Village Roadshow heading to China

[Noxegon]

...the operations might actually be worse than on the Gold Coast!

http://www.smh.com.au/business/village-roadshow-chinas-citic-form-500-million-theme-park-fund-20150323-1m5itv.html

[joz]

Yeah look if I were building a park I wouldn't let Village Roadshow anywhere near it. Nothing to do with the Green Lantern incident, but the general lack of passion for the industry that exists within the company is truly a thing of beauty.

In a recent share holder statement, they made mention of the fact that they were attempting to give the parks a more magical feel and brand, by renaming the VIP pass the VIP Magical pass. Nothing in parks changed, but they thought naming it the Magic Pass would help the public think of their parks as being magical. It's difficult not to be impressed by such thinking.

[westical]

I noticed the name change. Didn't increase the magic.

[DaptoFunlandGuy]

The sad part is I find many asian parks to be extremely efficient, so i think chances are these parks won't suffer from the terrible operations we have here - which would be 50% management decisions on cost saving, and 50% staff attitude and motivation (as noted by Noxegon in a recent TR to MW). THings could be improved dramatically just by re-training those staff who seem to have lost the 'magic'.

Maybe they could rename the cast members 'magic members' instead...

[JeffreyMoore]

for me it the over all feel of the parks changed when thay closed the dark rides

[joz]

Here's the thing, when you have a park that is mostly made up of good employees with the occasional bad one, that's a dud employee. When every staff member looks like they'd rather be somewhere else is slow and rude but you still find the occasional good one, that's a management thing.

I'm almost certain if management were to receive that criticism their response would be 'We need to tell off all the staff and make them look happier' rather than 'We need to find out why all our staff hate working here and fix it'

Anyway, I didn't mean to go on a big anti Village rant, it just kind of happens sometimes.

[Brad2912]

I have to say SW has the poorest staff when it comes to customer assistance and overall 'happiness' of any park I've been to.

Maybe it because they deal with a lot more foreign/non-English tourists and it frustrates them or tests their patience, but they are always short, unwelcoming and seem inconvenienced

[DWP]

Funny you should say that as while I was having lunch at SW last week I watched the staff at sideshow alley and thought the way they interacted with their marks...er customers was exceptional (although of course that's what they're supposed to be). As for the rest of the park staff I've always found them to be fine although a tad slow in loading rides (Storm especially) which seems to be a VRTP (and a mostly Australian) staple.