Is it fair for parks like Disneyland to sell expensive tickets to people who don’t know how few rides you can actually get to ride in a day? Which I think includes the majority of patrons.
I don’t think it’s fair at all. Even when you get to the end of a line you can’t tell how long it is because they intentionally put up walls and snake the line in odd ways so you always think you are almost at the front and then get there to realize you are behind a few hundred more unseen people.
What sort of remedy do you propose? The only way to shorten the lines is to reduce the number of people in the park and the only way to do that is to raise the prices even higher.
It’s not like Disney is entirely ignoring the problem. They already have their Fastpass system that allows you to avoid the lines on the most congested rides, and they sell special passes to Southern California residents to encourage the locals to avoid the park during peak vacation times.
I think the ticket should say that the average number of rides you can get is ___. They must have computed this to three decimal places.
There’s not much they can do about it. Besides having a park capacity cutoff, putting “wait time 90 minutes from this point” signs in the que, and offering “fast pass” I don’t know what else they could do besides telling you at the gates how many people are already in the park.
I do however hate the fact that Six Flags offers VIP upgraded tickets that put you in shorter waiting lines. Kind of a sucker punch to those who already paid $50 to get into the park.
But the average is dependent on the weather, the time of year, the day of the week, and what sort of ride you like to ride. If all you care about are the “E Tickets” on a sunny Saturday in June, yes, you can spend all day waiting in line to ride three or four rides. If you don’t limit yourself to the big ticket rides and go to the park on a cloudy Wednesday in April, you can ride twenty or more. I don’t think they could give you an accurate average at the ticket booth.
Just an anecdote; I’ve been do Disney Land once, and they had a machine you could slide your pass into, and it’d spit out a ticket with a time you could come back and get right on. So, we slid our tickets, and got in line. The line lasted about an hour, but after we got off, we were able to get right back on. When we got off the second time, there was a child crying near the entrance. As we walked by, the mother looked up and offered us two “rapid ride” (or whatever they’re called) tickets, so we got to ride THREE TIMES in a row, it was awesome.
To address the OP: It’s just as fair as them selling bottled water for $4.00 a pop.
My experience is with DisneyWorld, not DisneyLand, so maybe it’s different in California–but at DisneyWorld park admission is just as much about wandering around and eating lunch somewhere fun, as it is about rides. It isn’t like they have a dozen top-rated rollercoasters, or anything.
Probably not. Without tickets at each ride, they can’t tell that precisely.
And that doesn’t differentiate between people who do nothing but go on rides and others who spend time shopping and eating and watching the parade on Main Street. And the number of rides is a function of how many people are in the park that day and daily fluctuations in popularity.
I don’t see the problem. Disney isn’t trying to mask how long the lines are; they have “estimated wait time” boards on all their most popular rides, telling you before you even get in line just how long the wait will be. What you call “snaking the line in odd ways” is their way of running the line by interesting stuff to look at to keep you from getting bored in the line.
That’s the real trick: Disney doesn’t want people to stand in line forever and get bored, because bored people won’t come back to Disney World. That’s why they have ways to entertain you while you’re still in line (the movie in the “wait” area at MuppetVision 3D was so funny, I wanted to go again just to see it), and that’s why they introduced FastPass.
The bottom line is: Disney wants you to have fun in their parks, because they want return business. They won’t “trick” you into standing in a long line just for grins.
I share your frustration, but the last time I went to Disney World, there were signs saying things like “About 40 minutes from this point” in all of the lines. They were reasonably accurate, so there weren’t any surprises. Is Disneyland different?
How many rides is too few? I’ve never, ever had an issue getting on “enough” rides.
The last time I went I rode the Winnie the Pooh ride over 20 times in a row (then a newly-arriving operator said the record was over 100 so we gave up). This was a weekend in June and we still did Space Mountain, Indiana Jones, and Buzz Lightyear multiple time each, as well.
Ah, the magic of Fastpass.
I don’t ride Six Flags rides AT ALL. Disney, at least, has some that aren’t thrill rides and there are other things one can do in the park. I resent like hell paying $50 to get into Six Flags for the privilege of standing on hot asphalt all day long and buying $4 sodas. I really think they should offer a non-rider admission - pay a lower price and get a wristband or something that prevents you from getting on rides.
