State of the Parks

[Zachary]

You can tell me to avoid major holidays but I'm not really talking about me. Your average "GP" only gets so many days off and likely has to pick a weekend or holiday. I don't think that should mean a completely unworkable experience. I think the park should be built to handle crowds because that's what amusement parks are for. Instead, they're being built to handle smaller groups of people who paid more for "special" experiences while distributing the limited resource of "capacity" intentionally unequally. And that's why I hate Phantom Spire. Nobody should have to plan around a certain low-capacity ride to the point where they may feel their options are a one-time Fast Lane or just don't ride, and that is how some people currently feel about Flash. I know I didn't ride it until I finally got the chance to visit on a weekday in November. Most people aren't planning for repeat visits and will end up feeling like they lost out on the big new experience if they don't commit to the wait, which of course, is worse because of Fast Lane (I can't believe there are grown adults who "disagree" with this fact)

As far as the phone thing goes I completely agree. It's incredibly stupid to have to "book" fast lane rides online and part of the dystopian push to prevent all organic interaction for more Data Driven profit seeking. I often use Disney as an example for everything I despise about the organizational taskmastering of "conquering" modern theme parks/getting EVERYTHING done. Amusement parks should be environments where everything is approachable and fun and easy to understand, dare I say relaxing. Instead, we get policies that force guests to strategize against a class of people who paid to have the "luxury" of waiting a reasonable amount of time.

Jenny Nicholson in her video on Star Wars Land explained this better than anyone I've seen. I'll have to find some timestamps later because it's four hours long lol. But modern amusement parks are now tiring environments where it feels like you're missing out unless you pay to upgrade. Not everybody is gonna give up like me and say If you can't beat em, join em. Some amount of people will just not come back because of how cheated they feel by the tiered structure, or even if they don't get that far in thought, just because they waited so long.

I completely agree with all of that @northdetective—and I believe parks haven't realized how much damage this approach has done to their reputations. They blame increased competition from at-home entertainment options, they blame the weather, they blame poor marketing strategy, they blame bad cap-ex choices—all of these things likely play a role—but you will rarely see them consider whether or not their own basic profiteering—maintenance budget cuts limiting train availability, operations staffing cuts limiting throughput, selecting non-capacity-optimized cap-ex to save money, nickel-and-diming guests at every turn, creating an aggressively-price-tiered experience, charging exorbitant in-park prices that have vastly outpaced inflation vs in-park pricing from just a decade ago, etc—has harmed their reputations, limited their audiences, and ultimately, long-term, notably harmed their bottom lines.

Isn't it a little odd that, when you talk to normies about parks, one of the most-often-cited complaints seems to be crowds/lines/etc—and despite the public's attention spans having significantly decreased—presumably leading to a less-willing-to-wait audience—you rarely see questions on park surveys asking about the queuing experience? If the data was gathered, don't we think it would show that lines are, for the average guest, one of the largest pain points/disincentives associated with visiting parks? And yet we see parks continually build non-capacity-optimized attractions, artificially slow operations, pull trains from service, etc.

When I compare the throughput of rides 20 years ago to the throughput of those same exact rides now at my local parks, it's astonishing. The vast majority of parks simply don't give a shit about capacity anymore and they don't seem to give a shit about the almost-certainly, hugely-negative impacts their capacity disinterest has had on their reputations, the desirability of visiting their parks, etc.

With the introduction of paid, front of the line options, natural market forces have driven parks to this place. Why should they care about a lack of capacity increases the pressure on guests to pay for pure-profit "products?" Obviously, to maximize profits, they should build rides with mediocre capacity and then sell front of the line access that will monetize on a per-ride basis about 40 to 50% of that ride's limited capacity, right?

Except I sincerely didn't think parks have even remotely appreciated the harm this has done to the perception of parks in the wider entertainment market and, in-turn, the damage this strategy has stealthily done to their bottom lines. Unfortunately, unwinding this clock may just be impossible. Nowadays, daily attendance may be down enough and parks' bottom lines may have become so dependent on these ultra-premium, pure-profit offerings that there's no real path back to a 90s/00s-like park experience.

