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The only time people voluntarily rode AA was when they wanted their spine readjusted. My favourite in-park photos have always been on that ride because I look like I'm ready to embrace the sweet release of death.

We're only a few years off of Superman's 20th anniversary... I'd say that's pretty close.

I only ever rode it as Lethal Weapon so my experience was always like being slapped in both ears by Will Smith or maybe should that be Danny Glover in that case.

Yeah it would be purr insanity to go over $99. I do wish they'd make up their minds on wether WWW is a part of DW or not. I'd argue not as I think being lumped with DW is holding WWW back from being more successful

If.

Absolutely agree with you. WWW feels like an extension of Dreamworld and not it's own thing despite being a great water park. I know people who have gone to WnW for a day trip and that's it for their park visits, but I can't think of anybody who has just gone to WWW. I agree that it would be wise to give it its own identity, and that might even benefit their value proposition in the long run as well.

A bit hard to be a standalone park competing with WnW when you're only currently open 3 days a week while your competitor is open every day.

As it currently stands, you can buy a one park season pass to Dreamworld, but not WWW. That is not smart. WWW doesn't have a positive or a negative reputation, but all its branding is combined with a place that does. That is also not smart. I mean more in terms of identity. WnW despite the Village marketing still has its own identity seperate to MW and SW. WWW doesn't have this, and I think if they did it would help the situation out of sight. This is against every marketing play of the past decade where it's been 100% about passes, but I would love to see WWW go off school and push single day tickets at the start of next 'season' and price them at a reasonable level. Something like $50 a head. Remember it's not about a high day ticket price to push cheap passes, it's just about getting people through the door at all. Market the parks separately, open the park everyday from when they reopen, and do some 'adults at kids prices' and push the ever loving shit out of it. If you want to do a deal when you're there to upgrade to a DW year pass, so be it, but push the park that people will go to, and let them come without trying to get them to commit to a year of a park they don't want to go to. EDIT that seems more combative than I intended it to 🤔

https://www.hussrides.com/en/classic-rides/top-spin-suspended I think you were looking at the wrong ride model. The TOP SPIN® CLASSIC has 40 seats. TOP SPIN® SUSPENDED has 38 as stated on the manufacturers website.

Taken when kids were the parents responsibility. Taken when it's your fault I wasn't watching my kids.

Yeah cheers - I was hoping someone would bring these fences up and inevitably lead me to the point everyone missed because they were too busy playing into the Village vs Dreamworld trope that's been done to death. Disneyland had crappy fences at the front when it first opened. Over time they've improved it and this is what they look like now: This is what that area looked like when it first opened: This is what it looks like now: You don't arrive from the first picture to the last picture in either scenario by one massive leap overnight. It's usually additive over time or subtractive over time (also known as death by a thousand cuts). Consider then that the fence is symbolically and literally another stake in the ground where the park has lost a just a tidbit of charm. Initially it's the retirement of one of the steam trains. "It's okay Slick, they've got another, don't be so hard on them." Then it's retirement of the steam trains altogether. "Slick don't be so petty by hyper-focussing!" Then Dreamworld pulls out the waterfall and lets the stations and their gardens fall into disarray. "Look it's just one bit here and there, don't worry about it." Then the next year a station gets removed. "Nothing was there anyway, who cares." Then the train line gets shortened, then there's gravel instead of grass, then ugly fences go up. "Bloody hell Slick, give them a break, Village put up an ugly fence once so why can't Dreamworld?" Do this a few more times and one day you'll find guests and enthusiasts alike walk around the park going "jeese, there's no charm left, I wonder what happened." And it won't be immediately obvious because it's not just one thing that makes the difference, it's a thousand things over many years, one of which is the chain-link fence. Reading my opinion and thinking i'm hyper-focussing on the fence in order to nit-pick and then pointing out a competitor's fence is just missing the point completely and doubling down in the aforementioned trope. Consider the bigger picture, is this an additive step or a subtractive step? Given what once was, it's a subtractive step. Granted, wider context, Village should also be held to the same standard. And thanks to Dreamworld, theme parks in Australia are a litigious nightmare and fences are a necessary evil. But c'mon, you've got rocks in your head if you think this looks good in isolation.

^A long rant but very worthwhile of a read - especially for Village exec. Well said. In particular: You're god-damn right about that. And in my opinion I feel it comes across as contempt for the park-guest. Top-Golf has to deliver a certain standard, and it does (mostly). AOS is dinner and a show for ~$100 and you don't want Mr Dad coming out at the end of the show demanding a refund as that can be very bad for business. But somewhere along the line, it became acceptable to do that in the parks. Ride down? don't blame us, government safety regulations. Check the T&Cs, we're allowed to do this and you can't say shit about it. Come back next time. I've deleted number 3 because I think everyone has coasted about as far as they can on that excuse. If you're still blaming covid because your 2019-era business model hasn't been updated to account for covid, and the different strategies required to operate a business in this time, that's on you for not pivoting, and is no longer something that can be gotten away with with a "but covid". As mentioned, staffing issues are a possibility - but things like weeds, gardens, broken speakers... this isn't high-tech shit that requires much effort. A little weed spray here and there, generous application of rake and a few bags of woodchip et al... Heck, Wonderland ran a 7 zone audio system out of one room and the speakers and speaker housings were built IN HOUSE when they couldn't get the genuine dino's from the US by a total of 4 guys. It takes a level of knowledge, sure, but ultimately its about priority or giving a shit. If they can staff S&E with FOH operators, camera operators, etc - they could divert someone to work on these speakers for a few days - in the off season - mid-week - for a few days and you wouldn't notice. Don't run your camera down main street for a day. A lot of this comes down to caring and attention to detail. 'Reining in the spending' doesn't mean the 'weed killer' budget got cut. It just means nobody is paying enough attention to detail anymore, because they don't care as long as the one-shots, fast tracks, and all the other upcharges keep rolling in. I just had to repost this again - one, to say I agree with it - and two, because it needs to be noticed.

