Will Pay-to-cut come to Kennywood?

LostKause said:
With all the thought these parks have been putting into finding ways to let people cut in front of other people, shouldn't they finally consider it to be a waste of time? It doesn't work as smoothly as they predicted a decade ago, and it is such a hassle to park guests.

Heh. Really?

Just the opposite, man. Just the opposite.

^I was skeptical at first, but came around almost immediately when I saw that guests adapted SO quickly to the new queueing methodologies. There were a FEW bumps along the way to be sure, but the FPs and Bots have been almost universally accepted with incidents almost nonexistent after the first season or two.

Do I think parks/chains should continue to strive for best implementation strategies and optimal operations in addition to VQ'ing? Yep, absolutely. Do I think they've proven a failure and will go away? Not even in the slightest - and I'm still predicting CF comes around after whatever major change in management is on the not-too-distant horizon.

P.S. Where are park operations really needing to do better, rides or food service? Yep, that's what I think too. Blasphemy on a coaster board, huh? :)

Nailed it on all fronts, Gator. :)

Martin Valt said:
...doesn't really work. It's fine if you're at the park in the first hour after opening (when you don't really need fastpasses anyway!), but any later than that, on busier days at any rate, all the passes for that day have been taken resulting in longer lines than ever for non-fastpass holders.

To me that only represents an unwillingness to work with the system. Besides, the Toy Story Mania example is still a fringe case, and the only attraction in the last 15 days of visiting over the last two years where I couldn't get a FastPass. Again, that hardly constitutes failure of the system.

LostKause said:
I MUCH prefer no fastpasses at all, which ensures that everyone wait an equal amount of time, in line, as long as the demand for the attraction dictates at that particular time of the season and that particular time of the day.

Who is that good for? It's not good for the parks, because more customers are wasting time in line and not having a good time, or spending money on stuff or doing other things.

I'll say it again... an unwillingness to participate in the system is the origin of this discontent.

When the system screws 90% of the people visiting the park, and more at Disney, then yes, an unwillingness to participate in the system is the origin of this discontent.

edit - Sometimes copy and paste doesn't work on CoasterBuzz, oddly.

I was just at Disney last week, and minus Toy Story Mania everything still had fast passes until at least 5pm every night (even Soarin.) In fact most attractions had their fast passes good within the hour, which for the big rides ment that you could get your FP and ride the ride before you could have if you stood in the standby line. The only people being "screwed" at Disney are the incompetent ones, and incompetent people always (and probably should) get screwed.

Screws 90% of people? What kind of math is that? It seems to me that if 90% of people get to ride via FastPass and 10% standby, 90% of people enjoy not waiting.

I wasn't talking about Disney with that number. If 10% are using Q-Bot, then 90% are getting the shaft...that's what I was saying there.

Practically everyone is getting the shaft at Disney, except for those who know how to abuse the system.

I just can't believe you still don't get it. I've never been screwed by said system, so does that mean I'm abusing it?

I need to draw a graph or something.

At Disney, those who have figured out that they can ride two or more rides for the price of one, time wise, take away from those who want to ride later in the day. A ride can only give so many rides per day. Rides reservations get later and later as the day goes on, and at the same time the standby line gets longer and longer too.

In Disney's case, one can conclude that those who are abusing it are getting to ride more. Those poor souls who switch parks later in the day, or arrive later in the day, when all of the fastpasses are out, get screwed, because some of the extra amount of time that the are waiting was essentially stolen from them by someone who rode twice as many rides earlier in the day.

Maybe think of minutes in line at Disney as credits, I suppose. Later in the day, people who can't get flashpassed onto a ride have to wait longer than they should, because someone took their credits earlier in the day.

I could ramble on and on, heck, I do, and we all do, about this, and word it in different ways, but it's very complicated, and difficult to explain our views to each other in detail.

I don't know why it has to be so complicated. The old days were awesome, when everyone had the same opportunity to wait in the same line for a ride. Now one has to have extra disposable income, or be extra familiar with a park in Disney's case, in order to actually get on a ride without standing around for an hour or two.

Those who have figured it out? Do you really think that FastPass is some mystery only those with the secret handshake can figure out?

