News Six Flags America & Hurricane Harbor to Close Following 2025 Season

[paintervision]

My current prediction is that the water park a possible some of the existing main park get converted over to a combination of water park an family fun center type thing allowing the council to claim they kept their word and didn't rezone it finding a new amusement vender also allowing SF to sale it off without it going to any serious competition. Maybe a public park around that as a buffer and then significant residential rezoning and development. I really think that some hybrid plan like that is the most likely situation here. That might also be a way to save Wild One.

I guess anything is possible but that's still a huge amount of land to devote just to that purpose. A few acres for waterpark and parking for a small waterpark or some kind of sports facility would not need all this, and I could see wanting to change zoning to better draw tax revenues from other uses like warehouses, data centers, residential, etc. Just look at how tiny the existing waterpark is compared to the land around it:

 

[Nicole]

In what can only be termed a mind bending decision, Six Flags just raised the price of my legacy pass. "Hey pass member, who kept paying us during COVID, we have decided to close the park closest to you and raise the price of your dramatically less useful membership at the same time!"

Maybe if they had bothered to explain to me which of my benefits would apply to Cedar Fair parks, it might possibly make some sense. In the complete absence of real information about how the legacy passes will work, however, it is just a fascinating strategy. In my specific case, since I also have a Prestige/All Parks Pass, I am struggling to find enough value in my Diamond Elite VIP Membership to want to continue to give them my money. Previously, I considered the benefits from my legacy Six Flags membership too good to give up (yet).

We hope you have been enjoying everything your Six Flags Diamond Elite VIP Membership has to offer. We are updating our prices to deliver the best guest experience so you can always make the most out of your visits to Six Flags. Your monthly price will increase to $XX.XX per month, per pass on your next scheduled payment after April 10th, 2025. Your payment schedule will not change. 

As long as you remain a Six Flags Diamond Elite VIP Member, you can enjoy all of the benefits your Membership has to offer and all the exciting enhancements coming to the park. If you’d prefer, you can also switch to one of our new passes for the 2025 season. www.sixflags.com  

If you wish to make any updates to your Membership, you can visit the Payment Portal anytime in your account.   www.sixflags.com/payments  

We’re here for you if you have any questions. Visit our Help Center for more information or contact us to speak with someone from our team. 

We thank you for being a Six Flags Diamond Elite VIP Member – Enjoy the ultimate lineup of special events at Six Flags America including Viva La Fiesta, Star-Spangled Nights, Kids Boo Fest and Fright Fest. Plus, your membership gives you access beat the heat at the region’s biggest water park, Hurricane Harbor!

 

[SLC Headache]

My bank notified me that my Six Flags payment went up too. I'm still wondering what will happen next year when SFA is gone - does the membership go away with it, or would they migrate it to, I dunno, KD (nearest park) or Gadv (nearest legacy SF park)? If the membership goes up in flames, this price hike is one last Zimjob middle finger to us all.

 

[GAcoaster]

Found another ride that can be re-homed since it’s fairly new—

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Maybe put this where Apollo was in Dorney?

 

[Zachary]

The ONLY reason I still hold a Six Flags membership is because I'm grandfathered on the unobtainable Diamond Elite VIP tier and those benefits are invaluable to me at other, legacy, non-SFA Six Flags properties. If they're planning to terminate my membership at the end of this SFA season and I won't have the ability to move my current membership (with benefits intact!) elsewhere (Kings Dominion, Dorney, Great Adventure, etc), I sorta need the chain to tell me that ASAP so I can avoid potentially paying for months of membership unnecessarily.

Announcing the permanent closure of a park without having a plan in place to handle people who are paying a subscription fee to said property is just wild to me. Increasing the price of those passes as you're announcing the park's closure just feels disgusting.

 

[paintervision]

Maybe put this where Apollo was in Dorney?

Dorney has some height restrictions, which is why they never got a Windseeker.

I actually think a better place for this would be SFMM (who skipped out on the Sky Screamers) and even though it's not the tallest model, it could be used to offset the loss of something like the Sky Coaster in the back of the park.