 

[northdetective]

I completely agree with all of that @northdetective—and I believe parks haven't realized how much damage this approach has done to their reputations. They blame increased competition from at-home entertainment options, they blame the weather, they blame poor marketing strategy, they blame bad cap-ex choices—all of these things likely play a role—but you will rarely see them consider whether or not their own basic profiteering—maintenance budget cuts limiting train availability, operations staffing cuts limiting throughput, selecting non-capacity-optimized cap-ex to save money, nickel-and-diming guests at every turn, creating an aggressively-price-tiered experience, charging exorbitant in-park prices that have vastly outpaced inflation vs in-park pricing from just a decade ago, etc—has harmed their reputations, limited their audiences, and ultimately, long-term, notably harmed their bottom lines.

Isn't it a little odd that, when you talk to normies about parks, one of the most-often-cited complaints seems to be crowds/lines/etc—and despite the public's attention spans having significantly decreased—presumably leading to a less-willing-to-wait audience—you rarely see questions on park surveys asking about the queuing experience? If the data was gathered, don't we think it would show that lines are, for the average guest, one of the largest pain points/disincentives associated with visiting parks? And yet we see parks continually build non-capacity-optimized attractions, artificially slow operations, pull trains from service, etc.

When I compare the throughput of rides 20 years ago to the throughput of those same exact rides now at my local parks, it's astonishing. The vast majority of parks simply don't give a shit about capacity anymore and they don't seem to give a shit about the almost-certainly, hugely-negative impacts their capacity disinterest has had on their reputations, the desirability of visiting their parks, etc.

With the introduction of paid, front of the line options, natural market forces have driven parks to this place. Why should they care about a lack of capacity increases the pressure on guests to pay for pure-profit "products?" Obviously, to maximize profits, they should build rides with mediocre capacity and then sell front of the line access that will monetize on a per-ride basis about 40 to 50% of that ride's limited capacity, right?

Except I sincerely didn't think parks have even remotely appreciated the harm this has done to the perception of parks in the wider entertainment market and, in-turn, the damage this strategy has stealthily done to their bottom lines. Unfortunately, unwinding this clock may just be impossible. Nowadays, daily attendance may be down enough and parks' bottom lines may have become so dependent on these ultra-premium, pure-profit offerings that there's no real path back to a 90s/00s-like park experience.

Thanks for making this thread. The irreversibility of the model is a great point. Genuinely, and I'm being 100% serious, if they took away Fast Lane today, there would be hundreds of people calling it a "woke" decision because our cultural norms have shifted back to rugged individualism and hatred of the collective. I would say 2025 was my first year "back" after not being able to visit parks much during/immediately following college, so I don't think I rode a roller coaster in the time frame between my high school senior trip to BGW to last year (6 years). So much has shifted that I feel the whole business has been made thoroughly less enjoyable for the consumer post-COVID, like many many others.

A lot of people have said that Cedar Point will be at a "tipping point" this year in terms of Fast Lane sales and how much capacity can be allocated to them. It'll be interesting to see that play out there, and what the whole company makes of it. I fully understand that Fast Lane cannot just be dropped overnight, and having paid for it for the season, I don't want that, but I do hope when the country as a whole gets a little closer to normal, we'll be able to stomach the egalitarianism of the traditional queue (for able users).

 

[Zachary]

but I do hope when the country as a whole gets a little closer to normal, we'll be able to stomach the egalitarianism of the traditional queue (for able users).

The problem really is though that the last 15-ish years of regional park development has occurred in this environment—cap-ex, marketing, business practices, everything has been designed and optimized for this reality—catering to a smaller and smaller audience, attempting to extract maximum profits from a smaller overall base of attendees—financially and, in some cases, structurally (as with low capacity additions like BGT's Iron Gwazi, SFGAdv's Flash, etc) the parks have been redesigned to be profitable in this manner. The investments that would be required and the losses that would have to be incurred to reverse course probably wouldn't be realistic to ask from any business, but especially not one that has become as financially unstable as the regional amusement park space has.

