WTF Merlin?

[toofpikk]

what a horrible guest experience and arguably a safety issue to have the park at this much overcapacity

This is a bad take.

Theme parks have regulated capacities which they don't make. A fire officer will prescribe the parks with their capacities, working it out on a basis of accessible square metres and what the maximum amount of people within the park could be whilst still allowing for emergency vehicles to get access to specific areas. Sometimes park insurers will also produce a number which will be below the one given by a fire officer. On top of this, park operators will have their own capacity which will be lower than this number, sometimes by quite a large amount (some parks will lower it by up to 30% simply because of their own operational requirements and the guest experience).

The park was very busy, but that was just it. It was very, very busy... As it always is at this time of year. Halloween, falling on a weekend, now with many schools in the UK having a 2 week half term is a bit of a catalyst for the worst imaginable time to visit a park if you are an enthusiast. To the average London based teenager, it's a no brainer time to visit.

I also saw it take 40 minutes to get into the park for him as well.

It took me 40 minutes to get into the park on a fairly average weekend in September. Considering the crowds of this past weekend, the security checks must've been pretty fast. Thorpe's entry experience is absolute awful, we all know this, it desperately needs improvement, but in the scheme of things this is pretty average.

I have to assume with Merlin's debts they're overselling just to get cash in

So I have a bit of a sidebar here...

Spoiler: ramblings

but I was discussing with my partner who is a senior accountant about how bad Merlin is, they're in debt, trying to make small cash grabs, blah blah blah...

But every time I've showed them news articles or reports on Merlin's finances, she's always said they look pretty good for a company of their scale. We ended up spending like 3 hours looking through as many of the financial records as we could find from 2005 to the present day, trying to understand the company. There's a fantastic post over on towers-times discussing this, pointing out that a huge proportion of the debt is the owner of Merlin's own money, and until new standard accounting practices came into effect, another large sum of the debt (being renting of the land the parks are sat on) had to be recorded differently, making the debt look a lot bigger over night. Nearly 1/3 of their debt is just promised rent.

So long as Merlin can pay its rent and clear the interest on the debt is has to it's owners, it's actually doing pretty good financially. The trouble is that return goes into the creditors pockets, instead of back into the parks. There is some debt to banks it does need to pay back, but a lot of the books Merlin has is kind of a huge money equivalent to student finance.

Getting back on topic, and ultimately to the point, Merlin, Thorpe, any of their regional attractions would not ever put guests in an unsafe environment to sell a couple hundred more tickets over what is their most busy and profitable time of year. Financially, operationally, it doesn't make sense.

I bash Merlin as much as the next UK based nerd. They really ought to and can do better, and now understanding their financial state a lot better, it makes me wonder even more why investments seem so sluggish and stripped down.

 

[Tonkso]

The thing is, queue's are inflated due to a number of things that can be improved.

The entry experience is dreadful, given that's the first impression Merlin need to resolve that. Whether it is more security checkpoints, or relaxing security checkpoints I do now know. Merlin cannot be blamed for people bringing knives and drugs to the park though, that's guest behaviour and a wider social issue.

Queues for rides are made worse by downtime. Merlin parks seem to have a lot of it compared to other parks, but also dispatch timings. I marvel at the dispatch timings achieved at Europa Park, and that's with German working regulations (far stricter than ours). Separate unload helps, but that's pretty difficult, in most cases likely impossible to retrofit. Stealth's queue moves and I think that's in part due to the unload station.

Fast Pass is oversold, simple as. I still strongly believe a higher entrance fee and free fast-pass on a finite first-come-first-served basis which is precisely how the park functioned in the early 2000s is the best way forward. It's fair, and a higher entrance fee is justifiable when the package is better. Paid fast pass is honestly the biggest en****tification project to ever plague the amusement industry. It creates two-tiers of guests, those with and those without, they cost a fortune, they drive up the standby queue times and generally piss people off.

Controversial, but the annual pass model perhaps needs to go. The revenue-per-guest on a Theme Park day can't be sustainable, and must be leading to cost-cutting elsewhere. A full park is great, but only if guests are generating revenue.

I won't open the RAP argument but we all know it's a system designed to benefit those who need it, abused by those who don't. Quite how abused it is I don't know, but Merlin are kind of stuck with this one as any changes ultimately punish those who do need it.