Here's the numbers for Canadas Wonderland and Carowinds, unfortunately these are the only other parks that posted these stats today so we don't have that many parks to reference for this, but it's something. Canadas Wonderland had about 25 million total riders, and Carowinds had about 12 million, compared to KD's 10 million.
I just saw Six Flags New England's and yea I see where y'all are coming from for the claims of low ridership numbers.
Those poor 508,733 souls that had to suffer through Hurler.
No one else amazed that SFNE has superman ridership the same as 3 train B&M's at the busiest park in North America? And even beat out Fury....
It helps when SFNE pulls attendance from Boston. Which is a VERY populated city.
Also most of the competition is much smaller. Canobie Lake, Funtown Splashtown, Old Orchard Beach, and Quassy are tiny by comparison. Lake Compounce probably comes the closest but its still small.
At 20 people per train it was sending many more full trains than say Dominator. Its total output is limited by its capacity, much like Volcano.
Their numbers for the top coasters are comparable, but KD has them beat by a pretty wide margin when it comes to the total ridership number. KD had 10.7 million, compared to SFOG's 6.9. I'm not sure if that's just because of SFOG's bad ops or what, but their ridership was the third lowest of every park that posted, only beating out STSTL and WOF.
At least at KD, there's no way to track ridership for most rides, someone has to physically count. Not sure if they count who's on the train or who enters the line, but it's definitely not an exact science. If they physically count the Wave Pool guests I wouldn't put any credence to that number at all.
there are not any turnstile counters at kd, all rides rely on some amount of operator input to count riders. at most smaller rides it's a manual count with clickers and at most larger rides you count the empty seats each cycle and the ride computer calculates hourly totals. every hour the cycles and ridership is recorded on a tablet at the ride and is submitted at the end of the night.
Some rides use clickers so you just count how many people are on the ride. Other rides are counted on the panel itself. The panel ones just assume you have a full train, so you just count the empty seats you see which gets subtracted from that number
A few of the "big" parks haven't posted numbers yet including Knott's Berry Farm (which is identified as the most visited park on the chain-wide Wrapped post), Six Flags Great America, and Six Flags Magic Mountain.
A few years ago they changed the wave pool setup so you can’t just walk into it anymore. It has a dedicated single-file entrance and “queue” where every guest must walk past a greeter, just like the lazy river. I think the goal was to reduce the number of young children getting in without a life jacket and to make it easier to prevent guests from entering the pool when it’s closed (for example, during a storm when lifeguards shouldn’t be standing near the water).
