Winter Chill Out

https://sanduskyregister.com/news/293624/former-sawmill-investors-sue/

https://www.cedarpoint.com/blog/2021-winter-chill-out

This year’s Winter Chill Out is scheduled for Saturday, February 20 here at the park. In the current environment, a few things remain the same, but a lot has changed, so please read a few of these bigger points before clicking through for more info.

• All current COVID-19 safety protocols will remain in place; this includes wearing masks, social distancing, health screenings, sanitizing, etc. You’ll see the full list of protocols on the event page
• Winter Chill Out will remain a timed, self-guided tour
• Behind-the-scenes areas will still be highlights on the tour
• A modified Q&A will still be held; more on that later
• We’ll still provide a delicious, socially-distanced lunch!

The event is always a lot of fun so it's great that they are finding a way to still make it happen!

Yes! So excited!

Interesting to note their new policy on masks, no vents or valves etc.

I'm honestly surprised they are still going ahead with this. In the current climate + entitled enthusiasts, I'm impressed they are still willing to put in the effort for this!

It's become a huge charity event, I thought they'd do everything possible to not have to cancel it. Very excited to go for the 6th time, hope I can get tickets!

TwistedCircuits said:

Yes! So excited!

Interesting to note their new policy on masks, no vents or valves etc.

Good catch. I don't remember if they were that specific during the summer and fall. I think Disney and Universal figured out early that they needed to make the face covering requirements as clear as possible.

Nope, can’t do it yet again. And next year it will probably collide with ride school again. Maybe I can attend again in ‘23.

—Dave Althoff. Jr.

That was insane. They system must have been lagging. I showed that they sold out in 3 minutes and then more windows started to open back up.

It was probably folks that didn't complete their checkout in time. Looking forward to the social media outrage this afternoon

So Excited! Secured my Wife & I's 11 a.m. timeslot ticket! This will be our second WCO. We were hoping for 9:30 but the page only showed 8,11,12:30. Must have sold out fast!

I feel like Cedar Point might be pushing for the record amount raised for charity in a segment of time.

I got kicked out 4 different times starting at 12:03 and never got tickets. Made it each time confirm payment then the system kicked me out. Now sold out. Clearly issues with their system and cant handle the volume.

Follow-up: Completed the contact per Tony's tweet with the issues I had. We will see what happens. Hopefully it helps then find a solution.

2021 - the year of pent-up demand? (Got our tickets for 8am session)

Accesso is clearly not built for load.

I'm curious if the park would ever consider doing a lottery-style drawing for WCO. Especially in a year that they are presumably limiting the number of attendees. Clearly they have a good amount of interest in the event, and if they went to a lottery style it would get rid of any frustration with overloading the Accesso servers.

Yeah, I had an order in my cart within the first 30 seconds or so of 12:00 EST; I entered payment and contact information, hit whatever the "Check out" button was, and it errored out and lost my tickets...I was never able to get back in with any other reservation.

Seems odd that once tickets are in place that they aren't "held" for a few seconds (literally) while you're checking out; maybe with a countdown "they will be released in XX seconds" timer.

I filled out the contact form, too. I don't feel an "entitled enthusiast," and we've had the opportunity to attend the event several years in a row (and look forward to it each year). But I'm hoping at least they acknowledge the report with a, "Thanks for helping us track down the bug, and we hope you'll consider joining us again next year" message.

Also odd to me is that their web contact form doesn't even seem to send an automated email, something like, "Thanks for contacting us via our form."

Gee, sounds like San Diego Comic Con.........

This is purely speculation, but it seems like Cedar Fair is likely not using Accesso's "box office" software package which seems like it would be better suited for event ticket sales like this.

https://accesso.com/solutions/ticketing/box-office-ticketing-software

Most of the time they don't have a requirement for selling a limited number of tickets in a very high demand environment. So the issue might be that they are stretching their current options further than they were intended to go.

Interesting thought, from their own website information and Cedar Fair website information they are using the passport package.

Accesso has both the virtual queue package I believe Cedar Fair was looking at but didn't implement (curious to see what the overhead on that deployment would be?). And the box office package you referenced. At a software level something like Ticketmasters hold system doesn't take much to implement regardless of which option they are using I'd think? I'm leaning more towards there being a server load issue with so many people trying to connect and buy at once, and they wouldn't have a need to have the servers handle that the rest of the year, so if they don't have a flexible deployment option then they can't practically increase capacity of the servers without it being overkill for the other 364 days of the year.

One thought I just had to help soften the load and minimize issues like this is spread out the ticket sales throughout a day?

Example: there are 4 time slots from what I saw, I don't know exactly how many tickets but if my estimate last year was correct they sold something like 5-10k tickets based of the donation amount raised for AKA. So instead of a digital bum rush on the servers at 1200 they use this. Divide all of the tickets into 4 groups, in my mind it'd be best to have all time slots available at all times. Then instead of one ticket sale mid day they do four with less available at any one sale but the same amount still available throughout the day. Say they do one sale at 0700, the next at 1200, the next at 1730, and the last at 2030. Same number of tickets but they just cut the theoretical server load to a quarter. This also allows people who work different shifts to all have an opportunity to purchase.

I know that's kind of long, and I'm sure it's not optimal. But it's just a thought from my IT background and addressing some concerns people have raised. What do y'all think?