Here is the number-one reason not to visit a theme park

Hot damn somebody buy this man a beer already! Well said Robert, well said.

Really excellent piece, Robert. The last time we were at Knott's Berry Farm (we have season passes), my wife and I looked at each other and said what we had both been thinking: Boy, we'd rather be at Disneyland. That's out of our budget right now, but it solidified for us that we won't be renewing our season passes.

Just went to SFMM and KBF recently. Funny enough, almost every coaster was running only 1 train.

Not to mention the rides at DL and DCA consistently breaking down for hours on end. At one point in the day, Space, Indy, Cars, and Incredicoaster were all down.

At Disneyland trip, was very annoying the Web Slingers ride shut down almost an entire day. I know, these high tech rides more susceptible to this but still annoying.

Great article Robert.

Three weeks ago we visited Disneyland for the first time (we've done Disney World three times before but it's been 12 years since our last Disney trip). Whilst we had a great time we did feel a little short-changed by the sheer volume of major attractions that were down during our 4 day stay. Obviously Tiana's Bayou Adventure and Haunted Mansion were off the menu but Matterhorn Bobsleds were also closed for the whole of our stay, Big Thunder was down at least 50% of the time, Mickey's Runaway Railway was erratic at best, whilst over in DCA Soarin' was somewhat unreliable. The closure of so many major attractions put huge pressure on the remaining ones and even with Genie Plus (another $240 for us both for the 4 days) there was a lot of stuff we just didn't get to experience. The ILL attractions were strange. We bought passes for Radiator Springs Racers on two days (another $52), because the alternative was over 90 minutes in crushing heat and a line that was little better than a cattle pen. Rise of the Resistance however we rode 3 times over 3 days and used the standby line each time. Despite advertised times of between 50 and 75 minutes this line moved quickly and we were in Rey's hologram room in 50 minutes every time, having been in line mostly in shade and coolness.

We had a great time but didn't love the Disneyland resort like we have loved Disney World. It felt crowded, and it was impossible to do everything, even with the paid-for extras. I don't know what the solution is ride resilience is vital as is not having too many bit beasts down simultaneously.

I 100% agree with everything you say Robert. My $.02 from working in the business for 30 years:

These are all publicly traded corporations who are constantly trying to up their profits from the previous year to impress investors, but the theme park market is mature and there hasn't really been much organic growth over the last 30 years, so the people who run these parks are constantly trying to cut more and more while raising prices and coming up with scummy new practices in order to grow the profits. Obviously this is not really growth its just trying to squeeze more and more and more and more and more blood out of the turnip.

What is really not well understood is how underfunded all of these parks are on maintenance. Now granted I worked at parks for a long time so things change, but when I left Disney, at MK we sometimes had less attractions maintenance people working during the day/at night then we had when I worked at my local SF park 25 years ago. Yes, Magic freaking Kingdom, a park that gets like 50k people a day, had cut so much maintenance staff over the years that they sometimes had less people than a Six Flags park. If one of the major rides in Tomorrowland like Space Mountain or Buzz Lightyear was having issues the ride would sometimes have to wait while the maintenance guy was working on a broken parade float. Now if you don't know the geography of MK, the parade floats are stored next to Splash Mountain, so think of how much unnecessary downtime that causes. Now in full disclosure of course MK has much more robust third shift maintenance program (Six Flags had cut pretty much all of their third shift maintenance a long long time ago), but park hours at MK are so insane (especially during party season) that doing anything other than the bare minimum third shift is precarious. Also to be fair I know the SF park I worked at has gotten much worse with maintenance budget as well because when I worked there no coaster would ever run 1 train (except the two shuttle coasters which only had 1 train). Now its normal for like half the park to open the season with 1 train. The last year that I was at MK they were so desperate to save money they literally turned the air conditioning 1 degree warmer around the park (BTW they don't run AC anywhere when the park is closed at night, meaning all the third shift workers who are cleaning/doing maintenance/stocking just sweat all night every night).

The lack of willingness to spend money maintaining things properly is an epidemic around the industry. Last time I went to CP Maverick, Millennium Force, Gatekeeper, Raptor, Valravn ALL had delayed openings. TTD and Wicked Twister were both closed all day both days. And that was not due to staffing (that is a whole other story with the staffing). And the time I went to CP before that I had almost exactly the same experience with totally unacceptable amounts of downtime.

Don't even get me started on SFMM.

