Ride Availability

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There are many factors which affect the success of any day at a theme park and one of them is certainly the availability of the rides. Few things are worse than finding that your favourite attraction is closed or having your valuable time wasted by standing in a queue line waiting for a ride to be fixed after a breakdown. It is always best to have as much information as possible at your disposal before travelling and there are some tactics you can adopt to maximise your chances of bagging a ride on your favourites.

Scheduled Maintenance

All parks which are open year round must close each ride from time to time in order to perform the required maintenance. Even the parks which are open only for the summer months will need to work on their attractions from time to time. Many operators, notably Disney, will publish details of scheduled maintenance well in advance so it is possible to avoid the dates when the best rides are closed. Such closures usually occur in off peak periods and it is one of the downsides of the quieter days. Other parks are much poorer at such communications and so if there is no information online it is worth making a call to check. You may not always get a sensible answer but any information is better than none!

Breakdowns

Some parks have a great track record when it comes to keeping their rides running and I would like to praise Europa Park particularly in this regard. I visit this park almost every year and usually for several days and I have never been a victim of a ride breakdown which is astounding. Merlin Entertainments on the other hand have issues! The rides at Thorpe Park, Alton Towers and Chessington World of Adventures fail incessantly and I should know because I used to run some of them! Such shutdowns can result in long delays for the guests and the situation at Merlin Parks is made worse by the fact that the operators are not permitted to deal with the problems themselves, they have to wait for an engineer to attend. At Cedar Fairs’ parks the operators can deal with faults themselves as soon as they happen and so delays are kept to a minimum.

Before travelling it is wise to speak to those who have experience of the park to see which rides are most prone to trouble. When you arrive, if these rides are operational, get on them immediately whilst the going is good! If you do get caught in a shutdown you have to decide how long to hang around before leaving the queue line. Some interruptions are brief whilst others can take hours and most parks do not allow their operators to pass on the exact nature of the breakdown or how long it will take to fix. This is because they do not want to cause alarm or expose themselves to criticism if the fix takes longer than stated. If your time is limited it is often best to leave the ride and to return later in the day but you never really know.

Best Guess

No matter how much information you can obtain you can never rule out the fact that your day might be disrupted by mechanical failures and ride closures. It does always pay to find out as much as you can in advance though if you want to avoid spending most of the day looking at your timepiece or gazing dolefully at a closed attraction.

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Article By Sally Stacey