Another sad loss, although i've never been personally.. It doesn't surprise me, investment may still be high. But customers just aren't spending their money anymore. Why would they? They've got tablets and computer games, the kids sit at home all day in their rooms playing games, and the parents do the same...
Hear me out when I say Theme parks and the leisure industry has had it's day... Arcades too...
That's the last thing the park industry in this country needs. Yay, even less competition for Merlin! They can continue to not be arsed even more! Next we'll be seeing a worlds first angry birds basketball game stall thing in Amity cove and a travelling log flume to replace dragon falls.
And that park will be missed. Only went twice, we where driving up to Scotland to see family so it would have been rude not to. Didn't fit all of the rides in in 1 day because we where rushed, so stopped on the way back to do everything we didn't fit. Would have been 15 at the time, so that would have been 2014 or something. Nothing world class by any means but had a few pretty good rides and reminded me a little bit of PWH, a few rides had some character to them. Sad sad sad....
It's a crying shame that another small park has shut down. It goes to show how tough it is out there for these small family parks. It also shows that PWH are doing something right to keep their business viable. Still investing in new developments (well Hyper Drive could have been money saved) is a good sign. Hopefully we will never have to witness our beloved park succumb to a similar fate.
On the plus side PWH could benefit from a cut price ride or two. Every cloud.
I've got a friend who has family nearby to pleasure island (in Grimsby but he lives around here) and he's visited pleasure island several times every summer for 4 years. Apparently there where days where it was completely and utterly dead in the summer, and I mean utterly, utterly dead, he reakons there would have been maybe 100 people if that and apparently the weather wasn't bad at all. By contrast, I've been to PW when it's dead, but the only reason it was like that was because of an awful weather forecast.
Just to emphasise this, wipeout can pull a 20 (possibly even 30) minitute queue in the summer, but my mates never seen anything but a walk on to a single cycle wait on their boomerang. I guess you could draw a bit of comfort from that, PWH appears to be far from that stage for now.
Ooh, a boomerang at fantasy island, sounds good, more vekoma for vekoma land. Think they'll be able to afford it? If so then I think there was space somewhere beside odyssey (bugger off wind, 2 years and no slc ffs....), unless that's where part of the market is? If not, car park?