Mark Shaw

All Car Park works started on Monday. A few more changes to come in the next few weeks. I will update once we have final board sign off. Mark

Thanks for the support guys. I survived the night although didnt get much sleep. Total raised was $14,500 and 3 of my exec team took part this year raising over $7k on top so over $21k in total. Well worth the discomfort and sleep deprivation. Mark

Thanks everyone. Over $9k now and aiming for $15k. Mark

Thanks Iwerks. Altogether now the tally is over $21,000 and so far this year $2500. If anyone else wishes to donate, even if its juts a few dollars, it all helps and is appreciated. Its pretty cold out there at night just now and Vinnies are able to use the money immediately. I also have some of my Exec team joining me this year and they have raised over $2k sperately.

Yes it is good news. Their cost assumptions to actually do the works will be off by around 100% though!

Thank you IWERKS. Its great to have your support on this! I can confirm testing on Freefall has been going very well (and it survied last night's storm!) still some curve testing to do this week but fingers crossed she is back!

I quite like Velocity. Perhaps Virgin will sponsor it!

The Castle island will remain and one day be developed on. My plans to do much with Freefall hit a snag just after my last post as I am informed the tower will go back up early next week in readiness for the install of the new shocks. Once the ride is up and running, our maintenance team want to switch it off and turn it on once a week, run through some test cycles then switch her off until we re-open. That means I cannot get the structure on the ground for painting. Most of the tarting up will be at ground level. f anyone can think of a more interesting nmae than Freefall I'm all ears.

IWERKS Thanks and great photos. Regarding Freefall, we have our shock absorbers refurbished and arriving this week from Germany, along with a Huss technician to oversee the install. On top of that we have a second set of brand new shocks arriving later in the Spring. I am 95% certain the ride will re-open in September. It has been very frustrating to have lost the ride through no fault of ours and to have to do so much chasing! We have budgted for a paint job and tart up around the ride (subject to budget approvals later this month) In more news, the Paddle boats pond is dissapearing along with the Koi pond to create more lawn space as we seek to increase the Park footprint and ease the congestion on busy days. Its not an easy project as the pond was used as a storage of reticulation to provide sufficient volumes for each retic run. We are therefore having to build a 400,000 litre concrete tank with trafficable lid and inspection hatches under the new turf area. Its an expensive job but we feel the investment will be worth it in the long run. There are a fair few aesthetic upgrades planned but all subject to aproval on the 17th so I cannot go into any detail. Suffice to say whilst there is no major new attraction this year, we are committed to investing in the overall experience. Mark.

Hi and sorry for the delay in responding. The rule has always been no tandem rides so I was surprised to hear that you had been allowed previously. This is the manufacturers recommendation and we follow these. The team have been thoroughly re-briefed on this matter so do let me know if you are allowed in future. Mark

Curious to know if anyone has any "silly little things" suggestions for Adventure World that we aren't already aware of/addressing? Mark Shaw Chief Executive Officer Adventure World

Just confirming Tim is correct. As many have suggested, capacity soaking is a huge part of our considerations. We want more dry rides too! Anyone got a spare $10m they want to donate? Have a great day people. Mark

tree, barking, the , up. might, you, be..... wrong. but I'm happy for you to indulge in speculation. "wink"

Freefall : The saga continues. Huss are building new shock absorbers. I think I explained in a previous post that having ordered new shocks (over $50k worth) last March to give sufficient time to ship and install ready for this season, they then turned up 10 weeks late. By the time they were installed and everything else on the ride tested and balanced it was early November I think and we found they were faulty. They are safety critical so they have to be perfect. We had a local company strip them down and eventually a rep from Huss came and inspected first hand and said, "send them back, they're no good". The good news is we have a new contact at Huss in their CEO of the new rides sales company (who oversee service and parts) who seems to have given his colleagues a kick. Subsequently we believe the ride will return in Season 2016/17. Fingers crossed. It is a very complex ride unfortunately. Yes the early bird option will be available. Thanks Alex and a fair point. I recognise there is always a risk of info leaks but this is really just curiosity at this stage so if it did leak its not the end of the world as people would be simply barking up a tree that doesn't exist. I appreciate most if not all peeps wouldn't anyway.

