Movie World - January 2014

Yesterday I had a very uninspiring day at Movie World. In retrospect it was a bad time to visit the parks, however it give me a view of the park that I rarely experience. I also experienced the down side to the Fast Track system that Movie World implement during the school holidays.

The park was as busy as I had seen it during the day. I've only seen more people there for Fright Nights. Waits were very quickly over and hour for all the major rides. We saw Scooby Doo peak at 120 minutes before we left. What it proved to me was that this park can't handle that volume of people. It is probably 2-3 crowd drawing attractions short of where it needs to be for this size of crowd.

The biggest irritation of the day was Fast Track. Not the people with Fast Track, but the way the queues were altered to deal with them. The trouble with these passes is that none of the queues were built with this in mind.

The best of the bunch should have been Justice League, which has an inside split in the line, however the crowd yesterday was so big, they had to use the outside overflow queue. Which meant both fast trackers and normals had to wait outside in steaming heat, so the entry could be controlled, and switched between the two queues. The outside staff member was letting people in so slow, that only half the internal queue was used, while the overflow queue was completely full. We waited 1 and a quarter hours between the two queues (the posted wait was 45 minutes). When we eventually rode we had screen failures (videos playing incorrectly, audio not lining up, and one hilarious Windows desktop on it's side. I've rode it 3 times now, once it was perfect, but ever since, no good. I wouldn't wait more than 20 minutes for it next time.

Superman had the same issue. The fast track integration point was at the front gate, which meant that the people where queued outside in the sun. We didn't ride Scooby, but it looked like the same setup.

The Green Lantern had a different setup. The Fast Trackers queued at the ride exit and loaded from the other side. This worked okay except the loading was slow because staff had to decide when to Fast Track and count out the people. Even though there was 6 cars running, and 4 platform staff, it was the slowest loading I have seen. We only queued for 35 mins (posted wait of 50 mins), but we saw at least 4 cars stop hard because of the full station.

We did walk straight into the 4D movie, Journey 2 the mysterious island. It was a long 4 hours to only cover 4 rides.

Queues as long as they were that day make you consider the quality of attractions and how long you'd wait for them. For instance, I love the Scooby Doo coaster, but I would only wait 30 minutes for it. This isn't the haunted mansion or splash mountain. To be honest, only Superman is really worth waiting an hour for. When you have enough time to value the rides, you also consider the value of having annual passes. If I, as a total theme park nerd, am rethinking getting passes next year, then normal people must do the same. I don't mean to sound alarmist, but there must be a measurable cost to having days that busy. I'm not suggesting limiting numbers, what I believe the park needs is more crowd sponges to even out the crowd.