MW Fast Track price dropped to $99

[red dragin]

1 minute ago, AlexB said:

You'll also need to specify which state - as different states use the same name for different measures in some cases (see pint, vs. imperial pint) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_glassware#Australian_measures

Now you're just putting facts into the story! 

[New display name]

3 minutes ago, AlexB said:

My beer's done. i'm out.

It ain't wine so don't sip it.

 

[DaptoFunlandGuy]

Haha. All these vomit reacts are affecting my constitution.

[AllegroCrab]

6 hours ago, iwerks said:

MW doesn’t have to charge the highest amount. They can cap it lower and create a bit of goodwill with its regular customers. I don’t see why they should reward mediocre operations with an expensive fast pass system.

But if you make it cheaper, you'll be rewarding the mediocre operations even more as fastpasses will sell like mad. You'll be sitting there in the regular queue watching entire trains of fastpassers go in front of you because the fastpass line keeps refilling, and they can't let it overflow. This makes a feedback loop where the regular queue becomes even longer, thus selling more fastpasses.

Exact issue was happening at Alton Towers for my visit. The 'Bronze' is ~$35 AUD, Silver ~$70, and Gold ~$105. And this is in a park with 10 operating roller coasters, and a bunch of other rides, almost all are very high quality attractions. The park is basically relying on their fast tracks to sell, and they were selling, and it skyrocketed the queue times even more than they were already high. Couple that with the park's abysmally short opening hours and you're in for a stressful day as a credit whore.

I actually ended up getting one for the Smiler (They had individual fasttracks as well) because it was the only way I was going to get a second ride on it in the two days I had for the park, and ultimately, it was a good value decision based on how long the queue was for that ride. I didn't ride anything more than twice, and most things I only rode once.

I actually asked an op on Rita about why they were letting the shorter queue go through so much, and he was very honest with me, saying that they had been scolded for fast track queues getting too long, so they were letting almost entire trains of fastpassers through with only 2-4 people from the nearly 2 hour long main queue (signposted 70 minutes). I'm not completely against the concept of fastpass, but when your passes are so cheap that more people on each train are fastpass holders than not, you really need to up those prices for the sake of the park experience for normal ticketholders.

tl;dr, Cheap fastpasses won't do anything to 'create a bit of goodwill' with your regular customers. You might sell a lot of fastpasses to customers who are sick of the queue times created by the cheap fastpass system, and you might make a lot of money from it, but ultimately I'd rather fastpasses were priced for only the biggest spenders to indulge.

[iwerks]

Current AW season prices are $169 or $285 for Platinum. I believe fast passes are capped at 2% of AW’s expected attendance for the day. So you have the chance to buy one if you’re planning a visit on a busy day.

Yes, I hate queuing in stand by queues which are poorly managed. I just don’t understand why someone would charge more for a fast pass than they would a season pass.

[Brad2912]

Because they will only be at the park 1 day in the next 3 years, so a season pass makes no sense but they want to experience everything in there one day?

i doubt more than 10-20% of fast pass sales are locals/pass holders. I’d never buy one at $100, I’ll just come back again tomorrow when it’s quieter. If it was $50, hey why not, my burger meal at lunch costs half of that...

Don’t think FP is designed for regular attendees, but the once a year, once every few years visitors

Edited November 19, 2018 by Brad2912

[joz]

It's also priced high as a way of stifling demand so the average guest who has paid admission doesn't get the shits with it. If you put a cap on it and price it low you're upsetting all the peeps who have piss all money who want to skip. Price it high and the whole issue takes care of itself.

[DaptoFunlandGuy]

12 hours ago, iwerks said:

I just don’t understand why someone would charge more for a fast pass than they would a season pass.

Because the model is different.

A person visiting for a single day is going to spend around $150 on entry, food and merch. Plussing their day with extra experiences at an upcharge is a way to get as much money out of them as you can - and a fastpass option ensures they get everything done that they want to do. You immediately turn that $150 spend into $250 - possibly more since they don't spend half their day waiting in lines, so they might get extra things done that also have an upcharge.

