Six Flags appoints Selim Bassoul as new CEO

Clearly the former CEOs a kitchen appliance company and an airline famous for treating its customers like cattle are the best options for a leisure company. (In retrospect, the latter sounds about right.)

If you were trying to design a company that was the perfect fusion of industrial appliances and a bottom-feeding airline, Six Flags is pretty much what you would end up with.

I have worked for Spirit Airlines for over 8 years.

From a purely financial standpoint, Baldanza did great things for Spirit. He got the ball rolling on turning them from an extremely small airline into the growth and profitability they have today. 8 years ago, under Baldanzas watch, there were 50 planes and today there are almost 170 and still growing. There were times when Spirit had shut off all of the hot water in their offices, that's how poorly they were doing. When he and Indigo Investments left Spirit they went to Frontier Airlines and grew them in the exact same manner.

From a customer service standpoint, he was horrible. There are multiple videos of him in Investment shows saying things like "nobody will care how bad we treat them, and we don't care how they feel anyways. They will continue to fly on us because we are so much cheaper." However, Spirit is no longer like this and is becoming more customer oriented. (It's a work in progress, obviously)

Personally, (and I know very little about financials) I think Baldanza knows how to make money by cutting costs, hiring the cheapest possible employees, and providing the lowest passible experience.

In other words, business as usual for Six Flags.

Such a shame to see them staying the course, especially with all that extra money (?) they are getting from memberships. My friend foolishly thought he was being cute when he spent like $240 on a Diamond Elite level pass (after I told him get the basic pass only). He really wanted that funnel cake. So we waited... right there by Whizzer, for 45 minutes to get his free nasty ass funnel cake. And man it looked nasty.

I keep hoping Cedar Fair would get ahold of some of the Six Flags parks. Hopefully something will happen someday and Six Flags will take a good look at thier service (and lack of training, low standards, etc.).

Schwarzkopf76 said:

I keep hoping Cedar Fair would get ahold of some of the Six Flags parks. Hopefully something will happen someday and Six Flags will take a good look at thier service (and lack of training, low standards, etc.).

Six Flags Worlds of Adventure would like a word on how that turned out...

But in all seriousness, I feel like the reports I have read (and the ones I trust) in the last 5 years or so paint a picture that several of the Six Flags parks have really made a sincere effort to improve the guest service experience. At the same time, it seems some Cedar Fair parks have struggled with delivering the overall guest experience when they have, historically, been a leader in that area.

Yeah, it's not all bad across the chain, despite the corporate approach to pricing. The reputation definitely varies, and frankly it's the usual wins and losses.

SFFT remains a gem of a park and is by far my favorite SF park. SFoT and SFoG while not as good as SFFT are still tolerable and parks i could see myself returning to in the future. I still haven’t made it to SFGAdv, my last big SF park. The rest of the chain, zero desire to go to.

^I haven't been to Great Adventure since 2006; it was that horrible a visit, haven't been back. The other parks, especially Magic Mountain, Texas and Georgia used to be dream parks, but something totally different now. Perhaps I'm biased to my home SF park, Great America. It seems to have the widest variety of family rides, coasters, has what seems like the best operation in the chain... so I always think it stands above the rest in the chain.

I have had good experiences at Great Adventure the last two years, although I will qualify that by saying they were very lightly attended days (two days when the temps approached 100F, and a third on the day after Labor Day - seriously not sure why they were open that day.) But in general the crews were pleasant to enthusiastic, just about everything was running, and the park was clean.

I went to SFDK yesterday and it was not great. Quite a few rides down (V2, Medusa), quite a few rides on one train (Joker, Kong), and generally lethargic ops for the crowd size. If I had paid and cared, I would have been frustrated. As it was, we got a ride on the kiddie coaster, scrambler, and boomerang in 1:45 and that was "fine."

Schwarzkopf76 said:

^Perhaps I'm biased to my home SF park, Great America. It seems to have the widest variety of family rides, coasters, has what seems like the best operation in the chain... so I always think it stands above the rest in the chain.

SFGAm should be my home park, but much like Gonch’s block with KI, I just do not enjoy SFGAm. It’s not the coasters they are solid, the theming isn’t bad too, but the sum of all its parts is somehow less then it’s individual parts. Everytime I go I just feel like I should be having more fun then I am. So a lot of my coaster trips start with me waving to SFGAm from 94 as I drive to CP, or Dollywood, etc.

That is how I have felt about Busch Gardens Tampa forever. It's a little more than an hour door to door and I am closing in on nearly six years since I have visited. Meanwhile I have done plenty of trips out of state in that time frame.

ApolloAndy- That was “fine”?!? Sounds like a waste of time to me, whether you paid or not.

Meh. I got to hang out with my kids and it was my 10 y.o.'s first ride on a boomerang. It is literally on the way to where we were going (same exit off the highway), so the only cost incurred was the (long-ass) walk from the parking lot to the front gate and back. For 3 rides, that's "fine."

Touchdown said:

Schwarzkopf76 said:

^Perhaps I'm biased to my home SF park, Great America. It seems to have the widest variety of family rides, coasters, has what seems like the best operation in the chain... so I always think it stands above the rest in the chain.

SFGAm should be my home park, but much like Gonch’s block with KI, I just do not enjoy SFGAm. It’s not the coasters they are solid, the theming isn’t bad too, but the sum of all its parts is somehow less then it’s individual parts. Everytime I go I just feel like I should be having more fun then I am. So a lot of my coaster trips start with me waving to SFGAm from 94 as I drive to CP, or Dollywood, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's good as a Six Flags park, but I have driven past it quite a few times for Little Amerricka in Wisconsin. I told a friend back in August (who likes parks and hadn't been for a while) "We can go to Great America or Little Amerricka; Great America has the big coasters but we will probably have more fun at Little Amerricka." We went and he loved it.

Bay Beech is also stellar, but further up in Green Bay. Years ago, we'd drive to Mt. Olympus in the Dells, but that's a waste now. Isn't Mt. Olympus one of the few parks operating with lower standards than Six Flags' parks?

Six Flags isn’t as bad as it was in the early 2000s to the early 2010s. I wish they would do more to paint rides and improve infrastructure, and maintain it, instead of just blowing the budget to revamp an area with a new ride. CF has been doing the smaller consistent infrastructure and cosmetic upgrades for a while and it’s been nice.

having said that, I can’t tell much difference in park ops from either company any more. Granted, I have Diamond Elite for SF so I usually get Flash Pass and I often get Fast Lane if warranted at CF parks.

But operations across both chains are lacking. And let’s add in SWP too. Especially when I go to parks like SDC and Dollywood and the food is good, op’s are great, parks look amazing, rides are top notch. And most of the complaints from the previous three are pre-covid.

Have you seen what they're doing at Fiesta Texas? Not just the new dive coaster, but the new front gate and exactly the kind of general renovation mentioned above.

Six is doing a significant amount of paint and cosmetic changes headed into 2022. They did a sponsorship deal with a paint company, and even hired a person in their corporate office just to manage ride painting.

V2 - SFGAM (Retheme to Flash)
Batman- SFMM
Tatsu- SFMM
Great American Scream Machine- SFOG
Mr. Freeze- SFOT
Boomerang- SFFTL
Bizzaro- SFGADV (Retheme to Riddler)

Tekwardo said:

But operations across both chains are lacking.

The last time I was at Cedar Point, Raptor was consistently stacking three trains and it hurt my heart.