DaptoFunlandGuy

Aussie World has two swing rides if I remember correctly - a Waveswinger like the LPS Volare or the Dreamworld Flyer, and 'Booma Zooma' which is a bigger version of Soaring Swing with two rows of seats. I believe 'Soarin Swing' was originally from Luna Park Sydney, dating back to the ghost train fire days. I can't imagine it would get converted to a traveller - not really worth the effort - but hopefully someone sees the value and heritage in it and keeps it going.

You can't expand north beyond the rocky hollow footprint because of Oaky Creek. There's about 1.5 acres \ 6000sqm within the footprint, however as the train and BB Studios are no longer in that area (and blue lagoon is never coming back), you could theoretically expand into all of that space too - which would give you about 7.5 acres of land - about 31000sqm, which is about the size of main street, dreamland and ocean parade combined. There's certainly room for a lot back there - but they haven't started on Rivertown yet, so don't be too hasty - this is probably surveying for a proposed development - and we've seen how many concepts never get off the artist's desk...

I mean, it's a bit win\lose here. Pros Those who take up the offer give them an immediate $189pp on the books right before EOFY. Conversion rate \ Cancellation rate from Memberships means it's likely they'll finally be able to end the membership arrangements, so will reduce administration costs \ do away with debit success. The full ticket price comes to them Cons They've pissed off a lot of long term customers A regularly paid revenue stream has ended Many folk who would drop in, have a beer or a snack, do a ride after work\school will stop coming in regularly - banking the '12 month activation' until there is a reason to visit. The short term opportunity to get additional revenue from these customers is gone. In-park spend will also drop from these guests when they return - the bill-shock of an upfront ticket won't wear off - people will feel like they're paying a lot more for their ticket now - even though for most its only about $40 (though that goes up to $70 after their first year) - simply because its a lump sum single price Overall, i'm sure most members will retain some sort of annual pass. A few will cancel, though to have paid a membership for that long, they'll probably come back after taking a break. Obviously I don't have the data, though it is technically possible for them to identify the converted members to see what their habits are like, it's hard to track in-park spending as there is no passholder discount to link spending to members (a missed opportunity IMO that Dreamworld really takes advantage of with their passholders) - in summary, they won't really know whether this conversion has negatively impacted those guests or not. And they probably don't care. Me personally, I know i'll visit eventually - when I have a reason to. I'm quite sure that the poor handling of this whole process will be in the back of my mind when I eventually return to the park - and it likely will influence what i'm willing to spend in park.

Agree - like - calm down guys, it's May 2023 and there are 19 months left until the end of 2024. A boxing day opening for Rivertown makes the most sense if you follow typical ride openings in Australia, so there's plenty of time to go.

I'm quite sure both of these were posted into the Movie world "fan club" group - both later either disproven or corrected. As mentioned by @Spotty - there are several staff who like to drop fake rumors just to see how far the story will go - such as the "Scooby Fire Eyes" gag from long ago. I wouldn't be surprised if these latest ones were staff taking the mickey out of TPSN and the Fan Club. ...And this is why its always a pretty good idea to take these things with a grain of salt until something official comes from the park...

Legitimate question here - the Superman restraints are essentially the same as the one Gazza posted, but with the red straps. The straps don't actually hold you in? So at best they prevent you from leaning too far out of your seat if you were to try, but they're not doing too much to actually restrain you? How does the ability to move your head sideways about 8 inches improve the ride experience to a scale of 'much better it would be worth the millions of dollars it would cost to do it' ?

I think the point is - neither of them are good, and both of them could do better.

Yeah - aircraft maintenance isn't too dissimilar to car maintenance in that they're generally a mass produced product, with an established, international standard, and national and international governing bodies setting forth the rules on everything. They are orders of magnitude larger, and there are a lot more people with the skills that can transfer between companies and do the same job.

Oh please don't misunderstand my intentions. I'm not questioning the accuracy of the statement. Moreso the relevance.

Kudos on the well explained concepts at play here with your overall post. Unfortunately it's fact that *some* people will be the duck playing chess with you and... you know how it goes... 🙄 As for this specific quote - I think there's two lines of thought here in the car analogy - while you're under warranty, there's a certain incentive to have the dealership do the work, but once its out of warranty, most local shops can do the work cheaper without compromising the quality of the work - simply because they don't have to pay licencing to have the big badge on the front door... and there's thousands of that specific model out there, so the knowledge, parts and expertise are easily obtained. Amusement devices aren't as wide spread - in some cases it may be the only model in the country so finding the expertise and knowledge for that is a lot harder than your average 2005 Camry. Your local grease monkey can work on your 10 year old car because it isn't a specialised bit of kit. Rides are.

