Which UK Merlin park is best operated?

[Matt N]

Hi guys. Here in the UK, we have four Merlin parks: Alton Towers, Thorpe Park, Chessington World of Adventures and Legoland Windsor. Operations are a contentious topic surrounding the Merlin parks, particularly as of late; people talk a lot about throughputs, ride availability and the like with regard to these properties. However, there’s arguably some variation between the four properties in terms of many of these metrics, so with this in mind, I’d be keen to know; which UK Merlin park is best operated, in your view? Which one performs best in terms of metrics like throughputs?

Personally, I would put Alton Towers at the top of the pile. But if I were to rank them, I would say the following:

1. Alton Towers - The park may not be perfect, but in general, I think it’s the one that seems to have the most consistently strong operations. Throughputs are broadly excellent, on the whole, with lots of trains running and quick dispatches, the staff seem generally good at batching people and encouraging guests to fill seats, and ride availability, while extremely inconsistent at best in 2023 and 2024, generally seems to have been a lot better this season. I would say that Alton Towers is broadly very good operationally.
2. Thorpe Park - I have to say that I think Thorpe Park gets an unfair amount of flack for operations. From my experiences, the park are generally pretty decent at getting good ride throughputs; particularly as of late, there does seem to have been a bit of a throughput push at Thorpe Park. On my visits, rides generally seem to be running at full capacity and dispatching fairly promptly, for the most part. Granted, I don’t think the park is quite as slick as Towers in some regards; for instance, I don’t think they’re quite as proactive as Alton at batching and encouraging guests to fill seats. Nonetheless, I find that Thorpe Park generally do a decent job, and I don’t think ride availability is that bad either. On some rides, I would even argue that Thorpe Park like-for-like does better than Alton Towers; for instance, Stealth consistently seems to get a good peg higher than Rita in terms of throughputs, from my experience.
3. Legoland Windsor - Here’s where I think things dip slightly. It might be down to a greater lack of intrinsically high capacity rides, but I find the queues at Legoland seem to move more slowly than at Thorpe and Towers. In general, I think the coasters seem to do OK, but could go faster. For instance, Dragon was doing a little over 3 minutes per dispatch on my last visit, which seems a little on the slower side for a simple lap bar coaster running multiple trains. Minifigure Speedway was also impeded by the same weird quirk as Mandrill Mayhem, where they won’t let you wait on the platform. Some of the non-coaster rides also seemed a bit short-staffed; for instance, Flight of the Sky Lion had one person running the whole show batching-wise, and it was resulting in a dispatch interval probably no quicker than 10 minutes or so. To be fair, though, availability seemed good on my visit and I don’t really remember anything breaking down.
4. Chessington World of Adventures - Granted, I’ve only been once in the last decade, but Chessington definitely seemed like the Merlin park that struggled the most operationally on my 2023 visit. Most rides seemed very short-staffed; for instance, Vampire had one person who had to handle both batching and restraint checking, resulting in some of the slowest operations I’ve ever witnessed in a Merlin park (around 400pph on 2 trains…). This story continued across multiple rides. Croc Drop had one poor man running the entire ride on his own. Tomb Blaster had one poor man who had to batch, check and send the entire train. Dragon’s Fury was also strangely operated, taking a good 50% longer to send each car on average than Spinball Whizzer and only 3/4 filling most of the cars (?). To be fair, Mandrill Mayhem wasn’t doing badly at all for a 1 train shuttle coaster (around 3 minutes per dispatch), but most things seemed short staffed and quite slowly operated as a result. I went on a Sunday in September that was not obscenely busy, and there were many rides where the advertised queue breached 60 minutes (I saw Dragon’s Fury on 100 at one point!).

But I’d be keen to know: which UK Merlin park do you feel is best operated? Do you agree with my ranking?

 

[Melons]

Going purely off of how my recent visits have gone, I'd have to give it to Thorpe Park. No times have I experienced downtime or slow ops when I've been over the last year. My previous visit to Alton Towers wasn't brilliant, with some of the rides not opening at all and Galactica unsurprisingly closed till 2, it made my trip to the park a little disappointing. The 10:00 - 16:00 opening hours also made it so that me and my party had to cut out Dark Forest as there wasn't enough time.

 

[TJM2302]

I'd have to say Thorpe Park for me throughputs are always great, the staff are friendly and ride availability is always much better than at Alton. The opening hours are great too I always feel like I can easily get everything done at Thorpe in a day. It is a delight to just pop into the park for the last few hours of the day at a 7pm close in the summer. I feel like management are always trying to improve operations; there were noticeably higher throughputs on The Swarm during my last visit. The park is also maintained better than the other Merlin parks. As for Alton Towers I get the distinct impression that management just don't care about the park with poor ride availability and park maintenance really being prevelent. Let's not even mention the food which is truly awful and expensive. Throughputs at Towers are good but only when the rides are actually open. The opening hours are also way too short and it always feels like a struggle to get everything done and I'm speaking as someone who has always visited as a Passholder. I can't imagine how stressful it is for the GP to do everything at Towers in a day.

 

[Burniel]

1. Thorpe Park and honestly for me it's not even close. Hyperia and Stealth chuck out trains like there's no tomorrow and the others are usually at least as good as you'd expect from the other parks. Downtime is limited and usually well communicated (Stealth's disappearance earlier this year notwithstanding). It also has by far the most generous opening hours.

2. Alton Towers has improved recently, and the increased single riders are a game changer, but downtime is a big problem and (from other reports/videos more than my own experiences tbf) it's still possible to have a horrible day here in a way that I think is exceptionally rare at Thorpe.

3. Legoland Windsor seem to do pretty well with the hardware they have, and in all fairness they can't really demand speed from their target audience in the way the thrill parks can. But from my very limited recent visits I can't really find a reason to put them above or below the middle. Basically I see this and AT as interchangeable but for very different reasons.

4. Chessington World of Adventures, if only because it's so inconsistent. For every time you get a decent run through Vampire there'll be a 50-person Dragon's Fury queue that takes about three years. And not a single day this year of being open past 5? Come off it.