughput of guests, the park was clean and looked good. In particular the three adult woodies we rode (Racer, Beast, Mystic Timbers) were all fantastically maintained. The only negative I could see (which didn't affect me at all) was at times, the Fast Lane ratio was incorrect and the fast lane was significantly longer than the standby queue. Like, on Banshee, we waited 20 minutes and I would estimate the Fast Lane wait was 45.

Also, Banshee and Mystic Timbers are probably best of their class and Orion was very good, but not Fury 325 good.

Kings Dominion has/had a driving course for children.

Here in Huntington, WV, we have something similar called Safety Town. Every school in the surrounding counties schedule a field trip there. Safety Town teaches more than just traffic rules to elementary school kids. They also teach kids to memorize their phone number and how to call 911 in an emergency, among many other things.

It's pretty close to Camden Park.

Is that unique to my area?

Kings Island might be as close to Disney as SF gets in terms of operations and catering to families. Their kids area is huge and always busy and the operations are almost always good these days.

Interestingly, KI is the most expensive (non-renewal) gold pass outside of Knotts, which is full-season and only $5 more than KI.

ApolloAndy:

Okay, but are you going to get cut, yelled at, bumped into, or disrespected in some other way? Probably. And maybe even by the staff.

The fact that this isn't official advertising copy from SF is a shame. A damn shame.

I mean, they changed their spokesperson from a fun-loving old dude to a grumpy supervisor …

There's a lot here, but here are the things that grabbed me...

Internet: Entire families can be seen heads down at WDW, when they're at WDW. I don't get it. I'm on a DCL cruise right now, and something funny happens even you charge for the Internet. People engage and are present. Mind you, I'm not sure how you get bored in either situation, but if people default to doom scrolling, what can compete with that?

Disney, and probably KI, engineer what Ouimet called "vacation DNA" in the interview I did with him. The idea is simple enough, to get people going as children, build the memories and association with fun times early. The risk now is that they might miss that opportunity, and tomorrow's adults aren't wired for that.

TheMillenniumRider:

What about declining birth rates? That is certainly been shown as a trend via population data. How much does it affect the parks? I suppose it depends on how much your park caters to that audience, and cedar flags does not strike me as catering to that audience. Why? Because kids can’t ride **** at their parks unless they are over 48 inches.

The parks report their height requirements differently, so data in the table below isn't exactly apples to apples, but it seems to me there is stuff for kids to do at the Cedar Flags parks.

There seems to still be a major disconnect between the Legacy Six Flags and Legacy Cedar Fair parks as far as operations, ride availability, capacity, etc.

Even with the cuts and dirt cheap passes, I'm still hopeful the old Cedar Fair culture will get passed to Legacy Six Flags parks in the next 3-5 years. I'm not as encouraged as I was a year ago, but I also don't see Cedar Point turning into a park that closes rides for no reason and runs one train on the rest*

*unless there is a brief rain shower in Port Clinton

I might be in the minority but in the couple of years prior to the merger, I really didn't think that there was much difference between the two chains.

For me, the experience was broadly comparable in terms of ride availability, operations, food and the like. 15 - 20 years prior that wouldn't have been the case, obviously.

attendance at these regional theme parks is declining in my opinion because they went after only two types of customers. Thrill riders and little children. And they continue to do so. While moderate type rides they had such as dark rides, transportation, rides, etc., that everybody could ride together many parks removed because they were too “boring.” They also cut their live entertainment.

if one markets there product to a minority of the population, and that minority is of a lesser age with lower disposable incomes, it’s just not a formula for growth

I can’t really think of any regional theme park that I would bring a friend to that doesn’t like thrill rides except maybe Busch Gardens Williamsburg And that park only has about 7 or 8 things, including the shows for non-thrill riders to do. Three great transportation rides and four or five live shows Dollywood and SDC DO well with a non-thrill riders because they have so many (although hokey) live shows. But even those park lack non-thrill rides for adults

Disney has so many attractions that every single member of the family can do together. I think that is one of the keys to the success of these parks.

TylerWS:

The parks report their height requirements differently, so data in the table below isn't exactly apples to apples, but it seems to me there is stuff for kids to do at the Cedar Flags parks.

I won't deny they have stuff, but most of it is little spinny stuff, rocking tugs, hampton rides, the 47th iteration of the crazy bus, etc. 36 inches is really hard, but I think 42 is worse because at that point kids want to do better rides, and the really cool rides don't open up most of the time until 48".

Cedar Point is a not a great park for families who want to do things together if your kid isn't at least 48" inches tall. This isn't headline news. Anyone with a child and goes there knows this. In those days we refer to as the "dark times", one parent lives in Planet Hell (a.k.a. Snoopy) while the other earns the Parent Swap token.

Then they built Forbidden Frontier which was absolutely incredible, and then added the boat-ride which was like a bonus add-on....

And then they flushed it all down the toilet.

When our kids were in that pre-48" territory, that's when we discovered and frequented Dollywood, BGW, and also when we made our trips to WDW.