I find nothing complicated or difficult to explain. I am not a Disney nerd, and yet, I can use FastPass, park hopping and all, and never find myself to be at a disadvantage. Ever. I outright forget about attractions sometimes (how I didn't do Haunted Mansion last time remains a real mystery), but there's no screwing going on. I've picked up a FastPass for Test Track at 6pm and Soarin' at 5pm, after coming from other parks. I don't think you have enough experience with the system to make these sweeping generalizations, because they just ain't true.

I do think a lot of people don't know about how Fastpass works. I have read a lot of times on other sites where people overhear that others think you have to pay to use it or don't even know where to get the fastpass. When it first started, I saw a lot of people not knowing how to get the fastpasses (especially on my class trip in 2000 when even the teachers didn't know about it at first) but I haven't personally seen that as much recently.

Other than Christmas week which is so crowded that all bets are off, I never really noticed any problem with getting fastpasses with a decent return time. Even Toy Story Mania on my last trip which was on a Fantasmic Night and crowded I was able to ride twice, since even in the afternoon they still had them available. After that day the parks emptied out and it was even better, Test Track with a return time 40 minutes away at 11:00 in the morning? I couldn't believe it but I was glad to get the fastpass. The standby line was only 30 minutes but we spent that time going to Universe of Energy rather than stand in the standby line for Test Track.

Also I highly doubt that most people get a FP and then get in line for another FP ride. Everyone I knows does what Yoshi does, gets in line for a high capacity/low wait ride (ie get a FP for Splash, and then go on POTC.) Without FP I would never get 3+ rides a day on Soarin, Toy Story, the Mountains, etc because I dont want to wait more then 30 minutes for anything (I also would probably not ride Peter Pan or Pooh but once a trip too) even though I love those rides. FP is one of the greatest things Disney has come up with.

"An unwillingness to participate in the system is the origin of this discontent."

Didn't Hitler say that the day after he invaded Poland?

Holy crap.

Did you really just invoke Godwin's Law?

What has happened to Coasterbuzz? :)

...which ensures that everyone wait an equal amount of time, in line, as long as the demand for the attraction dictates...

Why should I be punished and have options taken away from me when I work hard every day to make money and I feel that paying for perks is worth the money I make?

And before anyone brings up "Why does someone who can't afford it have to be punished...bla...bla...bla...", they're not being punished. It's all about what you're willing to spend your money on, and lets be honest, if you're going to a theme park and it's putting a financial burdon on you, you shouldn't be there to begin with.

I'm gonna be rude and sound terrible for a moment, but I don't care:

I honestly don't care about 'the little people' (a term I've seen associated with this argument before) when I pay money to go to a park. I care only about me. Because that's part of the fun. It's called recreation. I spend 9 hours a day at a job where my primary concern are less fortunate people.

When I go out to have fun, I'm spending my hard earned money to do what I want. No, less fortunate people don't stop being less fortunate, and yes at any given moment I may donate money to charity, volunteer for some resource to help said people, etc., but who in their right minds is thinking about less fortunate people when they go to a theme park? The whole point is to escape, and if I've got the money to have a better experience, then quite frankly, I don't care what people in line think of me or how fair they think it is.

I've been burned by pay to cut systems in the past a couple of times, as I've said, but I didn't blame the person paying, and I didn't blame the person who came up with it. It was a case of being in a park that was at the time part of a company on the verge of a hostile takeover and bankruptcy and was being very poorly run.

But under nomral circumstances, I feel that if I have the money to spend to make my day Magical, then darn it, give me some extra magic. That's how businesses run. I don't get mad at High Rollers in Vegas getting better perks because they're wasting their money, so why should I care if people get mad when I'm wasting my own?

I'll never understand why pay to cut is looked down upon, but paying for a better seat or better experience in any other catagory is okay.

The moral argument, to the extent that there is one, is that as we all know, Thou Shalt Not Cut In Line, Lest Thou be Expelled from the Park. Now somebody comes along and adds a little asterisk to that which says, "*Unless you have privilege to do so". And that annoys people. Never mind that there have always been people for whom that exception applies. What makes it more annoying is that these schemes have just taken that asterisk and expanded it to a larger set of people, meaning that what was once little more than an occasional annoyance for some VIP, parent, previously inconvenienced customer, or wheelchair-bound individual now applies to a much larger percentage of the rides given.

