Tuesday 21 February 2017

News Update - 23rd February 2017

It's time for another week's news update!

Last week we told you about Disney theme park tickets going up. This week it's Universal's turn! Universal Orlando raised 1 day single park tickets to US$110. The OCRegister this week did an article on whether the Tickets and Passes for Disneyland and WDW represent "good value" for the entertainment they deliver. This is genuinely subjective, but it's hard to expect the recent rises are going to have any effect on the number of people through the gates, so I suggest they still are good value.

Over at Walt Disney World, we've seen interesting rumors about the return (in a way) of a previous attraction the Skyway. However it won't be an attraction in a park like the original Skyway, the rumor says it will be a park-to-park transportation that might link up the International Gateway rear-entrance of Epcot to the Studios park. That would be an awesome addition, as one of the biggest problem in WDW is the ability to park hop quickly!

At the same time this week, we heard that Disney's Hollywood Studios could be adding a BB-8 meet and greet sometime this April, which would be super cool!!

Over at Universal Orlando, there has been very quiet testing of a new technology in conjunction with their Express Pass system, Face Recognition. The system they call "Photo Validation Technology", is being tested in a couple of locations, and good help aid with Pass security within the park!

Theme Park Insider reports this week on another new phenomenon (for theme parks at least) that has started at Shanghai Disneyland, ticket scalping. The tickets being sold in this case, are FastPass tickets, which can then be used to see an attraction faster than the standby queue. The process seems awfully complicated, they need to get a family worth of passes, and then you have to go on the ride with the scalper pretending to be part of his family, however it doesn't breach any rules strictly. No doubts Disney will attempt to stamp out this from happening as soon as they can, but in such a big popular park (over 1 million visitors per month!!) it will be hard to change quickly!

In Dubai this week, apparently the Cloudy with a Change of Meatballs River Expedition opened at MotionGate Dubai, however I haven't yet heard from anyone who has ridden it. If you follow Theme Park Insider this week, you would have also seen an interview with Mycotoo, one of the designers of the MotionGate Dubai theme park.

Over in Germany, Movie Park Germany (which for the Australians reading started life as an almost exact clone of Warner Brother's Movie World), provided a sneak peak at their new attraction, a triple launching MACK coaster themed to the Star Trek series. Star Trek: Operation Enterprise will open for the park for their summer season, however it isn't yet clear whether it will have much more than a name to represent the Star Trek theme. Star Trek has always been a little bit of an awkward IP for theme parks, so it will be interesting to see if this attraction will draw much interest for this German park.


That's it for this week's News Update . For more Theme Park coverage, follow me on Twitter @themeparknut. Until next time, Cheers!

3 comments:

  1. WHAT there is a Movie World in Germany!!! Maybe you already mentioned that, but it still gives me a surprised face again :P

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    1. There is! It's funny. There was also one in Spain, and they all started out almost identical, but now look completely different! I wish I'd known about it when we went to Germany, we so would have gone!

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