 

[horsesboy]

My bank notified me that my Six Flags payment went up too. I'm still wondering what will happen next year when SFA is gone - does the membership go away with it, or would they migrate it to, I dunno, KD (nearest park) or Gadv (nearest legacy SF park)? If the membership goes up in flames, this price hike is one last Zimjob middle finger to us all.

Yep mine jumped up almost $6 bucks ironically the day after they announced the closer.

 

[warfelg]

In what can only be termed a mind bending decision, Six Flags just raised the price of my legacy pass. "Hey pass member, who kept paying us during COVID, we have decided to close the park closest to you and raise the price of your dramatically less useful membership at the same time!"

Maybe if they had bothered to explain to me which of my benefits would apply to Cedar Fair parks, it might possibly make some sense. In the complete absence of real information about how the legacy passes will work, however, it is just a fascinating strategy. In my specific case, since I also have a Prestige/All Parks Pass, I am struggling to find enough value in my Diamond Elite VIP Membership to want to continue to give them my money. Previously, I considered the benefits from my legacy Six Flags membership too good to give up (yet).

This is a really scummy way to go about all of this. I was going to join SFGreat America upon moving to Chicago but I doubt it now.

 

[MaxxForceFan]

^ I would wait to see what pricing looks like once the ticketing platforms are integrated later in the year and 2026 passes go on sale.

Richard Zimmerman

First and foremost, as I mentioned earlier, we have made significant progress on our merger integration and synergy realization plans. From a systems perspective, our IT integration is on-track. Guest data across all parks will be migrated to our in-house ticketing platform by year-end, providing a seamless experience for all park pass holders and enabling a more unified approach to pricing, promotion and CRM.

Thomas Yeh

I wanted to ask about progress on unifying your season pass selling strategy. I think you've been implementing a more consistent pricing on the legacy Six Flags footprint than was historically used. So any more color you can provide on how you've seen behavior shift on the Six Flag side, maybe both in terms of the blended pricing to date and the pace of adoption you expect and how much do you think that contributed to the gains that you saw in the last like 4 or 5-week period?

Richard Zimmerman

Listen, Thomas, it's Richard. What we saw over the last 4- or 5-week period, indeed, was indicative of where we think we could go. We strongly believe in a consistent approach to the market. So as the market understands they can they can make their own decisions on value that we provide and see that the value gets greater. We think there's a tremendous opportunity in June and July, given the membership aspect of the Six Flags program, and we've got that's sort of the installment and some of the pieces.

We really do need to get back to what I laid out in my prepared remarks, which is getting everybody on the same ticketing system. We harmonized the programs at a high level. We did not want to give up on this season and we rolled out the -- all Park Passport, which lets you visit any of our parks in the portfolio.

So a lot more work to do, but it's really going to be a lot easier, and we're going to be a lot more efficient and effective when everybody is on the same ticketing system when all the data is feeded into our data warehouse and the CRM folks that are on our team can go in and mine the value out of the -- our guests and the relationship we have with them and focus on driving more visits and getting more out of every visit from those set and path holders.

Brian, anything you want to add?

Brian Witherow

Yes, I would just say, Thomas, we knew coming into '25 given all the efforts that Richard just talked about in terms of ticket harmonization, but also program harmonization that it was going to be a little bit bumpy as we reset the season pass and membership programs on both sides of the portfolio. a little bit later start to the year with a later Easter and maybe deferring some of the opening days a little bit deeper into the season would put us a little bit timing-wise, behind where we were last year.

But very encouraged by the sales trends up mid-single-digits in terms of unit sales over the 5 weeks of April. And I think it's also important to note that there's multiple bites at this apple, right? It's not just the sale of 2025 passes, which May and June, as Richard noted, noted very meaningful part of the full sale cycle. But before we know, we'll be quickly into late summer and selling 2026 passes. And we feel we'll be in a much better place in terms of the consumers' understanding of what the program looks like. We'll be deeper into that exercise of harmonizing the ticketing platform.

So we're focused right now. The teams are highly focused on the May, June window, but there's a lot of prep work going on with plans for launch later than -- and so there's multiple opportunities to really drive the season pass program in the right direction.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/47...poration-fun-q1-2025-earnings-call-transcript

 

[Great Adventurer]

At least they're not completely mailing it in yet.

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It may be wishful thinking, but I'd really like SFA's final season be a memorable one, in a good way.