I mean yeah, so long as you let it cool down for a couple minutes.

Just one correction here - Much as i'm not a fan of the page, in most cases, he just reposts what is sent to him, and truly believes it. Over the years a lot of folk have created fakes and fed it to the page, and a lot of it has gotten through because he believes it.

Not sure where you get Factory from?

I really hope that you're using a fake name online to be constantly demonstrating this obtuse level of stupidity.

Seriously folks, there's a reason why we used to have the Fountain of Improbability. And TPSN is every part of that reason. It really doesn't take much to alter an existing website - you don't even need photoshop. *disclaimer - these are clearly faked images. i've changed text in an outlandish way that nobody would believe was real to prove a point. No further correspondence needs to be entered into.

It's a bad idea.

They do publish their maintenance plan for the year in advance. Sometimes things are delayed due to parts being needed, and other times unplanned maintenance gets in the way. It's not possible to keep a workforce on shift the size required to work on everything at once, so you are going to prioritise. If 3 rides are down unexpectedly, you might ask the engineers what the quicker fix is to get at least one up sooner, but in some cases - they all need a part that has to be shipped from across the globe, and what are you gonna do? You can't have too many maintenance workers just sat around idle waiting for something to break. So you've got to balance between 'having planned work on to get on with' and 'responding to unplanned downtime in a reasonable timeframe'. I think in most for-profit corporations, that balance will tip slightly in favour of reduced costs, and I can't really fault them for that.

Ouch.

Incoming waffle. If you want the TL:DR it's this: There is nothing wrong with their current approach, but they could do a better job than they currently do at pointing out their closures. You've been warned. There's a reason that Australian Consumer Law requires things like surcharges to be just as prominent as the advertised price. Now before anyone gets their knickers in a twist, i'm not suggesting Village is being misleading or breaching any law - i'm just making a comparison. The reason for the law is that consumers don't necessarily read everything in the fine print, because the big ad shows them "PRODUCT" and "PRICE" they should have a reasonable expectation that they get that, and if there's a good chance that's not what they get, they'd rightly feel misled. To put this in Movie World terms, any ad that were to feature Scooby right now would be misleading, because the company knows Scoob is closed for a significant time period. Ok, now that's said - take their main landing page - 'Buy Now' is the first menu item on the left (the natural starting point for reading) 'All Tickets' in a contrasted button on the right Page heading 'Australia's #1 Webste for GC Theme Park Tickets A giant banner image of a roller coaster, with much of the content hidden lower down. Now take a look at the next part - what happens when you scroll below the banner image: Over 115 rides, slides and shows 8 Theme parks and attractions + accommodation best online deals to save you time and money (with a call to action to buy online to save money at the gate!) Ticket options presented - again with the call to 'buy online and save' But the big issue here, is what is missing from this screenshot. Did you notice the blue and red bar in the first image at the top of the banner, just under the menu? Yes - that banner with the smallest font on screen that says 'Announcements - Important information' that you have to physically click on to show? What could be hiding there? (Bear in mind, this is zoomed in) Ok, so finally we have a reminder to check the maintenance schedule prior to visiting. This is better than nothing, but still could do better. Now, if we check out the maintenance link - Scoob isn't included in the list... unless you scroll all the way down. For an infrequent, non-thoosie visitor, you could forgive them for checking 'currently under maintenance' prior to today's visit and assuming scooby would be open. And this choice is deliberate. While all other attractions show a 'maintenance' banner in the attractions list on the website, scooby has been pushed to the bottom of the list, below the Looney Tunes Splash Zone, JL 52 Batmobile (that's an attraction now?) the HWSD2 upcharge experience, the New York Film Academy Hot Sets (select days of the year only) and the 'Coming Soon' Wizard of Oz precinct. Sure, it's a long term closure, but it feels deliberately hidden beyond where most average punters are going to check to see. Clearly when something is under maintenance its easy for them to swap out the ride pic for one with a maintenance ribbon on it, so it's odd that they'd deliberately relocate it to the bottom (and in the case of the maintenance page, create an entirely new banner just for it) Now, in fairness, I visited Dreamworld's page as a comparison. Noteworthy points of comparison are: The Dreamworld website has a similar 'ride maintenance info' banner at the top, which disappears as you scroll. Their ticketing offers are repeated, and prominent They should definitely improve on this - at minimum, make it bigger, contrast with the rest of the page (village does this better with the red bar) and don't let it disappear the moment you scroll - keep it showing on every page as part of the titlebar. One thing different is that their long term closure for major refurbishment - giant drop - is shown right at the top of the maintenance list as the first ride:

Seems to have come from this 2017 document published by Griffith Uni (full doc is attached below). It is a student work. https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CAIQw7AJahcKEwjwm6-o9If_AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fresearch-repository.griffith.edu.au%2Frest%2Fbitstreams%2Fe02053e2-8f97-4e0a-aa51-cf1952015768%2Fretrieve&psig=AOvVaw1QxjY-BUYisfkpP_xf9XcZ&ust=1684809952183559 Dupre421564Published.pdf Edit: the 2017 date might be a bit misleading, and was sought from google. the document refers to the monorail being closed "since 2019"

Mildly relevant to this topic given the earlier mention of closures, but this is the maintenance board out front this morning, presented visually: (I realise this map still shows Pounce n Bounce, but it doesn't show Marvin ride, so still pretty representative of the lineup today. I've excluded Showcase since it's a static walkthrough rather than a ride or show. There is literally no reason to turn left at Main Street as that entire wing of the park is a ghost town) Sourced from TPSN.

At least the seatbelt might be able to be closed on an average adult.

So you think because intamin has a LSM launch like Red Force, this automatically translates to itbeing compatible with the RFC model, despite intamin withdrawing support for the model? Don't you think Intamin would have offered the upgrade to the parks whose rides were slowly dying and make a bit of coin if it were viable? YOU'RE LIVING IN A FUCKING DREAMLAND MATE - WAKE UP.

Almost always. Yeah we've been trying to get our parks to move away from leaving things SBNO, so that alone is enough to disagree with you there. The manufacturer doesn't support it. SFMM - which has far more money to spend than Dreamworld does - is still cobbling together parts to keep theirs running (and not very well, I might add). It's not like an accelerator coaster where theres plenty of installs around that could be retrofit - bringing a company in to design and install a new launch system would literally only benefit two parks in the entire world, one of which was cash strapped enough that they took their old parts to cash converters. No. Nobody is reviving the reverse freefall coaster. It was built for one purpose - to break records. Its a one trick pony and while it hauls ass, that's really all you can do with it - and modern coasters do the exact same thing, but with loops and top hats and all sorts of far more rounded experiences. The ride design is dead and as soon as the last remaining drives die in Valencia, it's done. How many people you reckon drive the M1 after dark? And that's why you're not in charge of a theme park.

@joz has given a very accurate explanation to answer this - but one final thought: Locals are more likely to visit more often, but they're also less likely to spend in park on every visit. If they feel like they got a cheaper deal to enter, they won't hesitate as much about spending in-park. They've already saved money, so a little in-park spend is ok... every. single. visit. If they just refill their unlimited refill sipper on every visit (about $9) they're making $8 additional profit. Kids want to try that new donut milkshake? cha-ching. There's a new hat-graffiti-cape-embroidery-latest-gimmick store open on main street? try it out. no, the postcode restrictions are necessary, for the reasons already mentioned above by Joz - tourists will pay more, locals will be more likely to visit if they have cheaper passes. Most locals won't go near the parks in peak periods anyway, so blackout dates won't change much. (Back when all passes were $99, blackout dates would have worked for a tiered system, and they tried it, and then quickly backed down on it - rewarding the cheaper pass-buyers by allowing them to enter christmas week, while stiffing those who paid the extra for VIP Gold, making the extra money paid essentially worthless.) People have different opinions Tone doesn't come across well in written text Absent the tone that might imply humor or sarcasm, many people misinterpret intention and react to that misinterpretation. Also - some people are stupid, and because you can't smack some sense into them, they keep coming back with ridiculous unrealistic proposals, and won't accept being told it won't work by logic, reason, or experts in the field. (But that doesn't relate to this current thread).