Regarding staffing I will cut slack to seasonal parks in the spring and fall, especially big parks. The fact that they have to let everyone go every year and start new is a monumental task and its near impossible to have everything firing on all cylinders all the time. A lot of parks are dependent on J1 to fill those gaps, and some parks (cough Mt Olympus...and i'd argue even WDW) are way over dependent on J1 (wow never thought i'd put Mt Olympus and WDW in the same sentence).
However, many parks try to use the "we can't find any staff" as a bogus excuse for being terribly ran when in reality they just have poor corporate leadership and noncompetetive pay. [Modern] Sea World Orlando comes first to mind for this one: when you pay $12 an hour when Disney and Universal are starting at $16...and McDonalds across the street is starting at $15...you're going to have staffing problems. And meanwhile you have Sea Worlds leadership deciding to buy back five hundred million of stock but somehow they can't afford to properly staff or have decent operations.

I brought up earlier the other side of the business, which is having to grow revenues without actually growing or building new parks.

It started with parking fees, then came upsell line skip programs, then came mandatory ride lockers at many parks. Disney realized there was enough demand to do upsell Halloween and Christmas events, which turned into a smash hit (for good reason as the Halloween party is actually worth the money for many people IMO), but then came the Christmas party which is a shameless money grab, then came the After Hours events which are also shameless money grabs, and then the most abhorrent shameless money grab event of all with the DHS Christmas party. At Epcot it started out innocent enough with the seasonal food and wide festival which is now almost the entire year between three major festivals.

Great piece, Robert. Well said!

It really is a Catch-22 when it comes to ops, because parks are often trying to thread a very tiny eye of the needle when balancing ops/maintenance and anticipated crowds. That's why I'm utterly shocked that more parks have not maintained reservation requirements to visit. The pandemic gave parks the perfect solution to balancing staffing and anticipated crowds, and with guests having to make reservations, parks knew exactly how many people were going to visit on a given day, allowing them to manage and schedule staff to better mesh with the number of guests in the park. However, I think what happened is that so many guests got frustrated with the various reservation processes utilized by different park chains, and it was seen as a deterrent that offered minimal benefits over less accurate (though still helpful) internal crowd calculators that crunch data from previous years and recent trends to predict crowd levels. Reservations more or less have gone by the wayside, though some parks, particularly in Europe, offer discounted admissions for guests purchasing date-specific tickets over standard/flexible tickets, and parks are constantly playing a guessing game trying to match staffing to the actual crowd levels.

At big parks, that's not really a problem, because crowds are constant and far more predictable. However, at many of the regional parks, a thunderstorm hitting an hour before the park opens can completely squash crowds, and result in massive overstaffing even if the weather is perfect for most of the day. It doesn't help when an overwhelming percentage of your guests are visiting on annual/season passes who buy those admission products for the explicit ability to decide to visit (or not to visit) on a whim and whichever way the wind is blowing that day (literally). One of the biggest reasons regional parks are able to survive (massive influx of cash from season pass sales) is the precise reason why it can be impossibly difficult to match staffing to crowd levels because of the unpredictability of an often fickle and entitled fanbase. I do think some regional parks (BGW in particular) are making changes to their staffing to counter the annual/season pass problem by extending their operational calendars to near year-round and hiring more full time employees instead of part time variable (PTV). A lot of people don't understand what it takes and costs to hire a new employee, particularly one who is front facing and/or is responsible for guest safety. In most cases, I would be surprised if a park is able to break even on the investment in on-boarding, training, and benefits of a new employee sooner than 3 months, so getting these PTV employees to come back for multiple summer seasons or significantly restrict their earning potential in their first season/year is critical to manage costs.

Robert is definitely onto something here in regards to ops having a massive impact on a guest's impression of a theme park. If parks want to get that return visit or an upgrade to a season pass, they have always to put their best foot forward and make sure to operate attractions at optimal capacity whenever possible. However, there are always other forces at play. Upcharge skip the line services are massive revenue generators for parks (and often used by first-time/one-time visitors), and if guests paying for those don't feel like they're getting any value from them, they're going to stop buying them or even worse demand a refund, especially when more and more parks are either forcing or incentivizing the purchase of those products days in advance. I don't know how many times I've been to a SF park on an extremely slow day and have seen guests with Flash Pass walking up to an empty boarding platform and wonder to myself why they bothered spending extra to wait as long as I did for the same ride without Flash Pass. It's a conundrum, and one of the many reasons why some parks will deliberately operate attractions at lower capacities in the hopes that lines will develop to demonstrate some benefit to those paying extra for queue avoidance.