I think some of these decisions have created a sort of death spiral that these parks really, legitimately cannot recover from—not without a toppling and rebuilding that would likely be just as likely to result in a park's death as it would be to result in a park's resurrection.

I think Busch Gardens Tampa is such an informative case study here. Busch Gardens Tampa was one of the country's best regional theme parks. 15 years ago it was essentially what Dollywood is today—a regional theme park so strong that it really defined the upper echelon of a regional theme park and even managed to begin pushing at the upper bound of that definition. Just 15 years later, the place is an industry laughing stock. Busch Gardens Tampa, to a degree unlike that of literally any other park in the country, has experienced this completely unbridled, entirely unrestrained, guest-experience-be-damned-style profiteering. They're not doing anything substantially different than most regional parks—many, MANY other parks are walking their same path—Busch Gardens Tampa, thanks to a total lack of local leadership/autonomy has simply sprinted down that path at a shocking—almost impressive—speed. They've fully cashed out their legacy and reputation, they've abolished any even rough facade of a care for throughput, they've slashed culinary, landscaping, custodial, operations, maintenance, entertainment, etc., they've limited their audience down to teens and young adults looking for thrill rides thanks to a lengthy pattern of investment in nothing but unthemed ride hardware, they've added a series of low-capacity attractions, their marketing is abominable, and the park experience is trash.

What has this done? It has driven local audiences with taste, flexibility, and resources away to their competitors in Orlando, it has significantly reduced day-tripping Orlando tourists from adding a BGT day, and it has made BGT a wildly unappealing regional destination for Floridians outside the Tampa market. I think BGT realizes what they've done—they're now trying to invest in culinary again, they tried to recapture some old BEC magic by trying to bring back Jungala, they attempted some theming on Phoenix Rising—but it has seemed to me like these investments are falling flat. The audiences that would have appreciated these elements are already long, long gone. The overtures that would be required to lure them back are enormous and likely well outside the realm of what is reasonable for BGT right now. Ultimately, Busch Gardens Tampa has deteriorated from a class-leading regional theme park to a trashy local amusement park in the span of only 15 years and it is tremendously hard for me to imagine a real recovery for the property without MAJOR upheaval and a very long-term, very costly turnaround plan.

The unhinged, breakneck pace at which which Busch Gardens Tampa pursued these anti-consumer policies is unique, but I also think that it may have been a natural result of their HIGHLY competitive market. When audiences have the ability to drive an hour away for a better experience at a theme park, your hold on your audience is likely far more fragile than if you're a regional giant in a far less competitive market (like, say, Carowinds).

In some ways though, I think the path back for a park in a competitive market like BGT's is actually far more clear than the path back for a park in an uncontested market like Carowinds. In the contested market, your audience is still attending parks—they're just patronizing a better one. If you invest a ton of money and effort into a park in a competitive market, you can begin to win those existing park-goers back.

I worry that some of the regional amusement parks have done something far worse—I worry they've driven people away from being park-goers at all. The path to winning people back from their couches scrolling TikTok and watching TV is far less clear. People who have already elected to remove that monthly pass payment from their family budget are far less likely to jump back in than if they had simply shifted those dollars to a competitor. I'm very concerned that some of the parks are making audiences decide they don't like amusement parks broadly, not just a specific amusement park. Pulling people back from that requires convincing them not only of your park's reformation, but that their dislike of your entire base product is wrongheaded. That strikes me as being incredibly difficult and, likely, incredibly expensive.

This all sounds very doomer, I know. I think most regional chain parks are in an absolutely horrible state right now. Hopefully more conservative (profiteering-wise, not socially) chains like Herschend can continue to ignore the devil on their shoulder encouraging them to embrace the perversions we've seen from much of the industry. Hopefully independent parks like Knoebels and Holiday World can continue to stick to their convictions and resist the urge to follow the short-term gains. Hopefully more passion project park start-ups like Lost Island will arise. Hopefully audiences, both thoosies and the public alike, will continue supporting the few, relatively good actors that remain. Hopefully, long-term, competition from these less mainstream, less shareholder-focused parks can slow or even halt some of the worst instincts of the likes of Six Flags and United.