Thanks IWERKS. The Kraken additional theming still has patches and stitching to be applied and there are now new shade sails in the actual queue race where we had gaps which also need the stitching and patches added over the next few weeks. The additional theming you mentioned has been there since we launched the ride. We hope to add more in Nautica over winter, budgets allowing. Talk soon. Mark p.s. I know its old hat on the Gold coast but we should be introducing a 10 week payment plan for Season passes this winter/spring. We had hoped to launch it last year ( see, we didn't copy the Gold coast parks) but our ticketing system needed upgrading in line with the new website before we could launch it. All,, What do people think about a Lazy river sometime in the future? Please note, just because I am asking peoples opinions should not be taken as anything other than curiosity about the popularity of the LR in preference to other rides/slides? Please do not post to Facebook. Thanks. Mark

that sounds about right. the team are dispatching around 30% faster now compared to November! sorry!

All Thanks for the comments everyone. Alex, I will review the ratio in accordance with current queues, which have obviously come down a bit from January anyway as I think you might have a fair point, certainly to move from 1 in 3 to 1 in 4 might be something we trial. Iwerks, it is unlikely we might spend $7m for a few years on one attraction. Unfortunately January's poor weather (worst in 26 years!) had dampened enthusiasm to take such big risks until we see improved returns and more steady weather patterns. That shouldn't be read as "we wont be" but at this stage, it would be "unlikely". Interestingly I was talking to Dax at Jamberoo yesterday and he reckons queues of an hour and a half are common on their tornado.... still! I guess Sydney park goers are more used to queues than Perthlings! (look at Sydney's traffic for example?) as they do not seem to complain about it as much. Duke of Whales, you truly must have been on a very busy day. Our reports suggest the average queue time in January for Kraken was 45 minutes. This is taken from readings every half an hour through the entire trading day. Speak soon. Mark

All Some interesting points been raised since my last visit here. There is an old saying "you cant please all of the people, all of the time" I'm talking about fast pass. Everyone is entitled to an opinion of course. Because the Kraken has proven so popular, the queues have been longer than expected. When you have a theoretical throughput of 600 guests per hour, you kind of expect/assume, that the queues wouldn't often blow out over 40 minutes. That was not the case during the hot peak months. The fast pass option is a consumer choice option and is limited deliberately (believe me, we could sell twice as many, at a higher price and bank the cash thank you very much!) so as to not upset the balance of emotions of the guest experience. Consider on a busy day, 230 Fast pass users and 5k other guests, most of whom, want to ride Kraken and don't want to queue for more than half an hour on a hot day.... right? So imagine if your in that non fast pass purchased group (and remember, they may have wanted one but they had sold out?) you've been queuing to get your first (and probably only ride of the day) and you see a fast pass guest pass you 4, maybe five times, in the time you've been waiting? We have observed this frequently and if I were that guest in the main queue line, that's just going to anger me even more. Our social media is littered with feedback based on the Kraken situation as it was. We feel that 2 rides jumped queue is fair and if you have sense you will re-visit the ride later in the day when queues have died down and ride again if that's what you want to do. We do have to react to imbalances, sometimes it is dynamic and I make no apology for changing the policy mid season. What difference does it make if we make that change now instead of September? the only difference is we are reacting to the majority feedback to try and redress the balance to be a little bit more fair. Next two rides will have high capacity. Other changes to the park layout may also be designed to address capacity issues. I think we do need to be cognoscente of the changing global economy and how that affects us over the next few years. So that's a watch and wait situation regarding MI4/5 at this stage. We all want to see continuous improvement however we have to work within our financial constraints and keep testing the market place to see where the growth potentially tapers away. Aside from that we will continue to improve our theming, landscaping, infrastructure and commercial opportunities in food and beverage and retail as well as constantly driving the highest possible service standards through our awesome team. Chat soon and thanks everyone for your support. Mark

