New Steel Vengeance Locker System for 2021

Even one rider or spectator getting hit with a phone, wallet, keys or anything is one too many.

Top Thrill 182 said:

• Re-splitting the queue after the lockers seems to cause a lot of confusion without providing much (any?) benefit

This may have changed as the day went on, but when I went through they were alternating back and forth mixing a group from each line. The end result was that I don’t think it makes a difference in the FL line.

A friend of mine and his son are there today with FLP and just waited 80 minutes for SV in the FastLane line. Yikes.

I think it's safe to assume with a wait like that, they either way over sold FL+, dispatch times are super slow, or the merge tunnel for the locker system is causing it. If the new FL+ line layout is the reason, then the park is gonna have quite a few unhappy customers.

I can tell you from first hand experience today the park did not think things through, or chose money over the guest experience. Fast lane has been jam packed at every ride and if you didn’t drop the money for it you get to sit back and watch 30-50 fast lane guests go ahead of you every couple minutes. Main lines are insanely long and I think this is part of it. I don’t know what the normal protocol is for balancing both lines, but it’s not in effect today.

I should add that as a local, I expect park operations on opening weekend to be nothing short of abysmal at best, though this year certainly has been worse. I hope they figure out their staffing problems. I can’t see a whole summer like this.

Wow. Sounds like the same problem from when Fast Lane was first adopted by the park in 2012. Opening Day that year was an absolute disaster if you didn’t get a Fast Lane band.

I almost want to cry for the FL buyers who were conned by CP today.... Almost!

How are they going to even know how many daily ones to sell if they have no idea how many all season FL users are going to show up? I guarantee they will err on the side of selling too many, every time.

The picture I saw of the FL queue for Maverick wrapped around the regular queue is hilarious.

There has to be a way for them to use data from previous seasons to help them anticipate demand. I get 2020 was a mess but still, there’s patterns everywhere in the business world. And it’s not like they all sat there and said, nah, we won’t be that busy.

WKYC has a story about the cluster of a weekend the park is having

https://www.wkyc.com/amp/article/entertainment/places/cedar-point/c...ssion=true

I am going to assume a large majority of all season FLP holders are there this weekend , which isn’t a norm. They might set a cap of 5000 non season FLP sales and hope 1000 of maybe 5000 all season FLP show up on any given day. But if 4000 all season show up because a it’s opening weekend, suddenly you have nearly double your expected FLP numbers ( figures are for demonstration only)

As for as SV fast lane, this setup sounds like it will add 20-30 minutes to their line, which isn’t insignificant. The ‘tunnel’ seems wide enough you could have both queues in there, and then the merge is right before the lockers. Guessing they didn’t want to even consider this now since you’d have zero social distancing in there.

The split after the lockers makes no sense. If they want to use both stairs to ensure a steady flow maybe just make the left stairs for back of train and right for front. I’m sure they will keep tinkering with it and get a better system.

With the new changes I think using the two lines as front/back of train is brilliant.

Just like the old days for Gemini.

Cartwright said:
WKYC has a story about the cluster of a weekend the park is having...

To be fair, that's not a story, that's Hope Sloop scouring the internet for Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit comments and then cutting and pasting them together.

I smell a Pulitzer!

Cartwright said:

WKYC has a story about the cluster of a weekend the park is having

https://www.wkyc.com/amp/article/entertainment/places/cedar-point/c...ssion=true

Well, they can get over. It’s not like Cedar Point doesn’t want to hire people. They even raised the hourly wage for employees significantly. If I was closer to the park, I wouldn’t mind working some weekends for an extra flow of income.

I think some of you are missing the bigger picture, and I’ve seen similar comments made across social media. The point is that the park chose to advertise full capacity and a normal operation. Which by any definition to any guest means: when I arrive at the park, I will be able to enjoy all the attractions in a fairly timely manner, have access to food and beverages anywhere in the park, and if I purchase add-ones like fast lane plus I should be able to have a fairly shorter line, not 2 hours. These are general assumptions made by anyone who visits any park that is advertising “things are back to normal.”

The problem; and where Cedar Point completely failed in its promise to deliver the “best day experience” was that they couldn’t staff for “things are back to normal” operations and thus delivered a sub-par experience that was not in line with what was advertised. Believe it or not, not all who visit there have insider knowledge of the park (or pretend to). The park would have benefited from a phased operation approach, rather than attempt to open the entire park all at once with no one to support that, they could have limited capacity or attraction availability and advertised that.

Everyone is fully aware that hiring is a challenge. That’s not changing anytime soon. The question is, how do you adapt? Remember we still have the water park and forbidden frontier opening in June also. Plus seven day a week operations. There’s not much time to hire the hundreds more employees that they need.

I feel like this conversation happens every year on Opening Weekend. Outside of the fact that they got an October Saturday crowd, was the park in any different shape than it usually is on a non-2020 Opening Weekend?

I think their staffing levels were the worst I’ve ever seen. And, for some reason they were dispatching trains on Millennium Force about once every ten minutes. And that was all day. Dispatch on other rides weren’t much better. So that was a bit different too. But I’ve not seen that many food stands and refresh stands closed before. The park wasn’t prepared and that’s just how it is. Hopefully by June they get it figured out.

I tend to agree with you Mgou58. And following up on your “Best Day Experience” point, it presents a difficult decision for the park.


From a revenue perspective, thanks to the underpriced Gold Pass sales of 2019, I think it’s fair to assume that a decent majority of park guests are not paying to get in the gate right now. So the park’s revenue stream is limited to resorts, food, parking, merch, games, etc. In order to maximize this revenue potential, they must get as many people in the park and resorts as possible. In 2019, this seemed like a great move for the park’s massive 150th celebration.

Now, from a “best day”, guest experience perspective, the park’s reservation system means that they can now generally anticipate the expected crowd for that day. If they have any general idea of the day-to-day “crowd size vs. employee head count” ratio, they can potentially use the reservation system to cap the number of guests on days where their limited staffing clearly cannot meet the needs of a crowded park. The result could be a generally positive guest experience. There are other variables at play (weather), but the big problem is that limiting the number of warm bodies in the park limits their revenue potential. Other than more staffing, I don't know how you solve this problem right now.

I went Friday and had a decent visit. Frontier Festival's ticket redemption process was a mess. I got my lanyard after waiting an hour and left to get lunch outside the park. I can come back and use the lanyard another day. I’ve seen staffing issues at the park before, like we all have. I'm used to early season struggles with ride operations. I expect it. The current level of “understaffing” is worse. More rides are closed, more food places are closed, and there's no food trucks out right now to band-aid the food issue. It was sad to see.

Even with reservations, yesterday was October Saturday level. Any expectation that reservations = limited and manageable crowds was blown out of the water yesterday.

That said, even with the locker situation today, Steel Vengeance FL+ took 12 minutes

Kevinj said:

To be fair