 

[northdetective]

The problem really is though that the last 15-ish years of regional park development has occurred in this environment—cap-ex, marketing, business practices, everything has been designed and optimized for this reality—catering to a smaller and smaller audience, attempting to extract maximum profits from a smaller overall base of attendees—financially and, in some cases, structurally (as with low capacity additions like BGT's Iron Gwazi, SFGAdv's Flash, etc) the parks have been redesigned to be profitable in this manner. The investments that would be required and the losses that would have to be incurred to reverse course probably wouldn't be realistic to ask from any business, but especially not one that has become as financially unstable as the regional amusement park space has.

I think some of these decisions have created a sort of death spiral that these parks really, legitimately cannot recover from—not without a toppling and rebuilding that would likely be just as likely to result in a park's death as it would be to result in a park's resurrection.

I think Busch Gardens Tampa is such an informative case study here. Busch Gardens Tampa was one of the country's best regional theme parks. 15 years ago it was essentially what Dollywood is today—a regional theme park so strong that it really defined the upper echelon of a regional theme park and even managed to begin pushing at the upper bound of that definition. Just 15 years later, the place is an industry laughing stock. Busch Gardens Tampa, to a degree unlike that of literally any other park in the country, has experienced this completely unbridled, entirely unrestrained, guest-experience-be-damned-style profiteering. They're not doing anything substantially different than most regional parks—many, MANY other parks are walking their same path—Busch Gardens Tampa, thanks to a total lack of local leadership/autonomy has simply sprinted down that path at a shocking—almost impressive—speed. They've fully cashed out their legacy and reputation, they've abolished any even rough facade of a care for throughput, they've slashed culinary, landscaping, custodial, operations, maintenance, entertainment, etc., they've limited their audience down to teens and young adults looking for thrill rides thanks to a lengthy pattern of investment in nothing but unthemed ride hardware, they've added a series of low-capacity attractions, their marketing is abominable, and the park experience is trash.

What has this done? It has driven local audiences with taste, flexibility, and resources away to their competitors in Orlando, it has significantly reduced day-tripping Orlando tourists from adding a BGT day, and it has made BGT a wildly unappealing regional destination for Floridians outside the Tampa market. I think BGT realizes what they've done—they're now trying to invest in culinary again, they tried to recapture some old BEC magic by trying to bring back Jungala, they attempted some theming on Phoenix Rising—but it has seemed to me like these investments are falling flat. The audiences that would have appreciated these elements are already long, long gone. The overtures that would be required to lure them back are enormous and likely well outside the realm of what is reasonable for BGT right now. Ultimately, Busch Gardens Tampa has deteriorated from a class-leading regional theme park to a trashy local amusement park in the span of only 15 years and it is tremendously hard for me to imagine a real recovery for the property without MAJOR upheaval and a very long-term, very costly turnaround plan.

The unhinged, breakneck pace at which which Busch Gardens Tampa pursued these anti-consumer policies is unique, but I also think that it may have been a natural result of their HIGHLY competitive market. When audiences have the ability to drive an hour away for a better experience at a theme park, your hold on your audience is likely far more fragile than if you're a regional giant in a far less competitive market (like, say, Carowinds).

In some ways though, I think the path back for a park in a competitive market like BGT's is actually far more clear than the path back for a park in an uncontested market like Carowinds. In the contested market, your audience is still attending parks—they're just patronizing a better one. If you invest a ton of money and effort into a park in a competitive market, you can begin to win those existing park-goers back.