However, I think more often than not, many parks operate attractions below their optimal capacity because they simply don't care or don't want to spend the extra money needed to be able to optimize operations. As a guest who's already walked through the gate, you're a captive audience, and are at the mercy of the park, so they've already got your money and know that as long as you don't have a terrible time, you'll come back again, especially if you're visiting on a annual/season pass. The bar to achieve guest satisfaction in this industry, especially for regional parks, is extremely low, because most parks can tout their value compared to destination parks (like Disney and Universal) where costs to visit (not only in admission but for travel and lodging) are exponentially higher than a regional park.

That's where I go back to parks hiring more full time staff. Those who work at a park all the time are naturally going to have more affinity towards the park and want to take care of it (and its guests) like they would their own home. They can be paid a little more because companies don't have to spend money to onboard, train, and incentivize new employees, and if you keep your full-time staff happy, they're typically going to treat guests better not only because they care more, but because they get to know the frequent visitors and passholders as friends/neighbors.

The theme park business by its nature is going to attract seasonal employees and "cheap" labor, but I think if parks devote more time and resources to maintain more full time staff, they will reap massive dividends that will help to curtail a lot of the problems Robert describes.

SeaWorld is the worst for one train ops. I don’t go anywhere near much as I used to, because even on relatively busy days they run one train on Mako, Manta, Kraken and Icebreaker. Last time I was there, Pipeline was still running 2. Montu at BGT is often only running one train. Must be a SWE thing !!

Thinking back …. best ops I’d say goes to Phoenix at Knoebels, although the crew on Iron Gwazi are awesome as well. I recently rode Toutatis, and they were great too. I liked the idea of a countdown clock as the train came into the station, and the ops were dispatching before it got to zero.

Regarding the reservation system having one is pretty much useless except for DLR and WDW. It doesn't do much in terms of projecting attendance (which is fairly predictable already) and the only time any seasonal park cut off admission recently was CP during Halloweekends the past few years, so anybody could easily just make a reservation day of for any park.

Disney on the other hand uses it as a way to gouge more money out of people at the expense of APs as they can not give reservations out to APs on a day they think they can fill the park with higher pay ticket packages. Obviously this isn't anything different than the way concerts/airlines etc price and it is what it is, I don't think it makes any sense for 99% of other parks who never actually fill the park.

At the end of the day a good CEO/VP/GM/management team should know how to balance the cost of operating the park on a day to day basis with also making sure people visiting on that day are having a good time and want to come back. If you look at Disneyland and Cedar Fair under Matt Ouimet I think it is noticeable. Disneyland clearly got better after Matt Ouimet became its VP and had better business results, and Cedar Fair clearly got better when Matt Ouimet became its CEO and had better business results. Cedar Fair started going down the tubes after Ouimet retired and has had worse business results.
(That being said I will say though Dick Kinzel will forever be remembered as Mr Cedar Fair and obviously the Paramount merger was a huge success, but at the end of his career the maintenance and operations had slid terribly and he tried to sell the company out to private equity. Richard Zimmerman will forever be remembered for the Six Flags merger. But in regards to park beautification, maintenance, and leading with a stable hand, Ouimet deserves credit).

Possibly a minority opinion, but when it comes to operations it's less about the speed of them for me and more about the quality of the crew. Yes, running one train is annoying (though that's usually a maintenance decision), but I'd much rather have one train with a crew that seems invested in their job than two trains with a crew putting out the minimum effort. As a local to the parks cited, I've often found Six Flags Magic Mountain to provide a more enjoyable ride experience than Knott's Berry Farm, because while it's more common for them to run fewer trains than ideal, in my experience the operators tend to be much more interactive with waiting guests rather than simply following a script with minimal variation.

But while operations definitely affect my opinion of a park, they aren't my number-one reason not to visit. For me, it's the nickel and diming that is the biggest turnoff. Yes, I know theme parks aren't going to be the cheapest way to spend the day, but when I'm hit with things like 5% surcharges, convenience fees, and tipping requests, I'm far less inclined to spend money at the property and far more inclined not to return if that's not reasonably possible.

Amen. Mt. Olympus at Wisconsin Dells has some of the worst park ops I had ever seen. Coasters only running one train and water park ops only sending out one group at a time on the multiple-slide structures. It’s only an hour and a half away from me and I’ve never wanted to go back.