Busch Gardens Europe drops 'Haunted Lighthouse' attraction
May 20, 2006, 12:32 PM ·
The Haunted Lighthouse 4-D movie is no more! It was replaced at Busch Gardens Tampa with the old Pirates movie, and they have now done the same with the
Busch Gardens Williamsburg park. Interestingly, the Tampa change was promoted as a new attraction (since Pirates had never been there), whereas the Williamsburg switchover to revive
Pirates 4-D was done completely under the radar. In fact, Haunted Lighthouse was still at BGE last month, so I'm not sure what prompted the change.
I can't help but wonder if TPI has something to do with this. The embarassingly low score that Haunted Lighthouse has been getting in the TPI rankings pulls down Busch Gardens Europe's overall score, so I wonder if they're trying to get a little edge there. It's not as though the attraction was unpopular; I always saw a big crowd of people waiting to get in.
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So it's not like TPI readers were alone in their dislike for Haunted Lighthouse. But what TPI, and other websites, do is to alert customers *before they visit* about attractions they probably won't like. So Internet ratings can move attendance numbers for attractions, and entire parks.
There's been a battle within the industry over which factor is the cause and which is the effect. My take is that the attraction is the initial cause and that visitor reaction (expressed both online and through in-park surveys) is the effect. That word then spreads online and becomes the secondary cause resulting in the effect of increases or decreases in attendance.
Of course, price, travel expenses, the economy and marketing all affect attendance as well, making it difficult to isolate the effect of online reviews.
But there are some within the industry who cling to the idea that online reviews *do not* reflect the general population and that if the online sites would just shut up, or be silenced, then the public would discover that it really does like stuff like Haunted Lighthouse and Disney's California Adventure (to cite the most famous example of such an argument).
Haunted Lighthouse was doomed, thanks to its glacial pacing and lack of laughs. TPI and the Internet, if they did anything, *might* have accelerated its removal a little bit, by giving park managers additional confirmation of what they probably already knew. But that's all I'd be willing to claim.