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Dreamworld, Sea World, & Movie World Trip Report - Jan 2022


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That was a fun read. Glad you had a good time overall!

Couple thoughts on MW: yeah, it's a shame to see the current state of the park.

JL has been in awful shape for a while now. The guns have literally never worked for me the few times I tried it. I'll have to check out that Mushroom 😬

Scooby Doo, where are you?! I want my favourite ride back. Removing those awful unsynced screens in the lift would be a good start...

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Speaking on the new boats for Wild West, i really wish they could’ve found a way to continue having the moving station. This use to be the ride even when it’s busy and had a long line, it didn’t feel long due to the line always moving, but now with the boats stopping in the station and the front row out of action, it moves incredibly slow which is such a shame to see :(

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On 1/2/2022 at 6:03 PM, Dom said:

I can't imagine that after almost 7 years that regulators and insurance companies turned around and forced Movie World to buy these new boats and loading mechanism. 

Also, no offence, but that's an extremely poor take. Regulators and insurance companies aren't saying we can't have nice things, their escalation of requirements is a response to ensure that more people don't get hurt in a culture that has a tendency to continually put profits above all else.

I can imagine that the park has been put into a tough spot because of problems up the road but frankly Movie World has too many scapegoats. I just expect at this stage that VRTP has something to blame their problems on that is beyond their control and it's embarrassing. They can blame COVID and Dreamworld all they want but it doesn't change the fact that multiple rides are in an awful condition, the park is presented extremely poorly, and their operations make La Ronde look like Disneyland. 

If the 'incompetent f$$$s up the road' can do these things then surely so can Australia's #1 Theme Park. 

Also I found the picture of the mushroom growing on the Justice League sign and it brings me joy. 
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What does any of that redundant ramble have to do with not being able to have a continuous station at west?

And your assessment of regulators and insurance companies is inaccurate. They are extremely risk adverse now to the point that something that is extremely safe is no long enough. And it must be ridiculously safe to the point of being counter productive. That’s sadly the way it is, because no one wants another rapids. 
Village Parks always got a clean bill of health for safety because they took that very seriously. A faded sign has nothing to do with guest safety. 
 

Unfortunately this country will never see certain features of rides and immersiveness and efficiency again because of some very dangerous people who ran things at a single park. Thankfully those people are long gone. 

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19 minutes ago, rappa said:

And your assessment of regulators and insurance companies is inaccurate. They are extremely risk adverse now to the point that something that is extremely safe is no long enough. And it must be ridiculously safe to the point of being counter productive. That’s sadly the way it is, because no one wants another rapids. 
Village Parks always got a clean bill of health for safety because they took that very seriously. A faded sign has nothing to do with guest safety.  

im pretty sure one of the reasons they are extremely risk adverse now is because, you know, a literal wheel flew off GreenLantern? village isn’t perfect, that’s for sure 

 

and yeah, a faded sign has nothing to do with guest safety however, why are they unable to maintain high levels of guest safety while also maintaining the park as a whole and little things in the park like a ride sign? if they don’t be careful the parks going to end up looking like a Six Flags Park before they started refreshing most of them….

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You can’t actually be serious with this post right?

There is a MAJOR different between a park religiously following all manufacturer maintenance procedures and an inherent design flaw out of their control causing an incident that injured no one, and a bunch of cowboys hacking together a non existent control system, ignoring safety recommendations AND BRUTALLY KILLING FOUR PEOPLE!

 

And you can’t also believe aesthetics of a sign in any way correlate to the safety of a parks rides??? 

Don’t be dense!

 

Anyone is entitled to their opinion, like, dislike and critique of any of our parks. Hate MW, think they are crap? Sure. Think the sun shines out of DWs ass and a couple small changes to their shadow of a park is the greatest thing to hit the theme park industry? Go for it!

 

But facts are facts. Previous ex management of DW were dangerous, unsafe, arrogant, and killed people. This ultimately had major impact on the insurance and regulatory framework of all parks in Australia which will be with us forever. And this ultimately means ride capacity will play second fiddle to risk aversion. How anyone can argue this I simply can’t understand. 

