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Richard

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Posts posted by Richard

  1. I'm reposting this here to hopefully clarify so that everyone is on the same page.

    Day-to-day unexpected closures or stoppages are of no interest to the vast majority, unless it's in the context of a new attraction, a sidenote in a larger trip report, or a significant occurrence. Notice how there's generally no interesting responses to these minute-by-minute screenshots of maintenance page updates?

    If you have something specific and interesting to discuss, like Leviathan's ongoing issues or The Wedgie/Fully 6 being closed for a long time, feel free to post in the main Theme Park Discussion forum, just make sure it's in a specific topic dedicated to discussing it.

    Take two minutes before posting something. Think critically.

    • Are your posts contributing to a meaningful discussion?
    • Are you directly replying to what others are discussing in the topic?
    • Are you accompanying photos, links or screenshots with some sort of new information, opinion or additional questions that will further the discussion?

    If it's not directly related to what's being posted then it probably belongs in a different topic. If you're starting a new topic, make sure it's specific and will spark conversation. And if you are finding that no one is directly responding to your posts, it might be a sign to reconsider or find a way to make it more interesting.

    Sorry if there's been any confusion about the sort of discussion we want to foster, or where it should be posted.

    • Like 1
  2. Everything that's being done is in full consultation and with guidance from the manufacturer. The risk aversion of both Village and Mack is almost unrivalled in this industry, so it's crazy to think that anyone is making this up as they go along or that no one thought of seemingly simple ideas such as disassembling the train.

    Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous it's taking this long, but everything so far suggests that this is a really tricky problem to solve. What's worked for other rides and manufacturers obviously won't work here.

    They wouldn't have left it fixed halfway up the non-inverting loop after the weekend's efforts. Whether it was always intended as a dry run, or they encountered issues along the way, they're not going to walk away from cranes loaded with several tonnes of roller coaster train for any significant amount of time.

    However unlikely this situation is, this might well have been a problem waiting to happen. The non-inverting loop is the slowest moment of the entire ride (45km/hr at its highest point), and the hill  preceding it is shorter in height (38.2m vs 39.3m), which effectively means that if it loses too much speed between the top of the lift hill and the top of the loop, then it's going to valley in this spot.  If the preceding hill were taller and/or the loop shorter, then each high point would effectively reset its potential energy and ability to complete the course. (Stats from here)

    • Like 3
  3. Loving the enthusiasm for press releases everyone!

    Believe me I'd love nothing more than a homepage full of fresh stories from operators big and small. We can only share the releases we receive, though I can honestly say that we do share literally everything vaguely relevant that lands in our inbox, as I think an investor release about a WHS license demonstrates.

    Do feel free to reach out to the parks you've all mentioned here and suggest they get in touch with us. We only play favourites insofar as we'll publish it if they are proactive enough to send us a release in the first place.

    • Like 2
  4. 1 hour ago, New display name said:

    You're unwilling to take anything anything else into account.  6 months of Covid trading, westtest trading.   But no, it's all DW fault.🤷‍♂️ 

    All I’m taking into account is the actual results. You’ve repeatedly misrepresented what I’ve said, and misrepresented the actual numbers. If you want to disagree that’s fine, but there’s no place for blatant misrepresentation of facts.

    All things considered (weather, covid, brand and wider tourism trends, etc.), I think they underperformed. I didn’t expect a profit this year nor did expect them to give Village a run for their money. It’s  reasonable to expect an EBITDA profit in FY23, but it’s going to be more of an uphill battle than today’s presentation tries to convince us.

     They’ve gone to great lengths to put positive spin on the numbers  — as all public companies do — but I don’t think much of the spin stands up to scrutiny. Investors seem to agree.

    • Like 2
  5. 1 hour ago, New display name said:

    It sounded like you expect DW's rebound from Covid to be inline with MW rebound.   If MW didn't make a profit for the full year, how do you expect DW to make a profit?

    I never said anything close to that. That’s a strawman argument that you’re welcome to debate further with yourself. 
     

    1 hour ago, New display name said:

    The results show attendance is up 19% "pre-covid".

    Ticket sales is up 62% "pre-covid"

    Neither of those statements are correct. They’re up ~19% and 62% respectively on the prior corresponding period. In absolute terms FY22 is the second worst year on record (after FY21). Annual attendance is still about a third what it was pre-TRR and half what it was 2017-19 regardless of the creative language, cherry-picked benchmarks and obtuse graphs in today’s results.

    If you want to be optimistic about today’s results, that’s cool. But there’s a reason the market cap for Ardent is essentially the cash they have in the bank from the Main Event sale plus the value of the land Dreamworld occupies.

  6. 1 hour ago, New display name said:

    Years of neglect isn't going to be fixed with one coaster.

    Put to one side the bigger picture issues that plague Dreamworld concerning product offering and the brand’s reputation; no one is expecting them to be top of their game. But they were handed a win for the second half with Steel Taipan, Village’s shortcomings and the end of most Covid restrictions. These results don’t reflect any of that.

