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The CEO of the Big Banana has confirmed this Alpine Coaster has been ordered and is on its way. It’s a $5 million investment, will be opening later this year, will be just under 1km long, will have two lift hills in sections be 12m above the ground. The name hasn’t yet been confirmed (Plantation Coaster is a name being considered). Credit to Dane’s Theme Park Life for the interview with the CEO revealing this info.

Im talking more about them doing things that obviously slow up load/unload. Like the example raised earlier about waiting until the whole platform is clear until opening the gates. Poor performance within those constraints is 100% up to operations. In peak times, some of it is crippled by needing more staff, especially when it comes to sorters. Village have shown time and again theyll give someone multiple responsibilities and save having to pay another staff member, even if it slows load and dispatch times significantly. The training on specific rides and positions was (still is?) pretty generic. Focused on the responsibility and the safety aspect, but not really a lot on how to do the job efficiently. Plenty of people who really dont want to be there, its just a minimum wage job, turn up and leave. Also it seems like seasonal people that just havent got enough experience. They rotate people around too much they dont really get much of a chance to work on their skills at one particular ride for a long period of time. If they really cared about these complaints they would get together a bunch of their most seasoned/experienced ops, then go through each ride procedure and drill each ride to death to find where improvements can be made and set a realistic benchmark everyone should be able to achieve (time wise) between dispatches. I know they do have meetings with senior ops and discuss problems and receive feedback, but id never seen anyone revisiting their procedures and actively drilling the process on anything other than their newest rides that everyone is being trained on. Youd think they would revisit this at least a couple of times a year, just from working on efficiency I mean. Opening crews get the most time and scruitiny, then everything else is filtered down to the rest of the staff instead of giving everyone a couple of weeks intensive training at a time. Surely they could develop a rewards system for the crew achieving the most consistent (maybe highest overall daily dispatches?) dispatch times. Likewise, if the procedures arent being followed properly, you going to be penalised so people cant risk safety over winning stupid prises. It means managers would have to be actively watching whats going on every day, which means they probably need a level below park operations management team though as theyve got plenty to do as it is. Maybe something senior ride ops could rotate through, giving them a bit of a bump in pay in the process? Trouble is they have been having real issues retaining these people since covid. Other side of it is, you know what motivates people? Acknowledgement from management for good work (not just senior ride ops) rewards after being recognised and actually paying staff properly instead of hiding behind an EBA to underpay them. They used to have a pretty good ride star awards each month. Recommendations, prizes, even just seeing your name on notice boards for doing a good job. Lots of stuff kind of just faded away and not enough effort was put into maintaining everything. Its summed up by saying its all a bit average.

Movieworld needs to be open longer due to their horrendous operation and cycle times… that extra 1.5 hours of trading time means guests can fit in 1 extra ride….