Why Do We Give Parks a Pass on Customer Service?

Six Flags isn't ALL hopeless...I noticed on my last trip that not only did the ride ops for Rolling Thunder (of all rides) yell out fun things to riders getting ready to dispatch, but the El Toro ride op was HILARIOUS ("dude, someone puked in that seat and you still SAT in it? Alright! You're hardcore!!"). The park was clean and the ride ops and security guards would talk to you when you talked to them...really wasn't bad. I get mad at the price gouging, but except for one snippy food service clerk, things were actually quite pleasant. I wonder if it's just that certain parks are declining in the Six Flags chain. I hope Cedar Point gets better...I'm planning a trip out there hopefully for this summer, so if it's gonna be a miserable experience....I guess I'm in the forgiving category for at least ONE trip out there. After that, who knows if I'll ever go again.

If anybody wants to see a GREAT example of customer service, I'd look no further than my local Red Wing shoe store. I went in last week to buy a new pair of boots, and the guy behind the counter (Joel) took the time with me to get EXACTLY what I needed.

There are good amples of CS out there, just not in the parks.

Or how about REI Outfitters who has a no questions asked return policy.

It think it's funny how a bunch of people have said "This park has horrible customer service I'm never going there again. But I went last year. Or I'm going back this year to see if it still sucks." That is exactly why parks can have terrible service, because people keep going back.

I've never experienced customer service bad enough to make me vow never to return to the park. In other industries, yes. Tire shops, mechanics, restaurants, plumbers, etc. But not parks. I simply love them too much to write them off, even the worst.

Last time I visited an SF park was last summer, when I went to SFKK. The staff was great. I was greeted by employees as I walked in. The folks at the restaurant where I had dinner were incredibly nice. Sure, there were a few mopey employees, but that's virtually inevitable. I don't expect every ride op or litter gitter to be Chatty Cathy.

Cedar Point's food service is simply an abomination. I try to eat or drink as little as possible in the park when I go. I know where every drinking fountain in the park is.

I've never been able to find the second drinking fountain. Where is it?

I do believe that the older you get the more you look to Customer Service as a reason to visit or not visit a park. Teenagers rarely care how they are treated. They just want cool rides with minimum hassle. They start getting hassled and then they might not go.

When you get a little older you start looking at the entire experience, especially when you have children. If you have to fight with the people to get your stroller and then fight with the food guy while your child is screaming up a storm and then fight with some other employee because they can't tell you where the nearest restroom is, then you are going to look at things negatively.

My last trip to Six Flags were bad in that I already came into the park in a bad mood after shelling out a ton of cash just to park my car and then found out that the only way to get more than two or three rides in during the entire day was to pay a hundred more bucks for a q-bot. (Lines @ SFGAm are always horrible. Capacity issues there are a SERIOUS problem) Then I see the ride ops moving slowly on the platform, taking their time loading trains, stacking trains, not having enough trains running on a busy day, and it goes down hill. Then I see security doing nothing about hooligan kids terrorizing the park. (Get off my lawn!) It all adds up.

Compare that with my last trip to Disney where I was greeted with a smile by almost every cast member on the resort. I had the option of fastpass for free to make some of my waits shorter, not that the waits were bad, because there were enough attractions and each attraction was run extremely efficiently. I had several cast members there go out of their way to make our visit magical.

Because of that, I flew to two separate Disney resorts a total of four times in the past three years versus three total visits to Six Flags parks, only two of which was to my local Six Flags park and the other was to one that was in danger of closing (and is now under new ownership). Mind you, all four of those visits to Disney were multi-day visits on top of it.

Add to that a HORRIBLE experience at Mount Olympus on my last visit and now I am running out of local parks to visit!

I do believe that the older you get the more you look to Customer Service as a reason to visit or not visit a park. Teenagers rarely care how they are treated. They just want cool rides with minimum hassle. They start getting hassled and then they might not go.

Funny how that happens once you stop spending mom & dad's money and start spending your own! ;)

Having visited Cedar Point every year for the past 31 years, I can say that fir every "bad" experience I have had CS wise, I have probably had 5-6 exceptional experiences.