I worry that some of the regional amusement parks have done something far worse—I worry they've driven people away from being park-goers at all. The path to winning people back from their couches scrolling TikTok and watching TV is far less clear. People who have already elected to remove that monthly pass payment from their family budget are far less likely to jump back in than if they had simply shifted those dollars to a competitor. I'm very concerned that some of the parks are making audiences decide they don't like amusement parks broadly, not just a specific amusement park. Pulling people back from that requires convincing them not only of your park's reformation, but that their dislike of your entire base product is wrongheaded. That strikes me as being incredibly difficult and, likely, incredibly expensive.

This all sounds very doomer, I know. I think most regional chain parks are in an absolutely horrible state right now. Hopefully more conservative (profiteering-wise, not socially) chains like Herschend can continue to ignore the devil on their shoulder encouraging them to embrace the perversions we've seen from much of the industry. Hopefully independent parks like Knoebels and Holiday World can continue to stick to their convictions and resist the urge to follow the short-term gains. Hopefully more passion project park start-ups like Lost Island will arise. Hopefully audiences, both thoosies and the public alike, will continue supporting the few, relatively good actors that remain. Hopefully, long-term, competition from these less mainstream, less shareholder-focused parks can slow or even halt some of the worst instincts of the likes of Six Flags and United.

BGT is a great example. My parents actually planned an entire trip to Tampa just to go to BGT and see Yankees spring training when I was in elementary school, and it wasn't even like it was the "sad" alternative to Disney/Universal because we'd already been. And my parents certainly aren't thoosies, they had just heard from friends that it was a great experience worth traveling for. Last October I drove ~3 hrs each way from the east coast of Florida to BGT and I struggled to feel like even that much travel was worth it for the experience I got. And the rot runs so deep that it's not even something you can always buy your way out of. On slow days the throughput just is what it is regardless of if you have Quick Queue or not. I feel like they've devalued their own product to sell a "solution" to the problem they created, but that solution isn't always applicable, and it seems corporations seem to "forget" the third option between long lines, paying up, or leaving the park. Many times for me it's the last option, but I'm always able to tell myself I'm young and traveling alone and the burden of a bad experience is just a lot smaller on me than it is for a family. And I still leave parks disgruntled. So I can only imagine getting burnt by a park once, somebody with kids is especially unlikely to give it a second chance. Like you said, the cost of convincing customers to reconsider is likely incredibly high. So letting things fall into decline and making an effort every few years doesn't seem to be working.

It just seems like unhelpful "advice" to say that parks should offer a consistent, predictable, and overall enjoyable experience. I do think that Herschend is not bad at offering that, it just doesn't seem like it brings in crazy profits as quickly as the Six Flags Disdain for Customers model

 

[michaellynn4]

The problem really is though that the last 15-ish years of regional park development has occurred in this environment—cap-ex, marketing, business practices, everything has been designed and optimized for this reality—catering to a smaller and smaller audience, attempting to extract maximum profits from a smaller overall base of attendees—financially and, in some cases, structurally (as with low capacity additions like BGT's Iron Gwazi, SFGAdv's Flash, etc) the parks have been redesigned to be profitable in this manner.

Media/audience fragmentation isn't a problem unique to this industry - it's plaguing nearly all entertainment-based business at this point. The proliferation of options out there have caused all entertainment companies to turn inward to their most loyal audiences to figure out ways to wring out every last dollar from them. ESPECIALLY public ones - and until laws / decisions are passed to whittle away at restrictions cause by shareholder primacy, they always will.

Case in point - I'm a wrestling nerd too (although the current product is hot garbage). There's a lot of news of how absolutely batshit insane WWE ticket prices have become recently post-TKO merger. Wrestlenomics recently published an article showing how ticket prices have practically doubled in the last two years alone, and some of the more premium seating areas have ballooned well beyond that. I recently heard a story on a podcast how one person paid over $700 per seat for second row back for a basic TV taping show, tickets that a couple years ago were less than $150 each. This quote within the article says it all:

TKO President and COO Mark Shapiro — who began overseeing WWE when the merger finalized — has been clear that raising ticket prices isn’t an accident, it’s a mission. At a Goldman Sachs conference in September, he said WWE “is not where UFC is yet on ticket yield” and that there’s “work to do.” He added that Vince McMahon “was primarily pricing tickets for families and wasn’t totally focused on maxing the opportunity.” Shapiro has made clear he sees higher ticket prices as part of a broader effort to expand WWE’s profitability. He connected the company’s latest increase in profits — “margin expansion” — to “higher ticket yield and site fees” and said there’s still “more room to go.”

