We all know CP is one of the best parks in the country.
I like where they have been putting their money in regards to capex. Boardwalk, the RMC, improving hotels and building a new one, improving food selection, the ESPN sports complex ripoff. I think these are all smart and practical additions to make it a more desirable destination.
CP is easily the best rides park for little kids in the country, in addition to the kids areas they also have the best collection of big rides that even toddlers can enjoy. The park has one of the best trains anywhere (which makes sense considering the park is huge, and I was surprised at how well maintained the theming is, much better than MK’s train), Skyride, Big Wheel (which unfortunately we did not get on because it kept closing for rain as it was sprinkling on and off), and Cadillac Cars.
Their three kids areas (Camp Snoopy, Planet Snoopy, and Kiddie Kingdom) are all really good with the two Peanuts areas having attractions more geared towards rides parents can ride with kids, and Kiddie Kingdom being filled with rides kids that are slightly older can go on by themselves. There is a little Peanuts show in Camp Snoopy with character M&Gs inbetween. Kiddie Kingdom of course is old and a has a “stuck in the 70s” feel to it, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see this area get removed for some sort of gentrification in the near future, but the area still seems pretty popular.
And that brings me to my next point and the major thing CP struggles with. Being in the middle of nowhere with no major metro area to draw labor from (Cleveland is small and also too far for employees to be commuting), and also only being open May – October, they have a really hard time staffing the place. And this problem has gotten progressively worse over the years and can be really frustrating to deal with when you visit as a customer. I purposely decided to go in the middle of July since they should have peak staffing (the last few times I visited CP before this were a disaster because of understaffing in May), but the park still really struggled to get things open. The operations at CP are plagued with understaffing and under-resourcing maintenance.
Raptor sat there for the first few hours the park was open with a sign that said “delayed” at the entrance but had no one hosting the entrance, at like 11:30am it cycled a few trains so a line formed but since no one was hosting the entrance no one knew what was going on and it didn’t even open until hours later. I have no idea if the closure was staff related but since no employee was out front it created an issue. Rougaru, Gemeni, and Wild Mouse had similar situations where they just sat there for hours before opening. I thought Gemeni was SBNO because it looked abandoned just with a chain at the entrance with no sign. Similar to Raptor, it cycled a train at like 11:45 but then didn’t open until later in the day, and I think it just operated one side all day after that. Power Tower had two towers closed. Skyhawk half capacity. And these are just the things I noticed.
On the topic of one side operating on Gemeni, the days of CP caring about throughput seem to be long gone. I will admit I am old, but when I would visit in the 90s/early 2000s they were really good about dispatch intervals and throughput, even posting hourly counts in the operator booths where guests could see. I was really looking forward to riding Blue Streak as I did not on my last visit, but decided not to since it was running 1 train with a long line. Several of the coasters that can run 3 trains were running 2 and the ones that were running 3 had stacking issues. As previously mentioned Gemeni only running one side. The ride crews were generally “mid” to slow.
There are also really stringent safety procedures at CF parks compared to other parks, which I get and doesn’t really bother me, but when you combine this with the understaffing it can be a problem. Take a ride like Cadillac Cars for example, where they have an employee ride the outside pedal of the car into the station for every single car. I’m sure this is to prevent bumping and therefore prevent injuries/claims, however they only have ONE employee doing this for every single car. So instead of using the 6 loading spots the platform is designed for they only end up using 1-3 at a time, which makes what should be a 5 minute wait into a 30 minute wait. Every other ride like this I have ever seen they tell the rider which spot to stop at and it makes things flow a lot better. If CF wants to add extra safety procedures that is fine, but since they added the extra procedure with only one employee doing all the extra work.
So lets talk solutions to this problem. CP used to be ran mostly by kids who live in Ohio/Michigan who would go there over the summer and live in the dorm style housing. I have noticed over the last several visits the ratio of American’s vs J1 workers has tilted way in favor of J1. And I mean its an extreme amount of foreign workers, I’m not even joking when I say the ratio of J1 to American workers was like 10:1 in favor of J1 and higher in food service. It seems like American kids just don’t want to work at CP anymore and I also attribute this to CP losing its focus on efficiency of operations. The culture of employees returning for several years and caring about things like throughput has been replaced with “just staff the place with guest workers and desperately try to keep the rides open.”
So why do they have a hard time getting American kids to work at CP? I’m sure it doesn’t help that when you drive onto the CP causeway the first thing you drive past is the employee housing, which looks like a prison camp. First of all its really bizarre the first thing your customers see is a bunch of employees living in old run down dorm complexes, but that aside their accommodations are just not competitive anymore. Fact is college kids have more options and higher standards nowadays and CP has not made proper investments in recent years to properly staff the park and hotels. Disney recognized what they had was not going to cut it for future needs so they built Flamingo Crossings (which, Disney being Disney, is managed by a giant REIT but that’s another conversation for another day lol).
I also think they need to have a system of getting employees who work at the year round parks to work at CP. Give KBF and SFMM employees a chance to work at CP and give them free housing. If they want to be a destination park they need to think outside the box.
CP should an easy sell for a summer job for kids in the area. Its fun, you get to go to CP in your time off, you get work experience at an internationally known destination for your resume, you make friends from all over the world, you actually make money because OT is available unlike many other summer jobs, you are away from your parents, etc. Cedar Fair has clearly trying to lean in on the destination aspect of CP with more hotels and sports complex. I think If Six Flags wants the experience to go from “meh” back to great at their flagship park they need to make this their top priority.
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I think staffing at Cedar Point really suffered because of the impacts caused by the Pandemic. Cedar Point had traditionally drawn a large number of seasonal employees from abroad (Eastern Europe and SE Asia), and when COVID made international travel next to impossible, the park lost touch with their primary source for labor. When travel somewhat got back to normal in 2022, Cedar Point had already pivoted to local labor, which forced them to raise wages across the board that made it cost prohibitive to go back to foreign labor. However, even with higher wage standards, it's getting increasingly difficult to get locals to work at the park, mostly because in the way high school and college aged folks view summer/temporary employment.