Slick

Here's the screengrab from Ardent's ASX release. Another CEO with no theme park industry experience, instead John Osborne's specific expertise is apparently divestment. Thoughts?

Yeah, you're right, I guess all of the gift shops Disney & Universal make you walk through for their humungous staple attractions like: Star Tours Tower of Terror Stitch's Great Escape Winnie the Pooh Maelstrom Rock 'n' Roller Coaster Splash Mountain It's A Small World Space Mountain Test Track Toy Story mania Monsters Inc. Harry Potter & The Forbidden Journey Jurassic Park All result in a garbage experience. 🙄 I guess they keep doing it because there's no money to be made. Let me point out what that clip creates that's important for this discussion: generally speaking, over half of purchases made are unplanned capitalising on euphoria (whether that's the dopamine release from a ride or swedish meatballs) makes people buy more good retail design further increases revenue through simple things like optimising flow, lighting and simple window aesthetics (known as the Gruen effect.) You're making it sound like i'm suggesting making guests wonder through an IKEA floor-plan just to get out which is ridiculous. What i'm suggesting is Village should learn from folks like Disney & Universal who spend millions in R&D on stuff like theme park retail design and try and do better instead of doubling down on mistakes.

I'll just leave this here...

Ahhh, so the second photo you posted isn't recent? Got it, go back to previous statement.

Thank god - I stand corrected - apparently we can have some nice things after all. Nice one Sea World... but does it still spin?

Here's a crazy thought - if the ride doesn't work with either a full load or an empty load, it definitely shouldn't be open. If you were going to hop on a ride at the Ekka and the carnie out front said "just give 'er a bit aye, if we load too many people on it doesn't work properly" you'd be calling Queensland WHS, so why is this any different? Here we have Gary Weiss stating before the inquiry that both him and the Ardent board are "committed to ensuring Dreamworld becomes recognised as Australia's global benchmark for theme park safety" but he's got a ride that literally half works and three signature roller-coasters that have been closed for months with no reason why and no end to their closures in sight. Enthusiasts need to take their rose-tinted glasses off - this is a bloody mess.

Why is it so damn hard to have nice things at our parks these days?

Say you were the owner of Movie World and you noticed that a shop like Superman's wasn't making any money, surely you'd go "well shit, don't suppose no one's buying anything because the lockers are AFTER the shop where their wallets are" and then modify the pathways to fix that? (Harry Potter & The Forbidden Journey does exactly this.) It'd cost a bit of money sure, but every retail design book on the planet would tell you letting a potential customer walk out the building is a potential sale lost. You'd think given how much debt Village have right now that they'd be looking for ways to maximise revenue instead of finding inventive ways to minimise staffing requirements. But silly me of course, here I am holding the parks to the same standard as everyone else overseas. 😑

Was in earlier - Wipeout and Motocoaster are both open, so no worries there, but Buzzsaw, Tower and Sidewinder are all closed.

Had a quick walk around, here's what I noted: work is barrelling ahead on i-Ride - there's plenty of folks on-site cracking into construction Looks like they're gearing up to start work on the Lazy River in WhiteWater World - plenty of flags on-site. How does this relate to i-Ride you might ask? There's additional temporary buildings on-site near the cinema and a lot of buzz around the reservoir - all signs point to them using the dirt they pull up for the Lazy River to help fill in the reservoir (when I say all signs I mean I easily over-heard a few hard-hats chatting about it from the Giant Drop walkway.)

Yeah, and? Hundreds of zoos don't have rides and seem to do great, just as much as there's other "SeaWorlds" that have a ton more rides and seem to do great, too. There's no rule for what exactly to do here - not all hotels need to have pools to be successful just as much as not all cars need four doors to sell well. But keeping with the car analogy - if i'm going to build a 4WD, I expect it to have a 4WD engine, not something out of a Corolla that's underpowered and not what I expected or paid for. That's Sea World's problem - from the perspective of either a day ticket (where you're paying the same as Dreamworld or Movie World) or as a season pass holder wanting to get a full day's worth of fun, it doesn't stack up compared to the other parks anymore, and it's compounded by the fact that for the longest time it did. So many things have been pulled out and either not replaced or have been filled in with cheap alternatives that hyper-focusses the product to such a specific age group that it alienates others. Continuing on that thought, the mentality of "competing against your own product" is so, so fundamentally flawed that it's a big contributor to why Village are so far in the hole, in my mind. It's like saying you don't need Paradise Country because you have animals at Sea World, or you don't need AOS because there's a stunt show at Movie World, or Movie World's kids area is okay to be left half-arsed and shitty because Sea World's is a bit better so they should just go there. If your products can't stand on their own feet, they're probably shit. It's how Dreamworld have managed to stay competitive - they've got a great full day product whilst every other park is still, at best, a solid half day product. It's not a hard thing to fix either - Village just needed to maintain what they had in the first place (cough, Skyway, cough Vikings). If their products can't stand on their own two feet as diverse & quality day experiences worth revisiting then as a park owner you're going to fail on driving revenue because there's no reason for guests to come back, and that's where the money is. Funny... other theme park chains have figured this out and they seem to be do fine.

Let's be clear firstly - the fact that Sea World isn't a badass theme park that can keep up with Dreamworld & Warner Bros. Movie World in terms of attractions (which it did very well for nearly twenty years) is 100% a management oversight. The shift from "excellent standalone park" to "an upsell for Movie World customers and a playground for resort customers" should've never happened, and the result of that choice is a park that in some aspects still can't hold a candle to the park that it was over a decade ago. Will VRL sell Sea World? Last time I checked, the park, the resort and the resort's conference centre make great coin, so probably not. But should they be doing more instead of letting it cruise on autopilot like Wet 'n' Wild GC has done? Absolutely, VRTP has a lot to gain from the current CEO being less part time on-site nice guy & more like the Williams, Menzies and Longhursts of old, who were laser focussed and unabashed with their passion to get it right.

For a kiwi in New Plymouth you sure are switched on. :P

The bus is now leaving Coneyor Street, Cameron Park, NSW.

Good thing someone is "standing by Dreamworld" because not many are these days.