Again - the only way to vocalize your concerns effectively with these companies is through your wallet. Continue to give them money for it, you're just incentivizing the practice. Probably easier said than done for some, but personally, I haven't given a dime since 2019 and my life hasn't suffered as a result.

 

[warfelg]

So to get into my rant on this I do need to touch something that's a touch political for a second:

Didge vs Ford (1919) that ruled in favor of shareholders, reinforced by Shlensky vs Wrigley (1968). They both ruled that companies must primarily be operated for the profit of shareholders.

Then there's the case the Supreme Court wont take up of Epic Games vs Apple, which deals with the legality of microtransactions while doing things like playing games.

Both of these cases came away with the same general notion and directive to companies - making money for the shareholders in just about anyway possible.

So why did I stop there real quick - I think it's shaped things like what we see in parks now through two simple-ish things. They need to make the stock profitable and they don't need to make a ticket price be "all in" for the experience of the park. So then there's the parts where I believe that parks 'helped' themselves along the way.

So lets start with the first part/case. Parks need to appease the share holders. It didn't happen right away because for the longest time parks were just a subsidiary of a lager corporation (less stress to perform) or they were privately owned so either there were no shareholders to appease or there were other branches to offset parks losses.

Over time as the parks that were a subsidiary had their parent company realize they were a drag on shareholder profits they dumped them to the other companies where that was a less of a worry. Then suddenly those companies were in debt of didn't have the reserves anymore to put into the parks. So they went public and the private equity came in.

Now, one of the issue with PE is that they understand the value of almost any company is in the real estate and not the business. so part of what they do to get shareholders money is they strip the business down, sell the business while keeping the bricks and land, then lease the land back to the new business owner. So many of those revamped companies fail because the lease on the land is so high.

I don't believe we are going to the point of that with parks, but I feel like we're seeing PE do what PE does. How can we reduce expenditures as much as possible while only investing in items that give any positive ROI. In my belief (seeing this happen in my field) its why we aren't seeing F&B programs improve, staffing shrunk, games and the like minimized. Example here, if you plan on selling 20k meals in a day, you would sell that regardless of 50 staff or 100 staff, you would do it regardless of 5 dining options or 15 options. So how do you save money there? Either charge WAY more for food or find the tipping point on price then cut back on staffing, close dining options, or strip operations of a specialized dining to run on minimal staff.

Now for the second part (and I'll tie this all together soon) on micro-transactions. While things like fast lanes aren't technically micro-transactions, they effectively operate as one. And with the SCOTUS not wanting to rule on that, you are seeing so many companies operate as if they are. So if you don't want to wait, you can just pay to skip it. Pay do do other things in the park. Pay more for photos you ultimately forget about by the end.

So this is where the politics meets parks.

You as the consumer no longer matter. Ever since the coaster wars happened and there was a consolidation of who owns the parks that cause PE to get involved nothing mattered anymore then the shareholder. If you look at bowling, there's something similar going on there, but what's interesting and opposite is there they are kicking out leagues to boost one time visitors. Meanwhile with parks it looks like they are pricing out one time visitors for people they know will return.

So parks have to earn their money for the shareholders of the PE in another way. That's a big part of why you see things like fast lanes. Now you got that pass holder needing to pay more for things like the fast lanes, upgrades to the day, season long drinks, moving lockers. Things that were 'free' or minimally charged (or didn't exist) now were charged to make the consumer feel like it was about convenience but really it was about allowing PE to cut corners on expenses.

