As a former Apollo operator I understand they can not randomly bring rides online. They can put in extra effort to get staff to the park early ensuring rides are running smoothly by opening.
Another Annoying detail just from today’s visit alone, when the park opens at noon and people started to head through the train starts to depart the gates come down the crowd has to wait and the empty train takes off. It stops in Festa. When pantheon is not operating I go to ride the train and I’m told I can’t ride it until it comes around again, so it hasn’t even taken its maintenance lap. That maintenance lap should’ve occurred before guests we’re ever even in the park. These are the kind of operations mistakes that are nothing but the blame of leadership. Little details are what makes a great visit.
We need a new president now.
And speaking as a former lead for Area 4 rides, and as a former operator for Area 2 rides, I’m going to address a couple of your complaints.
For the train, there’s 2 things. One, the people who are opening at whatever station it is they’re opening at, have to walk all the way to their station before the train can even start its opening cycle lap. Second, often times the stops are to ensure everything at each station is working as intended—signals, gates, etc. Those things are manually controlled with the exception of the gates lowering as a train is entering the station. I will also note that maintenance does their own lap—but as I state earlier, the operations team must do their own, and it takes significantly longer to do that because of how long the hike to stations is, and that’s not including if they have to do track cleaning before they open. If they’re doing track cleaning, tack another 20-30 minutes onto the opening time. The reason you have to wait until the train returns to festa the second time is because the leads cannot sign off on the opening paperwork until the train makes a full and complete lap.
Two—the staffing issue. If they were to do as you suggest, be fully ready before the park even opens, many places would be getting scheduled for up to potentially 1 or even 2 hours before opening. When most attractions only need around 20 minutes to do their opening procedures. So often times crews are due in around 30 minutes before their location opens for the day. Doing what you suggested would leave crews running the clock not actually running said rides. I mentioned the staggered openings thing before in my last post, and this is one way they combat the staffing and maintenance things. Staggering the openings of lands and attractions makes maintenance’s job easier as they can work from what opens first to what opens last, and for park ops it makes labor budgets easier to manage.
No matter how early you bring staff in try and ensure stuff is running smoothly for the attractions, rides after all are machines and computers. They can have issues at any moment in time. Pantheon often is ready with the area, but due to the fact that Pantheon is very tech heavy, it can often see delayed openings because something comes up just before opening time or during a test cycle.
These kind of things are not in leaderships hands—but corporate’s. Leadership is just doing the best with what they’re given, which is unfortunately, a shitty hand. And for what it’s worth, that train thing? That’s a normal occurrence. Same deal with the Skyride—In fact, the maintenance green tagging process isn’t even done until opening cycles are about 3/4 of the way done, as maintenance has to be present to see the cabins fully cycle through at least once. Trust me, Kevin is very much doing just fine. Might I add he was the one who pushed through the Burgermeister’s Hideaway stuff? That was done almost exclusively at the park level with corporate pretty much just green lighting the idea. I’d rather have Kevin as our park president than the former BGT park president—who was more or less just a puppet for corporate. That’s why BGT sucks a lot—there’s not many people there trying to protect their park from United Parks Corporate stupidity, because the top dog doesn’t even do it.
Trust me, if Kevin had his way, Roman Rapids waterfalls would’ve been back when the ride reopened, DarKoaster would have double the onride theming, Verbolten’s theming would still work and inside wouldn’t be just be coaster in a box. Pantheon would’ve gotten more theming. Staffing would be better. You get the idea. Kevin genuinely cares about the park, but he’s limited but corporate’s insanely greedy, money hungry suits. Corporate tightened down labor budgets like crazy a while back, basically only allowing minimal staffing with the tiniest bit of wiggle room. They also capped out labor hours in a set day for different locations and such too. They created the bullshit surcharge (they didn’t need it, their merch and food is insanely priced as it is), degraded the guest experience, and more as “cost cutting measures”. Kevin 100% was against all of those so called cost cutting measures. Be thankful what we currently have is all that’s happened. If corporate had their way, BGW would be WAY worse than it is now.
