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Thorpe Park: What could the future hold?

I was just looking through Thorpe park twitter and some people noticed that the hashtag ( #ThOrpEpaRk ) they are using on there tweets might have a message. When you take the capitalised letters it makes the word Toer.

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Now personally i'm leaning more towards a coincidence, but it could point to a new flat ride, or at a leap the S&S AXIS coaster ?. More likely though is bouncezilla with VR ?
 
Niles said:
I was just looking through Thorpe park twitter and some people noticed that the hashtag ( #ThOrpEpaRk ) they are using on there tweets might have a message. When you take the capitalised letters it makes the word Toer.

View attachment 7806
View attachment 7805
Now personally i'm leaning more towards a coincidence, but it could point to a new flat ride, or at a leap the S&S AXIS coaster . More likely though is bouncezilla with VR
Click to expand...

RMC Confirmed.
 
Heth said:
Alternatively these messages don't mean much of anything. I recall there being similar attempts at code breaking last year and it turned out to be sweet F.A.
Click to expand...

This is true. In the past, Thorpe have hinted to stuff which ended up being cancelled (2017, when they said they were opening a world first attraction in the summer), used social media to ride off another's company's social media campaign (2018, with Project Zero and numbers in hashtags) and no doubt more.

I'm under the impression, however, this is indeed for some form a thing which will happen this year. But it's always best to err on the side of caution whenever it comes to Thorpe's social media and trying to figure out if it ever means anything..
 
They surely can’t be building anything large or we’d all know about it by now.

Storm Surge looks really run down and it’s a fairly poor ride as it is. At least give it a lick of paint to give the impression that you care.

I don’t actually think the park needs any more coasters - just a bit of TLC. It’s market is London teenagers.
 
Nitefly said:
They surely can’t be building anything large or we’d all know about it by now.

Storm Surge looks really run down and it’s a fairly poor ride as it is. At least give it a lick of paint to give the impression that you care.

I don’t actually think the park needs any more coasters - just a bit of TLC. It’s market is London teenagers.
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"London teenagers" is not a target market, at least not one you should be aiming for anyway. If that's seriously what they are aiming for no wonder the park is falling to pieces and visitor numbers are dropping every year.
 
Will be interesting to see where things stand by 2029 when Thorpe Park celebrates 50 years.
I really hope they will have built 2-3 new coasters by then. It's probably the best park suitable for an RMC or an Intamin Hyper like Hyperion. Other parks in the UK can't build them or afford them. Personally I don't care much about the spinning rides but I think a giant frisbee and an extended Disk'o would be a big improvement over the ones they have.
I would have thought Derren Brown will be replaced with an indoor dark ride within the next 9 years surely. I don't mind Colossus too much but maybe new trains would help improve the ride experience and speed up operations. It seems so slow that one every time I ride it with repeated opening and closing of the harnesses. What a mess.
 
AndrewRollercoaster said:
Will be interesting to see where things stand by 2029 when Thorpe Park celebrates 50 years.
I really hope they will have built 2-3 new coasters by then. It's probably the best park suitable for an RMC or an Intamin Hyper like Hyperion. Other parks in the UK can't build them or afford them. Personally I don't care much about the spinning rides but I think a giant frisbee and an extended Disk'o would be a big improvement over the ones they have.
I would have thought Derren Brown will be replaced with an indoor dark ride within the next 9 years surely. I don't mind Colossus too much but maybe new trains would help improve the ride experience and speed up operations. It seems so slow that one every time I ride it with repeated opening and closing of the harnesses. What a mess.
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Your hopes for the park are way too high. They simply cannot afford to invest because of stringent budgeting given by merlin, hence no proper investment in the park for the last 4 years and no new coasters for 8 years now. If they haven’t been able to afford/chosen to build a new coaster in the last 8 years, there’s no way they will have 2-3 new coasters and a dark ride in the next 9 years. Impossible.