Hi Iwerks You are correct. We would rather stay consistent with our opening times and besides which, things like essential weekly maintenance have to be achieved and rosters are fixed a minimum of two weeks in advance. I also believe anyone who might have attended on those days will come on another day anyway. Pirates arm has been fixed this morning. we wont let the idiots win. Obviously the join needs painting! Car park plans are coming along nicely (I know, not hugely exciting news) but MI3 plans are coming along. It wont be as big as MI1 or MI2 though. MI4 however? Mark

The incident occurred at the bottom loading platform. Immediately beyond the safety net is a grass/sand slope before block paving.

Hi Ocean Girl based on 4/5 star reviews as a % of reviews AW was pipping DW last week. Sadly due to our huge queues last week and severe heat we got pegged back a little and ended up just behind DW. If you take the period of AW's season last year and compare with DW and the other big Parks, AW scored highest with 85% of reviews being either 4 or 5 star. A lot of TA's ratings confuse us and we have challenged them before, many times without success (seems when we speak to an Australian TA manager they tell us that all that stuff is regulated in the USA to algorithms not shared and they don't have any sway because the company now is just so big) Hope that helps. ps. no disrespect to some of the Parks listed here either but we have hardly heard of many of them including the no 2 and 3 listed Park here so something is clearly out of whack.

Morning re stairs, that's a massive project in itself. We do already have the freefall stairs as mentioned here AND a chair lift!!!! Re misting systems, the problem at the Kraken top is the wind is prominent and I guarantee you guests would feel very little, if any impact from them.

Morning, the wait time signs have been in the queue race for approx. 3 days now. I think it definitely helps as most people don't have watches or phones on them and are poor at measuring time when waiting. Consequently 45 mins becomes over an hour in their minds.

Further to my comments yesterday, we have provided further shade at Kraken queue race overnight and positioned a team member with a bucket to douse the bitumen. The hill to freefall was black bitumen last year and we chose to refresh it with red on the understanding that it was cooler than black. We never receive complaints on the Freefall hill section before Kraken so this issue was hard to predict. The netting sections are being increased as and when the team can install. Complaints always increase when temps soar, that's human nature. We are still trending the highest rated Theme park, water park or amusement park in Australia on Trip Advisor for December to date, thanks to our teams dedication and hard work. We have also set a capacity limit on the park at 5500 guests. when making a call to bring this into effect we apply an average season pass attendance based on previous days so that Season pass members can still be accommodated. The period 26th Dec to 4th Jan is always our peak peak period so we expect numbers to return to more comfortable levels next week. Attendances in actual fact for this week are only 4% up on same days last year. PS. . the capacity limit has been brought into effect today.

Hi everyone. Yes, I am a little busy and sorry I haven't chatted for a while. Hopefully everyone had a great xmas. Kraken is extremely popular at the moment and we are doing as much as we can to keep throughput high, provide water for guests and deal with any outstanding shade issues. Today we added three additional pop up shade tents to address any gaps in the queue race. these are temporary as we will be getting some themed ones installed around end of January. The netting on the hill has reduced the heat on the feet by about 40% (I personally tested it!). We changed the DK costumes to add some "awkward" clothes (Dragons aren't really very good at dressing themselves!) to make them seem more friendly and human like. the show is far more interactive and the kids are responding well. Bumper crowds today, came very close to actually stopping ticket sales but then quite a few season pass holders left and we didn't quite hit capacity. The team did well with the snake incident. We do provide them with Govt approved snake capture and relocation training. Trading s way up on last year. Over 30% up. I cannot give exact numbers but bodes well for the future. Need more car parking! Talk soon. Mark