In fact, this season, I would have to argue that there is a significant observable improvement across the board. There have been more frequent 1) ride ops "playing with" the crowds, which has been less frequent the past couple seasons (in my experience), 2) more friendly "just outside the entrance" employees; the past few years the guy/gal has looked comatose.

Personally, I care extremely about CS and where I go for anything. We write letters about both good/bad experiences and always get a reply both ways from Cedar Fair.

---

Went last season for the first time in a very long time and was ever more scorned by their arrogant customer relations staff.

---

"Ever more scorned?" I would love to hear "your side of the story" on how you were "ever more scorned" by customer relations.

---

Now with their auction of the real Geauga Lake, I've sworn off the place indefinately until they replace the top brass and get some soul back in their heartless, greedy boardroam.

---

And here we learn the true nature of your negative attitude towards Cedar Fair.

Some people still live under the illusion that Cedar Fair isn't a business. Anyway...

After reading Moosh's earlier post, it occurs to me now that it has been nearly five years since I've been in a Six Flags park. I gotta tell you, that even surprises me. But I suppose the negatives added up enough that I lost faith in the brand as a whole.

Cedar Point is far from being a total write-off, and operations in particular are night and day with Spehn back at the helm. But I can't for the life of me understand why the guy who runs foods (the counter service stuff at least) wasn't canned years ago.

I still think that there's a cause-and-effect relationship between poor service and the cultural tolerance for it. Business adjusts to just barely get by, and I can't entirely blame the business side of that. You have to really suck to epic proportions before it really harms the business. Cable TV did that in the 90's, which is why we have DirecTV as a viable competitor, and now the phone companies.

---

Jeff said:
...it occurs to me now that it has been nearly five years since I've been in a Six Flags park. I gotta tell you, that even surprises me. But I suppose the negatives added up enough that I lost faith in the brand as a whole.

Cedar Point is far from being a total write-off...

---

I find this interesting as (and I know you said Cedar Point, not Cedar Fair, but..) I think that in the past few seasons, the SF experience and the CF experience have gotten VERY similar.

I've been going to CP regularly since 1995. I started really hitting the different CF parks in 2002. I visited my first SF park in 2001 and have visited many of them since.

In the past few seasons, the experience at the CF & SF parks has become remarkably similar on all levels - the only difference is that one company is trending up and the other down to meet at this point. How long before either SF starts getting people back and showing them the improvements they're making or CF starts turning people off the way SF did for the first half of the decade? Or both?

---

You have to really suck to epic proportions before it really harms the business.

---

I couldn't agree more.

Don't even get me started about the guy who runs the food service at Cedar Point. He really doesn't give a crap about customer service at all. Go into the foods office sometime to make a very valid and nicely toned/worded complaint with a smile on your face and see what a jerk he is to you.

...At least that's the way it was when I worked at the park in '06.

Cedar Point's main problem with rude employees is that they are overwork and underpaid. Anyone who lives in crappy housing conditions and works 10-15 hours a day, 6 days a week with less than adequate break/meal times and grouchy Management has less of a reason to provide decent customer service, in my opinion.

It was very difficult to be pleasant, but I never lost my cool to a guest. Maybe it had something to do with the awesome ride I worked! PWE was much more laid back than the rest, but still required a certain skill to pull off.

It's called CUSTOMER SERVICE. IMO anyone who justifies treating the customer poorly for any reason (i.e. low pay, poor working conditions, the way they're treated by management...even the way the customer treats you!) isn't an employee who deserves to remain on staff.

Anyone who even in the worst conditions can't serve the customer with courtesy, respect, speed, and a smile needs to find a job outside the customer service sector.

Ultimately, Moosh, yes, you are correct; it comes down to the employee. That said, you cannot just dismiss what LK said and expect great customer service to just emerge in a vaccuum, and stay high all summer when the employees are treated worse than suspected terrorists held in Guat. Bay.

The conditions they live in at CP are horrid, and cust. service would be greatly improved by making some sort of investment in improving the living conditions for the workers; at least to a certain degree. *** Edited 6/27/2008 2:11:26 AM UTC by OhioStater***

---

Mamoosh said:
...IMO anyone who justifies treating the customer poorly for any reason...isn't an employee who deserves to remain on staff.