(Unless merlin sell the park off, which I think at the moment is the best option for the future of the park, otherwise the state of the park is going to keep dwindling to a point where they have no choice but to close).
 
Don't forget Merlin just got acquired in November. Too early to see whether Blackstone will make changes for the better (or worse?) yet but things could change significantly over the next few years. Then again, Blackstone were the ones to merge them into Merlin in the first place.

I miss Tussauds.
 
AndrewRollercoaster said:
Will be interesting to see where things stand by 2029 when Thorpe Park celebrates 50 years.
Click to expand...


'Celebrate' ? More like Reminisce over the glory decade, work out what when wrong, list the missed opportunities. I would go on but I'm starting to realise the parallel with my own life... but I partly go to parks to escape all that nonsense.

It was so exciting watching this park bloom and now apathy is as good as it gets.
 
Even if Thorpe could afford to invest, what incentive do they really have to?

The nearest park with major coasters is multiple hours drive away - probably Alton, owner by Merlin too. Within a reasonable catchment area there just isn’t any competition. Sure Paultons are approaching a place where they may be able to compete against Chessington, but it’ll be years before they ever impact Thorpe and they’re probably not looking to even try that. Every mainland Western European park will need to keep investing as within a couple of hours drive you can usually find a decent competitor, but there is nothing like that in the UK.

Now that Thorpe have a reasonably solid lineup of coasters (not commenting on their quality), not to mention their last two investments failing to impact visitor numbers (The Swarm and DBGT), I don’t know why they’d splash $20mln on a hyper. I guess something really tall might be more marketable, but can the park even hold many more visitors? I wouldn’t be at all optimistic for anything new in the next few years.
 
I think people are getting bored of Thorpe though, and that will impact them, this is the word of the 'GP' too (I really hate that term). People want something big and flashy, and it's not just enthusiasts who are getting sick of the park's downtime. Attendance is steady but hasn't broken 2m since 2014, though on a more positive note extending the opening ours into the evening during the summer (Love Island Lates) has been a great idea and doing so across more of the season may draw more people in.

Is there any legal reason (council restrictions?) why the park can't open until 10 throughout the summer holidays? I know it's a different park, but the 6 hour operating times are one of the things that puts us off visiting Chessington, and I'd be keen to see how increasing competition from Paulton's will impact that.
 
There are a lot of statements of dwindling attendance... not true (relatively speaking). It’s not materially worse than Alton Towers’s decline and AT has had a major new ride since 2015.

As for low attendance from 2015.... there is an obvious reason why.

www.bbc.co.uk

Alton Towers Smiler crash: Four seriously hurt

Four people are seriously injured as two carriages crash on the Smiler rollercoaster at Alton Towers in Staffordshire.
www.bbc.co.uk

Alton Towers historical attendance data

Annual attendance figures for Alton Towers. Explore the popularity of Alton Towers over the years.
queue-times.com queue-times.com
 
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Whatever this thing Thorpe's pointing towards is, I don't think it will entail VR; as many have said, the park seem to be having enough problems with DBGT, and I think VR rides in general were a bit of a fad of the mid-2010s that has now mostly passed, as opposed to a long-term future trend. I could potentially see some sort of event or walkthrough attraction themed to some form of sci-fi IP, though; I guess we'll have to see what they announce.
 
To be honest I don't even think they're advertising a specific new attraction. It just seems like standard pre season opening marketing. I know people love to read into these things too much. I'd place bets the next image will just be Inferno, Saw or the Swarm.

2019 had no new attractions, just events. I anticipate 2020 will be equally as much of a let down.

Going forward, I genuinely don't expect to see a new coaster even in the next 3-5 years. I feel some people expect new additions often because they remember the boom between 2002 and 2009. But since 2009 we've had 1 coaster, 1 dark ride, a second hand raft ride and some rethemes and not a lot else. In fact, in that time almost as many rides closed!
 
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