  7. 1 hour ago, DaptoFunlandGuy said:

    @Richard used to do really indepth financial analysis on the end of year park results. I'd be keen to hear your analysis this time around as it seems like the park has really turned the corner and started to climb the hill...

    Won't have the time for anything like that this time around.

    The results are abysmal though. 140,000 uptick in attendance (from their worst year on record) despite a major new attraction and pent up travel demand that smashed airlines, accommodation and the Village Parks for the second half of the year? Hard to read anything into these results other than something is seriously amiss with their overall strategy.

    30 minutes ago, franky said:

    It's less of a loss than last FY

    It's more of a loss. That's a spectacularly misleading graph they put in there for some reason.

     

    • Like 1
  8. 4 hours ago, DaptoFunlandGuy said:

    So while i'm happy to accept your word as truth given what you've been given access to - i'll continue to remain skeptical of the end result until I see it with my own eyes... and I do look forward to being wrong...

    I'm not asking you to take my word on anything. I'm relaying what I've seen because there's some questions about the walls at the ride entrance. I have no idea how it'll turn out until it's finished, I just know that the plans haven't been significantly changed in several years. 

    The early artist renderings were known to be largely fiction from the very start. Just as artist renderings often are. Give me lush gardens and rockwork over clinical pseudo-sci-fi any day.

    You're right they didn't elevate Vortex as per most the model and concept art; it's probably a safe bet that the soil issues that were the reason for its pre-COVID delays were also the reason this wasn't feasible. This change aside I'd argue that this depiction is by and large what's there today. It was about as underwhelming then as it is now: and I don't think anyone could honestly say that things like the giant fountains right next to the incredibly narrow main path were a good idea that had any chance of being implemented.

    • Like 1
  9. A good place to start with grants and funding would be here: https://www.parkz.com.au/article/2020/08/11/692-Structural_changes_funding_injection_sees_Gold_Coast_theme_park_future_secured.html

    In short (and to augment the above with newer financials), during COVID:

    Village loans totalled $70M from existing lenders (i.e. banks) + Queensland Treasury Corporation (Qld Govt's investment vehicle). The exact breakdown between private loans and QTC is unclear, but they received $34M in government loans and grants in the second half of 2020, of which $1.7M was a grant under 'Supporting Australia's Exhibiting Zoos and Aquariums'. We lose public visibility of Village's financials after the BGH deal, but JobKeeper subsidies to June 2020 totalled $42 million. And under the guidelines of the 'Major Tourism Experiencing Hardship' Qld grant they would have been entitled to $3-4 million in the second half of 2021.

    Ardent received $66.7M loans from QTC + a no-strings $3M grant. It's unclear if this $3M is just the repurposing of the $2.7M koala grant (which itself is tied into a $1.8M grant for genome research announced as far back as 2016), but Ardent received government grants and subsidies totalling $8M in the second half of 2020, inclusive of JobKeeper. There was a $2M 'Major Tourism Experiencing Hardship' grant in the second half of 2021.

    I don't see anything to suggest Village were 'given' $30 million for Sea World before or during COVID, @StingRay. Feel free to dust off that Google machine and provide more info if you've got it.

    The fact that a STEM tourism (read: local school groups) project was to be funded by an Asia tourism development grant and pitched foremost as a research project to me is an indictment on government grants and the lobbying industry. But that's certainly not isolated to this situation.

    All in all it's totally irrelevant to try and compare the two operators. They are two vastly different businesses that faced vastly different problems during COVID and this is reflected in the fact that they took different approaches in the peak of the pandemic, and required different assistance packages. Dreamworld has been unprofitable for six years and even in their heyday was a business a third the size of VRTP. Village also has other Australia and Queensland based businesses. Of course they're going to get different things from government.

    Are the optics of this reallocation of funding great? Not really. But that's the worst you can say about it.

    Could a competent PR team have seen this coming a mile away and easily preempted it? I think so, but competent public messaging doesn't belong in the same sentence as government or Ardent.

    • Like 1
  10. 8 minutes ago, Tim Dasco said:

    I wonder what @Richard's view is on this. I am not suggesting any issues with polar bear welfare, and I know Sea World does amazing work for animals. But if someone has a different opinion to simply suspend them seems like an abuse of power. This form legit is proof people have different opinions, lets still respect peoples opinions.

    We have banned animal activists in the past for spreading misinformation about animal treatment at all of the theme parks and we will continue to do so.

    • Like 2
  11. That’s the maintenance shed not the station. It’s in a back of house area so it’s probably worth seeing what they do with sight lines within the park before tearing it to shreds. 
     

    The actual station will be hidden further from view behind it. And spoiler: it’ll be fully enclosed to facilitate theming and AV elements. 

    • Like 2
    • Love it! 1
  12.  

    17 hours ago, Dom said:

    It points out problems with supplies and professionals being core reasons as to why the rides wont be opening this summer, but for many people that wont matter.

    No it doesn't. It points out that pandemic related delays gets us to now, but the further delays to April seem to be driven by business decisions.

    17 hours ago, Dom said:

    Yes, things are dicey now - But we are on track to have 90%+ of the population vaccinated by the end of 2021.