A season passholder (as we all have heard on these forums) pays their annual fee, and very little else on a regular basis. They aren't going to spend $100 on a fast track every time they visit (some of them were spending $50 when the fast track was that cheap), but the idea is to keep them coming back. They'll spend something on most visits unless they really plan for it - for example, we will frequently make a spur of the moment weekend trip to the park maybe once a month or so. Inevitably, we'll forget our refillable cup\bottle thing, so we get another one. So a refill cup x 12 months = more than the annual pass price - they're getting much the same money out of me, but in smaller lots over a longer time.

We might not do it every time, but we might catch a whiff of that fresh popcorn in the warmer and decide to get a cup while we watch a show. It might be hot and we decide to treat ourselves with an ice cream or a slushee. There might be a particularly awesome ride photo that we'll decide to get, every few visits we might get a backwards wristband. I think i've spent about $80 on backwards seats for my group - spending that much on backwards seats in a day is a little cray.

Overall the annual passholder spends more money, over a longer period on little things, but they still feel they are getting value from the multiple trips per year that they make.

[New display name]

I prefer the 3rd option of jacking up the entry prices and having no fast pass.  Never been a fan of a fast past and never will.

10 hours ago, joz said:

It's also priced high as a way of stifling demand so the average guest who has paid admission doesn't get the shits with it. If you put a cap on it and price it low you're upsetting all the peeps who have piss all money who want to skip. Price it high and the whole issue takes care of itself.

People are stupid so you're always going to piss somebody off no matter what you do.   Put the prices up to high and people say the park only caters for the rich.

 

 

[Park Addict 93]

Price is back to $149 as of last Saturday.

[MickeyD]

6 hours ago, Jordan M. said:

Price is back to $149 as of last Saturday.

Understandable. The spike in Visitor numbers over the  coming weeks will be from Interstate visitors and many of which are time strapped. Regardless of this,  demand for FT would increase relative to the increase in visitor numbers - proportionality significantly more so because of the increased visitor type.

It baffles me why Passholes (thanks A-to-the-LEX-to-the-B,) still visit this time of year when they can go anytime. Blow out the Qs, piss off the Tourists and reduce per cap revenue for the Park.. ffs

[DaptoFunlandGuy]

I'm quite supportive of blackout dates. time for another tier of the one pass.

[Spotty]

^ Same, I personally think having different tiers is a great idea and i'd be supportive of it. Base level has NO perks and block out dates (Have it for $99 to keep the whingers happy) then say have a $149 with no block outs and one ticket to Carnivale or WC and throw in 10% off in park spending. $199 with no block outs and both WC and Carnivale and 15% off. For the people that really want to spend more money have say a $299 pass or even higher with all 3 nights, 25% off and maybe a few extra special perks. One that I think would be good, and increase in park spending could be say offer ONE free fast track in the month of your birthday, and for friends and family offer it at a discounted price to encourage them to all buy it.

 

Multiple ways they could make different pass tiers work just sayin

[DaptoFunlandGuy]

That's a pretty good concept Spotty. I took it a little further:

 

Most of this explains itself.

The F&B and Merch discounts would have to be priced up - i don't know the parks profit margins but i assume the percentages here maintain a margin across most of their range. If it would increase the pass holder per cap spend, then it can't be a bad thing. One thing to think about is whether you'd include a discount (even if its a different rate) for experiences such as SW animals, WnW pay-per-play experiences, HWSD back of house, star tours etc etc, and\or AOS, or whether you reserve that for 'premium privilege' tiers (more on that below).

FN and WC tickets - i kept them in the higher tiers as Carnivale, by all accounts, needs to boost attendance, whereas WC and FN are frequently full. I opened FN in a lower tier as they have more flexibility about running additional nights, whereas WC, there isn't much option to run extra nights, and it frequently sells out despite not much in the way of improvements. Discounted offers would be perhaps half the price of a GA ticket.

Premium Privilege - yes, its a crap name. I just see this as a way for them to offer more to a select group - early entry during peak times, with exclusive rides open early (like the old VIP Gold). First access to new attractions and experiences - admission by invitation only \ etc.

