FLP up again to $249 on Saturdays

Since none of us know the numbers and usage analysis of the $99 pass, this discussion just seems silly to me.

I'm guessing you didn't visit the park during Halloweekends 2019 when they first offered a similar deal.

The only number that's important is 99.

MichaelB said:

CED23 said:

Along, with silly slippery slope logic of 2 posts above b/c they can't get their simple minds around the fact the initial Gold Pass price was a special 150th intro ... will not be $99 again.

So uh, about that...

Whatcha got to say, champ?

Cedar Point & Cedar Fair made a very questionable & IMO horrible business decision. It makes little sense to have the best sale price last fall be $119, when the fate of 2021 season was not certain on operations & than make it $99 for 2022, when you know things are almost certain, there will not be lockdowns. They laid out the $99 Gold Pass originally as a 150th deal & the increase last fall backed up that notion, but was just a "head fake."

The pricing across the chain makes little sense as they are not pricing into demand on season passes or decreasing discount channels, which are 2 things they claimed on the last few earnings calls. They have increased labor costs that will not be transitory & they are not trying to offset that with prices or taking advantage of the inflationary environment. My posts before were based on business logic, that CP/CF have forsaken to take a trip possibly down the dark path of SF, eviscerating your pricing power long term by getting people used to cheap passes. They just raised ASFLP at CP from $775 to $850 & at KI from $549 to $625. Sadly, it seems the model at CP seems to be flood the park with cheap passes & sell FLP to make up for it. Meanwhile, they are taking a very different approach at Knotts, which has & continues to price like a flagship park.

Mea culpa, I didn't think CP & CF would go down the dark path at their flagship park & was laying out the reasons why from their own statement & business sense. The quality of guest experience could be in permanent jeapardy if this continues for a few more years. Reputation is not always easily mended & CP doesn't want to be viewed as a SF park. People come in with a low expectation of the guest experience & thus are not disappointed when it occurs.

After all that, it seems we're pretty much on the same page now. :) I agree 100% with everything you said in the post above except the very last sentence. Some people stop going altogether once they are pretty certain the guest experience will not be a good one. That's what happened with me and Six Flags back in the day. Maybe they've improved now. I wouldn't know. They lost me as a customer and have yet to get me back. I'm very stubborn. :)

Another thing that I am baffled by with regards to the $99 gold pass: Why did they pretty much replace the "standard" pass with the gold pass, and give all the pass benefits at the lowest price offering? I would think that, from a business perspective, it would make much more sense to offer "good," "better," "best" to try to get people to spend more money.

For "good" offer the traditional pass for $150 with standard Cedar Point entry, and maybe black out October Saturdays. Then for "better" offer the gold pass for $200 which adds parking, early entry, merchandise discounts, and no black out dates. Then for "best" is the platinum pass at $250 which gets access to all Cedar Fair parks, including the water park at Cedar Point. (In this example, I put the water park with platinum, not gold.)

Not a good look when you sell someone a passes and two days later they show up with their kids and the beagle out front won’t let you in.

CED23 said:

MichaelB said:

CED23 said:

Along, with silly slippery slope logic of 2 posts above b/c they can't get their simple minds around the fact the initial Gold Pass price was a special 150th intro ... will not be $99 again.

So uh, about that...

Whatcha got to say, champ?

Cedar Point & Cedar Fair made a very questionable & IMO horrible business decision. It makes little sense to have the best sale price last fall be $119, when the fate of 2021 season was not certain on operations & than make it $99 for 2022, when you know things are almost certain, there will not be lockdowns. They laid out the $99 Gold Pass originally as a 150th deal & the increase last fall backed up that notion, but was just a "head fake."

The pricing across the chain makes little sense as they are not pricing into demand on season passes or decreasing discount channels, which are 2 things they claimed on the last few earnings calls. They have increased labor costs that will not be transitory & they are not trying to offset that with prices or taking advantage of the inflationary environment. My posts before were based on business logic, that CP/CF have forsaken to take a trip possibly down the dark path of SF, eviscerating your pricing power long term by getting people used to cheap passes. They just raised ASFLP at CP from $775 to $850 & at KI from $549 to $625. Sadly, it seems the model at CP seems to be flood the park with cheap passes & sell FLP to make up for it. Meanwhile, they are taking a very different approach at Knotts, which has & continues to price like a flagship park.

Mea culpa, I didn't think CP & CF would go down the dark path at their flagship park & was laying out the reasons why from their own statement & business sense. The quality of guest experience could be in permanent jeapardy if this continues for a few more years. Reputation is not always easily mended & CP doesn't want to be viewed as a SF park. People come in with a low expectation of the guest experience & thus are not disappointed when it occurs.

I commend you for getting your head out of your rear and mostly speaking sense. You couldn't admit your exclamatory, made up matter of fact statement was wrong. However, I'll take you making sense now as consolation prize.

Cargo Shorts said:

Not a good look when you sell someone a passes and two days later they show up with their kids and the beagle out front won’t let you in.

Confirmed they were turning people away? Seems to be mixed reports.

Agree, seen mixed reports as well and as Og mentioned in the other thread if so there should at least be a tweet or something from the park.

