Queues - improving the guest experience.

Two Dragon Wagons...man, that would be nice. Would there be two campgrounds?

Of course. One would be men only, though.

Raven-Phile said:

My park will just build 2 of every ride. I'll allow standby lines at one, and fast pass on the other.

That'll solve it.

Spoken like a Disney-phile whose been on Space Mountain and Primeval Whirl... ;~P

Yeah! And you could even build two hote...oh, wait. Never mind.

You know I'm gonna...

LostKause said:

At Hersheypark last year and this year, I noticed the staff filling roped off seats with the stand-by line when they were not being filled with FOTL access patrons. I had little reason to complain about it because of the way they were doing it.

That changes it entirely. If the roped off row gets filled when no preferred guests is there to use it, then there is no capacity downside.

I don't care about merge points, because the stand-by line is going to have to wait longer anyways. Even if they don't know it is happening, it is. They are still getting less rides for their money than those who pay for the privilege to cut in front of them.

Yep. But it works so many other places in life and people seem to be totally ok with different levels of access as long as the ugly is as hidden as possible, that's why it's odd that the parks haven't tried harder to make it more seamless.

The whole reason I hate this stuff is that the parks have preached that line-cutting is against the rules for so long, and then they figured out that they could just let people pay to be allowed to cut, and it would somehow be okay.

I think it's weird that you still equate preferred access with line cutting. You're stuck in the POP mentality. People our age pretty much grew with with POP as the norm. In the big picture (and if you extrapolate into the future), POP will be a funny idea that parks used around the turn of the millennium.

There's a huge difference between line cutting and preferred access. Everyone is still waiting their respective turn for the service they purchased.

I hate what Lo-Q has done to the industry.

As an enthusiast, a fan of the business and a person with more than a passing interest in hospitality and the industry of making people welcome and happy - I think it's a total game-changer that's been nothing short of exciting and fun to watch and experience.

As a guest or customer of the park I don't mind it one bit because it's really helped me out the few times I've had to use it and when I don't the effect on me is so negligble that I can't imagine being worked up about it.

I'll try not to add any more to this conversation because my views about it make so many people here so angry for some reason. :)

Oh totally. When I read your post I let out a primal, gutteral scream and put my fist through the wall. Then I called my wife and screamed, "WHY!? WHY!?" for several minutes before hanging up on her and grounding one of my kids for no reason. After that I did breathing excercises and tried to calm down and talk myself out of driving to West Virginia to personally find you. After about two hours in the car, I realized how silly I was being, turned around, and posted this reply as soon as I got home.

So yeah, I'd appreciate if you quit making me do that.

Build two of everything. Disney just did this in their New Fantasyland at WDW. They relocated the original Dumbo and added a second one, creating the "Dueling Dumbos". The lines were always long for the old ride. The hourly capacity was stated as 570 guests per hour. But, this was nearly impossible to achieve.

A few parks added a second log flume during their prime. Any other instances where the park added a second nearly-identical ride to boost capacity? (ie. not built at the same time, but after-the-fact)

Boasting capacity would be a great way to "improve the guest experience".

LostKause said:

They are still getting less rides for their money than those who pay for the privilege to cut in front of them.

Are they? If you pay $40 and get 10 rides, while I pay $100 and get 20 rides then who's getting fewer rides for their money?

I'd be interested to know how many attractions, on average, a "regular" guest gets versus a fastpass guest. If they're paying more than double what you are and not doubling their rides, then I'd say you're still getting the better deal.

(Assuming you base enjoyment on rides per dollar, which seems to be inferred here.)

Or perhaps another way of looking at it:

If you used to pay $40 for 10 rides and now pay $40 for 8 rides, is that any different from them increasing the price for 10 rides to $50. I doubt you'd care nearly as much if they just raised the price.

Lord Gonchar said:

LostKause said:

At Hersheypark last year and this year, I noticed the staff filling roped off seats with the stand-by line when they were not being filled with FOTL access patrons. I had little reason to complain about it because of the way they were doing it.

That changes it entirely. If the roped off row gets filled when no preferred guests is there to use it, then there is no capacity downside.

I still disagree. When loading FoL guests from the exit ramp, it almost always mean the air gates are held for the 45 second it takes the exit ramp guests to take their seats. The load cycle ends up taking almost 50% longer when you have to load from two different places in serial.

Every pay-to-cut scheme is different, with different prices and different amount of rides allowed.