...needs to find a job outside the customer service sector.

---

That eliminates at least half of CP and SF's employees right there. lol.

Just to clarify, Moosh, I'm not justifying poor treatment of customers in any way at all. I am simply offering a point of view as to what ones reasoning may be not to care about their work performance.

I was a Team Lead at my ride and I although I understood my "Team"s frustration with working conditions and the unnecessary drama rolling down from management, I really tried to motivate them to be the best they could be. That was sometimes very difficult to pull off because I was fighting the dark mood management set each and every day.

Maybe the real question asked of the thread should be:

Why Do We Give Parks a Pass on Employee Relations? ;)

Seriously, if the parks treat employees this way and they keep going back, then the idea of customers returning seems downright logical and reasonable in comparison.

Maybe customer service, or lack thereof,is a bigger deal to many parkgoers than we think.

Maybe parks had the attitude a la cable companies or the early 90s. "What competition?" "The closest park to ours is hundreds of miles away." "Where else would people go, and what else would they do?" "They'll put up with whatever we give them."

Maybe the annual attendance problems aren't due only to weather issues, or competition from other forms of entertainment. Maybe if the parks got off their asses and acted like they gave a crap about the people coming through the gates, a day in the park would be considered a better choice than sitting in front of a game console all summer long.

---

RatherGoodBear said:
For most of the past 25 years, the economy has been humming, people have had a lot of cash to spend, and the population of the country has increased by tens of millions. There's no reason why attendance at the major theme parks (other than Disney) should have been basically flat for so many years. Maybe the poor service contributed to it.

---

---

RatherGoodBear said:
Maybe the annual attendance problems aren't due only to weather issues, or competition from other forms of entertainment.

---

Ok, I'll bite. This is kinda twofold. (or threefold or fourfold :) )

First off, I didn't know there was an attendance problem. I believe the actual numbers show industry-wide growth as far as attendance numbes go.

Secondly, I believe certain (many?) parks are flat because the market isn't infinite. There's a theoretically limit to how many people you can and will draw. Does anyone here really think that any of the North American regional parks - any of them - will ever pull in 4 million people? 5 million? 6 million?

No they won't. And I'm don't think I (you? we?) want them too.

What about Disney? Will Magic Kingdom eventually do 25 million? 30 million? 40 million?

No they won't.

And even if growth is expected to inifinty, it still has to top out around 6 billion or so. ;)

In general, I don't think customer service is down in the industry as a whole compared to previous years. You're talking like there's some epidemic where it's next to impossible to have a good time at a park because no one cares. I'm not sure that's true either.

And to top it all off, if there is any actual problem to be found you make it sound like it's an amusement park problem instead of a general public problem. It's not just the amusement industry that suffers from poor customer service and the industry in general is no worse or better than anywhere or anything else is. If there is a perceived drop in the levels of customer service it's certainly not limited to amusement parks.

I'm either willing to accept to little (which I HIGHLY doubt :) ) or I'm missing it, because I sure haven't run into this massive lack of customer service that's everywhere and killing the industry. Hell, I'd buy that prices are killing the industry (and you know my take on that) before I bought into this.

I visited Kings Island this past Sunday. I went to the LaRosa's on International Street to get some pizza (I usually don't eat much at amusement parks because 1 the prices are outrageous and 2 I'd rather not have food in my stomach if I'm going to be on a ride or coaster, well, I hadn't eaten all day).
The lady in front of me couldn't find her money and was taking forever to pay for her whole pizza. My 2 slices were getting cold, so I put my plate back under the light and grabbed a fresh plate. Not once did I touch the pizza, only the plate. Suddenly some loudmouth yells from the back of the kitchen WE SHOULD PUT A SIGN UP THAT SAYS IF YOU TOUCH IT, YOU BUY IT and glared at me. I explained to her that I did not touch the pizza itself and if I had, I would not have put it back. The cashier snapped that it was policy and the girl who yelled came out and glared at me too. As I was leaving, I looked at them both and told them that their attitude was unnecessary.
In the 14 years I have been visiting the park, I have never been treated so badly. Won't stop me from visiting Kings Island, but I certainly won't eat at that LaRosa's anymore.. there are 2 more of them in the park.

That will show them!