 

[harry580]

wait, maybe they saving a ride, so maybe six flags great adventure is getting this ride

 

[jscll]

At least they're not completely mailing it in yet.

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It may be wishful thinking, but I'd really like SFA's final season be a memorable one, in a good way.

Shipwreck falls is also scheduled to return on May 24th. (I did not think to grab a picture of the sign when I was last there.) I did not expect it to reoppen as it was closed to reduce operating and maintenance costs.
And the stunt show will be returning for a final season.

 

[warfelg]

^ I would wait to see what pricing looks like once the ticketing platforms are integrated later in the year and 2026 passes go on sale.

It’s not what does the pricing look like, it’s the raising the price unannounced while closing the park that pass is tied to.

 

[horsesboy]

It’s not what does the pricing look like, it’s the raising the price unannounced while closing the park that pass is tied to.

At least in my case I did recieve an email announcing the price raise at the time of my prior month payment. However that again means the price went up a substantial amount at the time of the closer announcement.

 

[The Master]

What happened to all the optimism for CF and ZImmerman? The closure of SFA will increase customer value and satisfaction somehow. At least the shareholders will be happier which is the important thing.

 

[Zachary]

What happened to all the optimism

If you read the merger thread, I think you'll see that many of us have been very skeptical of the merger from the start. I'm on record calling it a disaster for the industry. I think this news item is good evidence for that position.

You're conflating the positivity around the future of SFGAdv with positivity for the merger overall. I believe SFGAdv is one of the parks that stands to benefit GREATLY from this merger—at the cost of parks like Six Flags America. Overall, as a fan of the industry's products broadly, I think that's awful. For SFGAdv specifically though, it's great news.

 

[CoasterBroCam]

If you read the merger thread, I think you'll see that many of us have been very skeptical of the merger from the start. I'm on record calling it a disaster for the industry. I think this is good evidence for that position.

You're conflating the positivity around the future of SFGAdv with positivity for the merger overall. I believe SFGAdv is one of the parks that stands to benefit GREATLY from this merger—at the cost of parks like Six Flags America. Overall, I think that's awful. For SFGAdv though, it's great news.

Every time I’ve called the merger a disaster people say I’m overreacting! Finally someone who agrees!

 

[Zachary]

Every time I’ve called the merger a disaster people say I’m overreacting! Finally someone who agrees!

The main merger thread here on ParkFans has been very negative about the prospect of the merger from the point it was first rumored. I know I saw some shortsighted folks on social media proclaim how great it was because they'd only have to buy one pass now or whatever, but those people clearly knew nothing of the actual, typically overwhelmingly negative consumer impacts that basically always result from consolidation like this.

Rough waters were easily predictable from the start.

 

[The Master]

If you read the merger thread, I think you'll see that many of us have been very skeptical of the merger from the start. I'm on record calling it a disaster for the industry. I think this news item is good evidence for that position.

You're conflating the positivity around the future of SFGAdv with positivity for the merger overall. I believe SFGAdv is one of the parks that stands to benefit GREATLY from this merger—at the cost of parks like Six Flags America. Overall, as a fan of the industry's products broadly, I think that's awful. For SFGAdv specifically though, it's great news.

I agree that the merger is terrible for the industry but I disagree that its going to lead to a rosey future for GAdv. This is the only place I see any optimism for GAdv which has suffered a major downsizing in rides and it is uncertain its ride count will be rebuilt to its former glory anytime soon. That park also lost several of its icons in one controversial sweep making it feel less like GAdv now. A few coats of paint and repavement isn't worth the loss of several iconic rides by a long shot. However, GAdv still faces a better future than poor SFA. Thinking about it, its no coincidence that one SF park was subject to major amputation and downsizing while its closet neighboring legacy SF park faces complete closure. Its doubtful GAdv will even receive any of the much needed flats from SFA.

 

[the_pantsmith]

This is probably the only place you've seen optimism for GrAdv bc it's the only message board about coasters that isn't chock full of either 14 year olds with unfounded hot takes derailing every thread (like Reddit) or angry entitled 40 year olds (like TPR). This forum is where I come for actual conversations; not shocking it's also the only one with nuanced takes about the future of GrAdv that go deeper than "I'm mad they removed ka".