ApolloAndy said:

I still disagree. When loading FoL guests from the exit ramp, it almost always mean the air gates are held for the 45 second it takes the exit ramp guests to take their seats. The load cycle ends up taking almost 50% longer when you have to load from two different places in serial.

Yes, in the most technical sense.

At this point you're delving a little further into what I see as the minutiae than I care to. There's still bigger, broader issues that need worked out with these systems. I'm not willing to jump to the fine-tuning stage quite yet.

On paper, filling unused preferred seats with stand-by guests eliminates the waste created by using the roped-off approach in the first place. That was the greater point. That fact that the roped-off approach is broken is other ways is a separate issue.

kpjb said:

Are they? If you pay $40 and get 10 rides, while I pay $100 and get 20 rides then who's getting fewer rides for their money?

I'd be interested to know how many attractions, on average, a "regular" guest gets versus a fastpass guest. If they're paying more than double what you are and not doubling their rides, then I'd say you're still getting the better deal.

(Assuming you base enjoyment on rides per dollar, which seems to be inferred here.)

Yes, and if price/rides=value then why do we assume everyone gets the same number of rides in any given day to begin with? Because that's just not true.

Two people in the park on the same day at the same times will do vastly different things and experience the park in totally different ways - including the number of rides.

The whole argument is broken from the start becasuse it assumes the system was already 'fair' (fair in the sense that the value is in the number of rides and that we all get the same number of rides) - and it was anything but.

Everybody wasn't getting an equal number of rides for the same price before upcharge access.

kpjb said:

I'd be interested to know how many attractions, on average, a "regular" guest gets versus a fastpass guest.

I'm happy to contribute my part to this discussion. I went to CP a few weekends ago on a Saturday. We knew it was going to be packed to the gills, so we pondered getting a FastLane.

We wound up doing it, and for my $75, I took less rides than I probably would if I went around and waited in lines, but you know what? I had WAY more fun.

I went and got a coke freestyle, walked around and drank that for a bit, looked at some ducks and birds, ate a nice lunch, took a whole bunch of iPhone photos and generally just played around. Why? Because I didn't spend the whole day in lines, so when I wanted to ride, I knew I could basically get right on-ish (give or take 15 minutes, but that's better than 2 hours).

Less time in line, more time in the shops, restaurants, and sightseeing. I figured out that I spent roughly $15 a ride or so, but my day was smooth sailing so I didn't care.

The secret sauce of Dumbo isn't the dual ride, it's the air conditioned playground in the queue with pagers to let you know when it's your turn to ride.

Raven-Phile said:

We wound up doing it, and for my $75, I took less rides than I probably would if I went around and waited in lines, but you know what? I had WAY more fun.

To me, that's a waste. I have fun even when I'm waiting in lines, because I'm with friends and we like to make fun of the fat/ugly/fat ugly people around us in line. We also talk about other stuff lol. But if we had the fastpass we'd get on way more rides.

To me, on that particular day, that wasn't a waste. I got to ride the flat rides that I usually pass on if they've got a wait, like MaxAir and Windseeker, because I basically just walked up and waited one cycle.

It's really the best of both worlds. You get all the experiences of a dead day in the park, while getting to people watch on a busy day.

I can see the rationale in still buying Fastlane even if you aren't going to ride many rides. Some people aren't the power-riding type, and I hadn't even considered the value of it for reasons other than increasing ride count.

If anything, that goes back to how the value of a visit for some people isn't the number of dollars per ride, as much as I might need it to be to justify some of my arguments against the current setup. ;)

My one time using FlashPass was at Great Adventure in '06. I used it on El Toro and Kingda Ka, one time each, and it was absolutely worth the price.

I know there have been many threads on this in one form or another, but I just saw something that I had never seen before.

I happend to look up Splish Splash (Long Island) - a waterpark I had hoped would be open this weekend - but will not be.

I saw a video for thier H2Go pass that was mostly loaded with the expected information and usage directions. The one thing that I found "interesting" was that on the video a line was stopped by a person holding a rope and a goup of H2Go users coming to the front - showing the pass and being moved along the way. The reactions from the people on the long line were akin to - "Ok, it's ok, just go on ahead of us. It's alright."

I never saw a scenario like that on a video and I'm sure it's not as appreciated in practice. (I have not been there since they started using the system.)

Just a thought.

I can only speak to the day I was there and it was working smoothly no empty cars were being dispatched they were filling them from the regular line