(Before the obvious question comes up, I’ve had to go on a number of occasions for assorted events - Girl Scout trips, family or friends in dance or cheerleading competitions, etc.)
Last time we went to Disneyland it was on a Monday during the summer, and I don’t think we ever waited more than 20 minutes for a ride. It was great seeing all the empty waiting areas roped off because they weren’t needed that day.
My experience of being an amusement park employee is about 25 years out of date, but when I worked at Six Flags Over Texas it was possible for us to “tune” our wait time at various rides by selectively opening lines in the queue. On an average day, people generally wouldn’t join a line that extended very far beyond the entrance to the ride, so by not opening some of the lines in the queue house it was possible to keep the overall length of the line shorter. This only worked on days when the park wasn’t overly crowded though – on a Saturday in May the principle didn’t really apply.
I can say that when I worked at Six Flags a very serious attempt was always made to keep the wait as short as possible. We timed the wait every hour and knew about how fast the line should move. It’s also important to realize that a line at five o’clock in the afternoon that appears to be the same length (and one would assume wait time) as the line at the ride at eleven that morning might actually have a shorter wait because by that time there might be more units running on the ride. For example, I worked for a year or two on the riverboat ride, and from opening until noon we might have five boats running, but with the swing shift that came in at noon we might start running seven, so the capacity of the ride would increase even though the line was apparently the same length.
That kind of adjustment wasn’t possible for every ride, of course, but generally speaking, the numer of trains on a roller coaster might vary accrding to the time of day and the crowd as well. I assume that at least some of Disney’s rides are the same – I’d guess the number of units on the Pirates of the Carribean or the Matterhorn can be changed pretty easily.
Curate
Paying a flat fee is reasonable. What bothers me is after paying the flat ticket fee some rides also require an additional fee after you go in.
The last amusement park I went to at least half of the rides the kids wanted to go on you had to pay for above and beyond the ticket price.
The last time I went to an amusement park was Cedar Point in Ohio. It was on one of the last days they were open in the fall and it was chilly but sunny. We were getting off the best rides, walking right back and getting on again with little or (more often) no wait. It was fun. Once the sun went down it was almost deserted and many of the people there weren’t riding anything.
To answer the OP, I think there should be some indication of how many “good” rides you can reasonably expect on that day before you pay to get in.
Even that is problematic because different “good” rides can have very different waits. For example at Disneyland the wait for Splash Mountain is always always significantly greater than the wait for Pirates of the Caribbean even though both are major attractions. The difference is that the logs at Splash Mountain hold half the number of riders the pirate boats do, even though they take about the same time to load and unload. So the throughput of Splash Mountain is much lower and the line moves slower.
About all you could do would be to post a big board at the ticket booth with current average wait times for different attractions. But it’s questionable how useful it would be to the average park vistor. By the time you get to the ticket booth at Disneyland you’ve probably already invested at least an hour driving there, parking in the garage and riding the tram to the entrance. How many people at that point are going to tell their excited little kids that they’re turning around and going home because the wait for Space Mountain is too long?
Maybe they should just let those who are last in line go first.
The wait depends on popularity. The first time I went on Star Tours, the line was gigantic. The last time I went, my kids wanted to do it a lot, and we basically walked in again.
One of the books on Disney* I read mentioned how fast loading the rides were. Rides like Dumbo and the teacups are always going to take forever.
Maybe they should post wait times at the entrance - that might be more practical than giving an average, and might balance out the wait times as people head for the short lines.
I went to Luna Park in Sydney last year because my son wanted to go. I had this idea that I would buy him a nicely expensive ticket, and the could go off and amuse himself while I sat under a tree with an overpriced coffee. I don’t like going on the rides myself, so this seemed like a good plan.
But no.
After having bought his ticket, it transpired that about 90% of the rides had signs saying “MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY A PAYING ADULT” on them. This was NOT made clear at the ticket office.
So the day cost twice as much, and I had a shitty time going on rides I hated.