When you think about it, they cut staffing for rides that allowed them to run 2-3 trains at a time constantly moving to 2 trains with longer dispatch times. So they introduced fast lanes, but did it result in more staffing? No. They kept staffing low and just allowed you to skip to the front of the line basically. It's a false sense of value to not wait because it really doesn't buy you anything. You're giving the company whatever amount to just skip lines. Something that costs them almost nothing.


So this beings me around to my frustration of state of parks:

They are no longer about families being able to enjoy themselves. They are money traps built to make PE's as much money as possible. And it's one hell of a catch-22 to deal with as someone who loves parks. If I spend money on going to parks I'm supporting this behavior from the parks/parent companies and we're going to see this type of action continue. But on the flip side, if we don't spend the money, the parks/parent companies have shown anymore that they are willing to shut down parks as a result.

As fans we're in a no win situation. And that sucks. Because there are so few parks that don't have all these things attached to going to them. If there was one park that didn't do all the extra upcharges, and had a robust staff the kept things moving I would go to it all the time. This is where I get really mad because there's no parks really doing that anymore to put your money towards to show parks we reward things like that. But no because we got every park copy-catting each other with going down the rabbit hole of trying to profiteer off every nook and cranny they could of their parks we get stuck having to continue to support this crappy behavior.

 

[AmyUD06]

If there was one park that didn't do all the extra upcharges, and had a robust staff the kept things moving I would go to it all the time. This is where I get really mad because there's no parks really doing that anymore to put your money towards to show parks we reward things like that. But no because we got every park copy-catting each other with going down the rabbit hole of trying to profiteer off every nook and cranny they could of their parks we get stuck having to continue to support this crappy behavior.

I think Knoebel's fits this bill.

I absolutely agree with the rest of the post.

 

[warfelg]

I think Knoebel's fits this bill.

I absolutely agree with the rest of the post.

So I purposely left them out of fitting that bill for one specific reason:

Knoebel's fits the "pay to play" format. You buy tickets then spend them on the rides you want to. Because you aren't paying a theoretically one pay all access.

So theoretically if you wanted to say it, Knoebel's is basically all lightning passed because you get to choose how you spend your tickets. But if they ever gated the entrance and kept everything the same I would be with you on the fits the bill part.

 

[AmyUD06]

So I purposely left them out of fitting that bill for one specific reason:

Knoebel's fits the "pay to play" format. You buy tickets then spend them on the rides you want to. Because you aren't paying a theoretically one pay all access.

So theoretically if you wanted to say it, Knoebel's is basically all lightning passed because you get to choose how you spend your tickets. But if they ever gated the entrance and kept everything the same I would be with you on the fits the bill part.

I can see that argument - but they do offer pay-one-price admission; just not on most weekends.

 

[warfelg]

I can see that argument - but they do offer pay-one-price admission; just not on most weekends.

And that's a fair enough counter. The not on most weekends is frustrating because I have had friends get them through work then basically not be able to use them.

For the record - despite my personal issues with Knoebel's, I do think they do a lot right.

 

[michaellynn4]

Only other thing I'd say about Knoebel's is the pay-per-ticket is sort of the built-in charm of the place, a carryover from yesteryears gone by, and not necessarily done in the same spirit as some of the cash grabs we're discussing from other parks. I get your point, though.

 

[warfelg]

Only other thing I'd say about Knoebel's is the pay-per-ticket is sort of the built-in charm of the place, a carryover from yesteryears gone by, and not necessarily done in the same spirit as some of the cash grabs we're discussing from other parks. I get your point, though.

Agreed that it's not a cash grab in the same spirit. But it's also why I didn't mention them.

I know this might be sorta a round-about way to describe my feeling but the pay-per-ticket effectively acts the same as a lightning pass. Why would you spend 8 tickets on a ride with a 40 minute wait when you could ride 3-4 smaller ticket rides in that time (unless of course it's your last 8 tickets and you aren't getting more)? The reason I don't see it as cash grab though is your using those tickets either way, so at least you have a choice as to which rides you want.

I really think Knoebel's needs it's own little category and exemption in many of these conversations because of how wildly different it's model is from others.