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Dude I literally commented on the specific issue of not being able to have the continuous Wild West Load. 
 

Any attempt to turn that into some personal attack is on you. Literally talking about one specific comment about a moving load system. Lay off your own kool-aide perhaps. 
 

And there’s nothing thinly vailed, I’m sad that the people responsible (and I know who they are) aren’t rotting in a gaol cell over the fatal incident. I’m happy to insult them all day long. They have nothing to do with present personnel at either park.  

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7 hours ago, rappa said:

Dude I literally commented on the specific issue of not being able to have the continuous Wild West Load. 

Yes, you did, and it was a perfectly valid comment before it was depraved with personal animosity and a pathetic tirade where you attacked character over content. I wont let you drag this thread down to your level of petty insult slinging because you'll beat us all with experience.

Moving on, I definitely feel like Movie World is stuck in a limbo state at the moment where they're waiting to do start some major changes. I overheard some chatter between staff members in the park that Superman Escape was running two trains that weekend because it was close to going down to make way for Arkham removal. It could just be general staff chit-chat, but considering that Arkham was completely blocked off with construction walls in the courtyard area, I wouldn't be surprised if we see demolition start soon for the coaster.  

If they can get construction started for their new attractions relatively soon then hopefully they shouldn't be too far off. I've seen the concepts and I'm whelmed, but I would have loved to have seen Movie World go back to their roots with an attraction similar to that at Movie Park Germany. They created a coaster experience around a fake back stage tour and it's incredibly creative and well done. This is the sort of things that I think would add a lot of personality to the park.
 

 

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21 minutes ago, Dom said:

Yes, you did, and it was a perfectly valid comment before it was depraved with personal animosity and a pathetic tirade 

See this is our difference. Nothing about the parks or comments on them is personal to me. A negative comment about them is not taken as an attack on my personal character because I can separate my identity from my interests. 
 

And if that one comment was a tirade I’d hate to see your reaction if someone really wanted to have a go about something. 
 

But I’m glad to hear YOU WONT LET ME do something 😂

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9 hours ago, Dom said:

Dreamworld also didn't force Village to implement an app which directly benefits from extended wait times and therefore incentivises the park to take things slow and underperform to push more people towards One-Shots. 

Most large organisations pour over Net Promoter Scores because in the case of our parks identifying satisfaction in park departments (F&B, Ops, GS etc.) is a key base metric to ensure repeat visitation occurs. Why is that important? Because repeat visitation is one of the fundamental keys to driving revenue for Australian parks (I think it sits at like 2.3x visits average from memory). And believe me, you make more money from a nuclear family coming in for a second visit than "scalping" a few regulars to skip the queue.

Therefore, it's safe to assume that provided park management and executive leadership are in alignment on the organisation's goals (which I'm very positive they are) and therefore it'd be very un-likely they'd be taking trains off duty to drive revenue at the cost of satisfaction.

A far more likely scenario is that part availability sucks. But what do I know? It's just my opinion, i'm not in the room with leadership. Therefore, let's all be mindful that correlation doesn't equal causation.

Another side-note - I often wonder how much enthusiasts extrapolate performance based off whether executive leadership is in touch (or out of touch) with the common man? In either case, I think it'd be foolish to assume any level of leadership is not trying to do their best in the frameworks they're provided.

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42 minutes ago, Dom said:

 

I overheard some chatter between staff members in the park that Superman Escape was running two trains that weekend because it was close to going down to make way for Arkham removal. It could just be general staff chit-chat, but considering that Arkham was completely blocked off with construction walls in the courtyard area, I wouldn't be surprised if we see demolition start soon for the coaster.  

That would be a smart move to remove AA while SE is already closed. So they don’t have to close it again in a few months when they decide to finally remove it. I’m interested to see if they construct a more permanent looking fence under SE to block off access to the AA area while they construct the new attraction/s

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6 minutes ago, Slick said:

Therefore, it's safe to assume that provided park management and executive leadership are in alignment on the organisation's goals (which I'm very positive they are) then it'd be very un-likely they'd be taking trains off duty to drive revenue at the cost of satisfaction.