2 employees (they say) on the Facebook sp group saying they were turning vehicles away. My god we are in for a crazy final 2 months of weekend attendance.

From what I read somewhere on the internet, they weren't actively turning people away, but rather people in line on the causeway were giving up and turning around. I guess I find this a little more likely than them turning people away without tweeting it or anything. Since I read it on the internet it must be true after all no one on the internet has ever been wrong. Regardless if people were turning around on their own after getting to the park, or being turned away at the park, its a pretty clear sign that they are under priced.

I think there’s an interesting conversation to be had about the overall level of “care” that the park has about the guest experience, in that you really don’t hear about the whole “best day” or “best day crew” anymore. While I’ll never expect Universal Studios levels of excellence at Cedar Point, I expect that my experience will at least be tolerable enough to where I don’t leave the park with a bad taste in my mouth. That hasn’t happened since early 2019, and I expect it likely never will again.

I have a suspicion that a majority of those who ran out and bought the gold pass probably don’t care as much about the guest experience like many of us on here do, they see the price tag and the rest is history. But I stand by what I’ve said before , this is not going to end well in the long term. And no I don’t mean something like Cedar Point will go out of business, I just think that eventually word will spread about just how mediocre the park experience really is.

Our outlook on the park has definitely changed in the last 5 years. Despite my love of the coaster lineup and overall vibe on good weather days, we've greatly reduced the dates we'd visit. No more first month of the season, too many issues with staffing to visit before Coastermania/Run Ride weekend. Then we'll do one Tuesday-Friday trip in July. Once it hits the passholder renewal/new passholders get the rest of the year free part of the calendar, our year is over. I'm still in shock that the pass is being offered at $99 and includes the rest of the year for new customers. They'll be challenging capacity on every good weather Saturday through Halloween.

mgou58 said:

I think there’s an interesting conversation to be had about the overall level of “care” that the park has about the guest experience, in that you really don’t hear about the whole “best day” or “best day crew” anymore.

That conversation actually isn’t gonna be very interesting. They don’t care. Plain and simple. Pack as many sardines into the can as possible. Once they are there, rake them over the coals as much as possible from every angle. You want to ride more than 4-5 rides in a 12 hour day and not spend your entire day in lines? That will be $250 for Fast Lane please! Oh and that will still have hour waits. When food and drinks have 30-45 minute lines, your park is way overcrowded. They aren’t interested in you having the best day ever, they are settling for a Six Flags day.

I've pretty much seen enough of the Richard Zimmerman era at this point. For as much as I liked Matt Ouimet and thought he was the right leader at the right time for the chain and did a ton of good things to sort of up market the experience at Cedar Point, Carowinds, KI, and probably others, I feel like the next round of leadership has thrown much of it out the window. Cheap season passes are their MO. A cheapened experience will follow. Maybe he's comfy looking at spreadsheets in Charlotte, but the flagship park is going to suffer within a year or two because of these strategies. I can almost guarantee it. When do investors or the board start making his seat feel warm? Take Tim Fischer out too. Kinzel was wrong to try to force the Cedar Point way on all of the former Paramount Parks when CF bought them, but these guys are also wrong to try to force the Paramount strategy on Cedar Point.

Shane Denmark said:

“That conversation actually isn’t gonna be very interesting. They don’t care. Plain and simple. Pack as many sardines into the can as possible. Once they are there, take them over the coals as much as possible from every angle. You want to ride more than 4-5 rides in a 12 hour day and not spend your entire day in lines? That will be $250 for Fast Lane please! Oh and that will still have hour waits. When food and drinks have 30-45 minute lines, your park is way overcrowded. They aren’t interested in you having the best day ever, they are settling for a Six Flags day.”

That’s fair. I just thought it was hilarious that the park made such a big deal out of the whole best day concept and then abandoned it so quickly.

Shane Denmark & mgou58,

You pretty much summed up what I was thinking more elegantly than I might have put it - they just did away with anything resembling "best day ever." They have reduced the prices on admission to try and cram as many people in the park as they can, which makes for long lines. Then, they operate the rides far below what they are capable of, which makes very long lines even longer. On top of that, half the rides capacity goes to fast line. All of these combined pretty much means you have the "slow lane" for the normal people, and the "normal lane" for people who have $250 to turn a 2.5 hr line into a 1 hr line.

Speaking of fastlane, I think that fastlane is a good option to have, and I'm glad they offer it. I just think that the implementation they have needs some tweaking. First of all, I think that fastlane should account for 20% to 25% of a rides capacity. I figure 20% to 25% is about the highest fastlane capacity can be without a significant impact to the perceived wait time (how long the line feels like it is moving / minutes from this point). Then, when the ride has significant down time due to mechanical difficulties, they could increase it to 50% when the ride opens. However, having 50% be the standard, makes the perceived wait time significantly longer.

My mind just keeps drifting back to our last trip to Universal Studios Volcano Bay, and how we never waited more than 15 minutes for anything because of the Tapu-Tapu wristband system. (Might have spelled that wrong). I know that this type of system and the one at Disney would likely be too difficult for Cedar Point to implement but one can still dream.

But those systems (at least Disney's Fastlane+) slow down the regular line even more than CP Fastlane, and overall severely limit how much you can do in a day