The Beach will offer discounts to passholders instead of refunds

Sounds good, but for me, if I bought a pass I can't use due to the park not opening, I feel I should be entitled to my money back. Or at least have the option of doing one or the other.

Judging from the comments in the article, I see Ohio's AG is likely to be very busy really soon.

Contact the Ohio Attorney Generals office to join in the complaint. You purchased a pass for use of the Beach Waterpark, Not Cincinnati zoo or Warren county YMCA.

Can't squeeze blood out of a turnip. Contact whoever you want, there's a reason they abruptly closed. If the money isn't there and the business is closed, where you fona get money from
?

Best bet would be to try filing a complaint with your credit card company (assuming you paid with a card). I doubt there's any other way to get money back out of this situation.

Ohio AG says they have 120 complaints thus far (last night). Doesn't sound like a whole lot, considering its an amusement park. I wonder just how many (or few) passholders the park had. Meaning how big of an issue is it really. (Not speaking from a moral sense of course)

Some smear campaign stuff has surfaced, like channel 9 reporting that the park's water had been cut off since January. (Yes I know pool water recirculates, but how ironic is it to have a water park with no water service).

Shame, really, but if they are that far under they can't cover basic utilities, the cold hard fact may be there is no money. I suppose if push comes to shove they can try to sell the assets, but who knows how far into debt they may be.

I guess who I really feel bad for are the passholders. Family of 4 pays $360 and now has really nothing for it. Now they can pay $200 more for the discounted Gold Passes to Soak City..

Reporting they can't pay the water bill is a smear campaign? Just sounds like reporting they can't pay the water bill to me.

Smear in that they didn't report it until the big news broke. I guess smear really refers more to the unsubstaniated tweets, facebook statuses, article comments etc alledging the place had safety and health violations.

Anyway, the article did mention some good points. One is that the park reports they sold about 8,500 season tickets, so we know what kind of volume we are talking.

More crucially, the park was being operated by some sort of management company. I wonder if that arangement is such that it isolates liability to just the management company. That way, the operator would have no liquifiable assets if they don't actually own the park, and the owner shouldn't be responsible for the actions of its tenant. Which boils down to, there just isn't any real recourse.

Typically management companies are not used for that purpose. The management company is acting as the agent of the principal (the park). So the park still would be on the hook to return the amounts paid by passholders. Unfortunately, its an unsecured claim against the park which would be paid along with other unsecured claims and after secured claims. I do not know that the financials look like for the park in terms of debt (unsecured/secured) and assets. But typically in these types of cases, there simply are not sufficient assets to pay all debt claims.