It just echoes similar sentiments to what we've seen at Disney where rides now don't offer any compensation such as fast passes when an attraction goes down because it directly affects their bottom line. Obviously I have no idea either and you make an excellent point that correlation doesn't equal causation but if they're making a profit from decent wait times and guests aren't complaining then it's a win-win for them. 

Similarly I'd love to be a fly on the wall when they're reading the metrics. I have no idea how the public perception would swing at the moment but just using Google as a reference, if you scroll through the latest reviews for Movie World they are hugely mixed and fluctuate wildly whilst Sea World, Wet'n'Wild and Dream World appear to be mostly positive. 

2 minutes ago, Slick said:

Context is key. That incident wasn't caused by Village's organisational culture having a literal "don't even worry" value-in-action about park safety for three decades.

I feel like his comment was more at the relaxed nature of the regulators and insurance companies during that time. The entire industry appeared to have a normalcy bias considering that incidents were rare and considering that nobody had been hurt in the past then they just believed it wouldn't happen in the future.

They were wrong, and the industry as a whole including Dreamworld were caught with their pants down and now they're more overzealous then ever.

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1 hour ago, Dom said:

I feel like his comment was more at the relaxed nature of the regulators and insurance companies during that time. The entire industry appeared to have a normalcy bias considering that incidents were rare and considering that nobody had been hurt in the past then they just believed it wouldn't happen in the future.

They were wrong, and the industry as a whole including Dreamworld were caught with their pants down and now they're more overzealous then ever.

Isn't that a lot of correlation equalling causation?

No one else in the industry was co-ercing WorkSafe to extend plant registration without an RPEQ sign-off and huge gaps in paperwork. No one else in the industry was re-engineering large chunks of rides and passing them off as maintenance fixes. No one else was pro-actively ignoring a $3,500 fix that would've saved lives because minimising OPEX was viewed by executive leadership as more important.

I could go on - point is, the systemic symbolic failure that lead to those deaths was Dreamworld's fault and Dreamworld's alone. The notion that the industry as a whole was caught with their pants down implies that other parks had similar deficiencies, which by and large wasn't the case.

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I think you're misinterpreting what I'm saying. Even though somehow we're getting back onto this topic again, I'm not disagreeing with you that the problem was Dreamworld's fault. The causation is still very much from Dreamworld's own actions which was proven in a court of law.

What I'm saying is that it feels that after the dust settled regulators and insurers were left in a position where they needed to severely ramp up their attentiveness around ride safety because they equally have a responsibility to ensure that these things don't happen. The capitalist business model requires regulation otherwise you get executives who prioritise OPEX over safety which is why I feel that regulators and insurers were caught with their pants down because their watchful eye should have picked up on these problems before the event happened.

This doesn't absolve ex-Dreamworld management of fault because the actions are still their own and they knew that what they were doing was wrong, but there should have been steps to prevent something like this from happening in the first place which leads us to where we are today.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I noticed on my visit today that they’ve added a couple signs around the path towards JR, to make it easier to find. E19913D5-2D60-4EFD-91BB-AEE65B5E4352.thumb.jpeg.9dbc7bc9e3e6b94e6466255a66439714.jpeg

Does anyone else feel like this is there attempt at marketing the ride again now that Steel Taipan is open?

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Maybe they should just remove the bridge that serves no purpose to make accessing JR easier and more obvious. And then they can widen the pathway too so it doesn’t feel like you’re walking down a back alley to get to a major attraction. 

Edited by themagician
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15 hours ago, themagician said:

Does anyone else feel like this is there attempt at marketing the ride again now that Steel Taipan is open?

Talking to my friends on the Gold Coast who have the opportunity to go more often, apparently these signs appeared around Steel Taipan's opening. I found it hilarious.

15 hours ago, themagician said:

Maybe they should just remove the bridge that serves no purpose to make accessing JR easier and more obvious. And then they can widen the pathway too so it doesn’t feel like you’re walking down a back alley to get to a major attraction. 

I know the Sea World layout on the top of my head and even I have difficulty navigating that park. It's full of dead end's that just don't make any sense. You can't intuitively make a line towards many attractions which I'm sure confuses some guests.

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