I stopped in recently and... yeah. Not a great vibe there at all. I'm sure there's a million excuses ("the Covid"), but there weren't any excuses made for still charging the prices they do. For reference my wife (who does not at all stay up to date with the parks and isn't interested in doing so) came away saying the place "is looking very sad". Interestingly we went to Top Golf afterward and the bay attendant asked how the park was and when my wife said it was pretty sad she agreed and noted that several others had said the same thing this week. Justice League was a complete and utter shambles. There's no point operating the ride in that type of condition, except if you're trying to cover up for a lot of your other rides being down (which, really, isn't actually making that situation any better). The guns had a life of their own and bore no resemblance to what you did with them. A significant proportion of the usually-lit set pieces were not lit. The projection elements (where visible) were out of sync, non-interactive, and of very poor visual quality. Elements like the mist screen didn't have a hope in hell of working. Photo screens at the exit mostly did not work, and for those that did the quality of the photograph was abysmal. Superman was down, which is a lost drawcard. Batwing was down, which created a zone of the park right as you enter where your view is dominated right away by rides you can't ride (Batwing, Superman, Arkham). West was down, which creates an entire dead wing of the park, especially given Doomsday does not announce its presence well to passers-by, and frankly is pretty sucky and unpopular. The kids area is probably around two flat rides (and dare I say a play structure) short of being good. If you have a young kid you will probably miss the height for Speedy so you're going to be restricted solely to the carousel, JDS, Sylvester and Tweety Cages (if your kid is okay to ride alone), and railroad. Railroad is mighty uncomfortable for an adult and the rope-based restraint system ensures capacity is very low, so you're probably not going to want to do that many times. Not having more characters doing walk-arounds of this zone is a missed opportunity. I appreciate that they will do photos at times throughout the day at the entrance to the area (the backdrop to the photos is an odd-choice though), but it's not the same as a chance encounter with a character as you explore the area for the kids. I'm not sure if it's a new thing but it's a shame that staff won't also take a photo with your phone in addition to their professional one so that more families can get photos together. I'm sure there's a Covid excuse brewing there, but that doesn't feel like the motivation when you're in the park. On the topic of characters and photos though; setting Batman up with Robin and the batmobile at the head of the main drag behind a red rope next to a sandwich board that spruiks $80/photo with them is fucking gross. I lost count of how many kids I heard on the way past say they wanted to go and say hi to Batman only for them not to be able to. Fantastic guest experience. On the plus side the folks appearing as Shaggy/Scooby were really fantastic with the guests whenever we saw them, and I sincerely hope the park looks after them. I'm not sure what's so hard about getting wait time signs semi-accurate out the front of major rides (especially given there's far less to keep up to date with half the park seemingly down), but we never saw one that was even within a multiple of accuracy. It was frustrating watching Rivals advertise a 10 minute wait when it was a 45 minute wait, and all the more frustrating watching the load attendant on several occasions accidentally mis-count riders to be admitted and then rather than correcting the mistake when it was found instead just dispatching with empty seats. That type of thing is hard to hide from guests when they have 45 minutes to watch it happen over and over and think "that could have been me on there". The parade seems worse every time I see it. Now we are down to the point of the floats never stopping and characters staying on them which doesn't make it very interactive or memorable. Again, I'm sure excuses re: Covid, but jesus, fleeting contact and outside area. Doesn't even need to be contact, really. I also would avoid having the characters on the floats ignore the customers at either side of the road and play to the crewmember with the un-whitebalanced handycam for the big screens (that near-nobody is watching). The stunt show was also worse than I remembered. No fireball, no car jumping, little comedy, laughably poor quality LED screen. I'm not sure who it's aimed at entertaining, but I'm guessing it's Showtime FMX. Food and beverage is slightly better at Movie World, but generally abysmal across the VRTP parks. Rivals is still good once you get on it. Didn't bother with GL. Scooby still had broken and crappy effects in the first half, but the disco room was quite passable. Clearly the maintenance-related items are issues the park is choosing to have, because a short walk away at AOS they aren't choosing to have the same problems.

I have considered making a similar thread for quite awhile, the Villains area is in particular need of attention. I have noticed a large difference since BGH took control, the parks have raised prices on everything but the quality/standard has fallen. I have no problem with a One Pass being $189 currently, but the park should be operating at the same or better standards than when they were at $139. For example it's near impossible to get VQ reservations for the major attractions now on a weekend only an hour after opening as the allocation is much smaller to push Fast Track/One Shot's. The only department I am aware of having staffing issues and are continually advertising for staff is Show & Entertainment, not surprising considering someone with strong vocal ability is only paid $26.69 an hour part time.