I've seen this in action. When it's your turn to ride and the ride host says, "Do you mind waiting one more cycle" and ushers a family of four into the train, one of whom has a cast on his foot, you're unlikely to say "no". After all, you're delayed a minute and a half, what's the big deal? But what happens to your patience when a parade of 15 wheelchairs comes trundling up the exit ramp, each one filled with a genuinely disabled customer, each one accompanied by a family of three, and every one of them wants (a) to sit in YOUR seat, and (b) to not wait for you to ride. At what point do you turn to the ride host and ask, "Hey, when do I get my ride?"

(the specific case I witnessed was one where one train was running on a coaster that uses load and unload stations, and does special boarding at unload. For 40 minutes, every train that came into the loading station was at least half full, and a few were fully loaded. People waiting in line were beginning to get more than a little grumpy because their expected wait time had more than doubled because a large number of special access customers all decided to ride at once)

For the record, I don't think the moral argument is a very good one. We're talking about a for-profit business here, one that could just as easily decide to make their big new attraction cost you an extra dollar or two on top of your pay-one-price admission. And if you don't think that's fair, then do you also hate Knoebel's for doing exactly that with their haunted house, their aerial tramway, and to a lesser degree, their wood coasters? Or taking the Oaks Park approach, where back in 1999 the POP plan included one ride each on the coaster and the bumper cars?

I think you can argue that these systems have a deleterious effect on the wait times for some people. You can argue that everybody has to wait longer (I certainly do, as much as Jeff disagrees with the raw numbers). You can argue that these systems replace an actual solution to a problem with the illusion of a solution to a problem. On the other side you can argue that the systems can help to balance demand against available supply (e.g. Splash Mountain assigning a disproportionate number of FastPass return times after sundown). You can argue that whether it's an illusion of a shorter wait or not, less time spent standing in the queue house is less time spent standing in the queue house. But to claim that the system is somehow "unfair" is, I think, reaching more than a little bit.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

RideMan said:
The moral argument, to the extent that there is one, is that as we all know, Thou Shalt Not Cut In Line, Lest Thou be Expelled from the Park. Now somebody comes along and adds a little asterisk to that which says, "*Unless you have privilege to do so". And that annoys people.

So we just need to educate people that there's more than one line and people in the other line are in no way cutting into your line at all. :)

I mean, when people reach a coaster platform and stand in the long line for the front car, do they complain that people who go to shorter middle car lines are cutting in front of them because they got to the platform second but still board the ride first?

Same kinda thing.

(and someone better not say it's different because those people in the shorter lines aren't getting in the first car...because it's not)

Tekwardo said:
I'll never understand why pay to cut is looked down upon, but paying for a better seat or better experience in any other catagory is okay.

You're gonna get the argument that those other things don't affect those people paying less.

Then someone else (like me) is going to come along and explain how it often does - if indirectly so - and that even in this case the people not paying more have chosen to pay less for a certain level of service.

Then somebody else will come along and make some other ridiculous claim about how they're getting screwed and...

...well, you know how it goes. :)

Lord Gonchar said:
I mean, when people reach a coaster platform and stand in the long line for the front car, do they complain that people who go to shorter middle car lines are cutting in front of them because they got to the platform second but still board the ride first?

Believe it or not, I've had that happen to me. Opening Day 2008, I was waiting for my usual seat on Magnum, and some idiot was waiting for the front seat, but got all upset when I tried to go around her and sit in the otherwise empty row. Actually threatened to call security on me, and even flagged down a ride operator.

She didn't count on the ride operator actually knowing me. :) Nor did she count on being *wrong*. :) :)

The train went out with a couple of empty seats on that cycle, and then in a face-saving gesture, this person switched seats and went ahead of me. Fine with me; either take a seat or make way for someone else.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

RideMan said:
You can argue that everybody has to wait longer (I certainly do, as much as Jeff disagrees with the raw numbers).

Only you can't, because if a ride gives a thousand rides per hour, and a thousand people are in one line, two lines, virtual or real lines, everyone will ride in that hour. Some people may have waited longer than others (those in the standby line), but they had just as much access to a FastPass as everyone else if they worked within the system.