    Hence the article expressly stating that decisions were almost certainly made amid lockdowns and the shambles of a vaccine rollout months ago. Disagree with the decisions all you want, just acknowledge when they would likely have been made.

    17 hours ago, Dom said:

    I did actually love this brief diversion in the article because it was so out of nowhere. 

    "So look, coaster ain't on it's way... BUT MEERKATS ARE"

    It's literally in the first sentence that Village are relying on a slate of other new attractions without the coaster. The entire premise is that there's every possibility it'll be a decent summer for Village without Leviathan, and likely even a better summer for Dreamworld as a result.

    2 hours ago, DaptoFunlandGuy said:

    it seems a bit rich to blame shipping delays and material shortages when materials were already on site, and global shipping had about the same impact on Taipan as it did on Leviathan. 

    No one's blaming timber shortages. It was outright dismissed as a plausible reason for delays; we all saw how construction progressed at a steady pace once it started (albeit behind schedule). There's possibilities that the timber cost more than originally planned and that may have affected when and how it was supplied (depending on contracts, who's fitting the bill for market fluctuations etc.), but it has never been unobtainable.

    You're right that shipping delays probably ended up having about the same impact on Steel Taipan and Leviathan given physical construction on both wrapped up around the same time.

    1 hour ago, MrLukeCarroll said:

    Steel Taipan was originally meant to open late 2020

    Despite the non-committal "late" provided publicly, Steel Taipan was absolutely planned to be operational by September 2020. Leviathan was originally earmarked for December 2020. Make of that what you will; it's splitting hairs when both rides have suffered different avoidable and unavoidable delays.

    2 hours ago, Dom said:

    I feel like Richard probably didn't write this article alone and had some insider information, but I wouldn't exactly trust the source to be providing the right information, just the best information that reflects positively on the business. 

    This article is entirely my words and opinions. I speak with industry sources all the time but no one person, company or viewpoint coloured this article. Most of it is simply educated speculation and I'm not exactly going out on a limb with any of it. The first 750 words are a play-by-play of avoidable and unavoidable delays over the past few years. The remainder is a fairly succinct synopsis of what summer will look like for VRTP, including the thin attraction count and the optics of numerous dormant rides at Sea World, while also spelling out how Dreamworld will benefit here. I called it a comedy of errors in the second last sentence... who's this apparent puff piece for exactly?

    Is there a particular piece of information you think is wrong, or that I chose to omit or spin? Is something more sinister at play with the delays?

    • Like 3
  13. If you think there’s an interesting story about this being delayed amid a global pandemic that has delayed virtually every other attraction on the planet then I’m all ears. I personally don’t think the narrative is anywhere near as compelling as Sky Voyager’s delays amid years of mismanagement and a botched recovery plan, but each to their own.

    I genuinely encourage any of you to write such a piece and send it through if you think it’s of interest — I’d be more than happy to publish a well written piece on the subject.

    Given that @TimmyG and @Tinter were both previously banned from this site I’m not too surprised that they are back with the same tired ‘Parkz is biased’ stuff. One created fake accounts to cause trouble, lied about it repeatedly when asked and ultimately got themselves banned only to create a whole fake persona to rejoin and lie to me yet again about who they were. The other just seems to enjoy disrupting this community for fun. They’re also both behind the Golden Years Facebook page but that’s neither here nor there in their banning, though it does provide context and likely motives for their undermining behaviour. Neither have reached out to apologise, clarify or justify their past actions.

    At some point it’s just plain harassment though and I’ll reiterate that it’s not something we are entertaining anymore. 

    • Like 3
  14. 1 hour ago, New display name said:

    Trying to remember, but didn't a post/column on Rivals get modified during construction because of a clearance issue?

    More than just a clearance issue  it tried to pass straight through a support column for the track below:

    https://www.parkz.com.au/photo/14866-DC_Rivals_HyperCoaster_construction/gallery/sort/newest/location/dc-rivals-hypercoaster/offset/207

    The ride also had a major section of track removed for reprofiling a year or so after it opened: https://www.parkz.com.au/article/2018/08/24/620-Track_comes_down_from_DC_Rivals_HyperCoaster_during_annual_maintenance.html

    Even if the design process is perfect (and as we see, it's glaringly not), there can still be flaws that appear during fabrication, shipping, ride construction as well as theming/landscaping construction.

    There's also the fact that you probably also want to double check that the train can be safely winched around the track, because there's basically a 100% chance that it will stall at some point during its 30-odd year life.

    • Like 2
  15. 29 minutes ago, New display name said:

    Currently Parkz has everything listed as a theme park which is not correct.  It would be good if Parkz had more categories and it was the Parkz members who decided what went where.

    nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn.thumb.JPG.cf2f001e742fc0753fa53e7cdddddb0a.JPG

    Agreed. Lumping everything under "theme park" or "ride" has largely been done for expediency and this terminology is slowly being replaced across the site in favour of "attraction".

    But members can indeed submit changes/additions to the database and there's currently nine categories for parks to choose from, including both theme and amusement.

    • Like 2
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