Offers to attend things like out of hours events for filming, TVCs etc, all the enthusiasty things that die-hard fans want and are willing to pay for

Special one-off offers - eg: "visit this month and show your pass to receive a free bucket of popcorn"... things to encourage revisits, that don't cost much\anything to do.

Preferential seating at shows on a first come first served basis - ie - reserve a block of maybe 10 seats in show arenas at SW and MW, available only to premium privilege members. (and once its full, its full).

The tiers would mean that some things are offered to tier 1 first, and then opened to tier 2 if the tier 1 holders don't take the offer up. Other things would be offered to both tiers from the start (such as preferential seating, and the monthly freebie).

 

They could also feature a 'premium privilege upwards seating pit' exclusively for some events for the parade....

 

 

 

Pie in the sky? probably. still - nice to dream.

[AllegroCrab]

Pretty big fan of making it more expensive on busy days. The value of the pass goes up when the queues are longer so you'll just see more people buying fast tracks, and this will make the queues even longer as fast trackers are cutting in front. You need to balance it out somehow so that you don't piss off the regular ticketholder too much.

[aaronm]

@AlexB I think you're on the right track, though six options could be overly complex. Your $99 pass is a good alternative to the current locals option, and then also the $169 and $239 levels to round out the selection.

Could also add in $10-20 entry on blackout dates, and some kind of family pass (maybe buy 3 get 1 free)...

[Park Addict 93]

Fast Track has increased again for the peak, they are trying a slightly cheaper cost ($125) for the second half of Jan.

Has also returned to SW after a very long break.

[rappa]

Fast track at Sea World?? What is that like over $50 per ride?

 

Our parks are just too small to warrant things like virtual queuing and online food ordering. 

[red dragin]

$30 for the pass (to the right of the image) 

[Park Addict 93]

I visited Movie World briefly this arvo in between Fun House and Summer Slam.

Rivals was a posted 120m wait (running one train), Fast Track was a half hour wait (sold out) only just made it with the 30m allocation of the Virtual Que.

Edited December 27, 2019 by Jordan M.

[Park Addict 93]

Welcome back Fast Track for the peak periods!

MW is now a single use on each FT ride for $99.

WNW is being sold as a two pack for $140!

[MrLukeCarroll]

The down season seems to have brought about another change to Fast Track. You can now buy Fast Track on the app at Movie World on a per attraction basis for $20 per ride for the bigger attractions such as Rivals and Scooby or $10 per ride for attractions like Road Runner.  This means a single ride on Scooby now costs about the same as a whole day of Maxpass at Disneyland, and slightly above what any of the other parks I can find around the world charge for the same thing (mostly UK parks that charge £10 per ride for a similar thing).

[Brad2912]

They’ve been offering that the whole summer holidays on the app 

[Slick]

In my mind the whole FastTrack thing is just Village leaving money on the table.

By having the app and having one source of truth (Accesso) for the majority of the guest experience, they'd be pulling in crazy data on consumer behaviour that they're clearly not leveraging to maximise daily revenue. They would know age, gender, party size, geolocations throughout the day, purchase behaviour, visit behaviour, app access behaviour pre-visit etc. etc. and a bunch of other data points that they could use to create subsets of customers (enthusiasts, families, couples to name some basic level ones) that they could target with specialised offers. If the Rivals backwards seats haven't sold well, why not create a trigger that at 2pm you send an offer to enthusiasts in-park for a $5 backwards seat they could redeem via Apple Pay/Google-Pay in-app?

I'm guessing this is why BGH Capital want to invest so much effort into theme parks, there's easily a few million left on the table every year just by having a comms strategy that refuses to get with the times.

[DaptoFunlandGuy]

You potentially create a worse problem with upsells like that though - people deliberately wait until the end of the day for the discounts (like Karen hovering over the roast chooks at Woolies waiting for the markdowns) which can depress your current level of full price sales too.

There's still merit in the idea of capitalising off the current App data available (that they aren't using) they just can't make it too predictable, or certain, lest everyone get used to paying $99 for a year of entertainment...