DispatchMaster

Yes, exactly. Parks will get rides based on things like need/expected ROI and available cap ex budget, not because of where the HQ is located. Which is why it was, IMO, a terrible move to offer stupid-cheap season passes in the first place. Ouimet had spent years diligently building up the brand, and the morons who took over burned all that brand equity to the ground. Now they are stuck with trying to increase gate prices while, as you say, potentially struggling to afford the cap ex necessary to maintain their desirability.

That is still how ~99% of people visit parks. We are the 1%. 🙂 I'm not sure why the location of the HQ would have any meaningful impact on cap ex moves of individual parks. If CP doesn't get any big new additions in the near future, that would probably be because it's a relatively mature park that just debuted two new record-breaking coasters in '24 and '25, and not because of a conspiracy theory revolving around the HQ location.

Normally I would agree. But the parks would be well-served to replace a fair chunk of guests who only became pass holders in the post-Gold Pass era with guests willing to purchase passes (and add-ons, etc.) at a higher price.

I would imagine part of what is driving their pricing strategy is the recent inflationary cost of doing business. The cost of commercial electricity has risen ~20% over the last 5 years. In the prior 5 years it had risen only ~7%. That's far from trivial. That drives up the cost/rider, so I'm sure there's pressure to increase the income/rider, and the gate and FL are pretty direct ways to achieve that. It's a similar story for the cost of food, so making meal plans more expensive on a per-meal basis makes all the sense in the world. Given that context, it would be surprising to see them pull an about-face on these increases.

I don't think what you described occurred very often at all, maybe a few days during the season when the park was so full people were parking in the grass. It wasn't a regular occurrence. Also, they've been increasing the price of daily FL over the years. So, assuming they continue to keep FL prices high, they can keep those lines, and by extension standby lines, from becoming an issue.

Possibly, but closing loopholes helps maintain pricing integrity. That, along with the chain seeming to understand that their products are priced way too low, is refreshing to see after too many years of what seemed like a "race to the bottom" strategy of giving away the gate.

One nice thing about a park like CP being a premier regional park/resort is that their pricing is sort of in the fat part of the bell curve, meaning that, generally speaking, anyone squeezed out of the lower end by higher priced premium products can be replaced by becoming more enticing to folks on the other end of the bell curve's tail. Or, as you put it, "Raising the price could reduce the number of people using Fast Lane, potentially creating shorter waits and a better experience for those who continue to purchase it." I think that's the main takeaway here. Previously, All Season Fast Lane was just way too inexpensive, leading to saturation and thus a poorer experience for everyone, including and especially annual multi-day visitors who may drop a substantial amount of money each year at the park, as compared to locals who could "justify" the ASFL by using it many, many times throughout the season. Hopefully this price point pushed locals and other lower-per cap visitors away from it. I do want to push back on this just a bit, because if locals and other frequent visitors were using ASFL on a regular basis, which I would guess was the case based on this price increase, pricing some of them out may actually make standby lines shorter, rather than longer, since there will be fewer people lapping them from the FL/FLP queues. In general, though, it's refreshing to see the park seemingly setting the pricing to where it should be, correcting for the bargain-pricing strategy of the Gold Pass. CP, and to a slightly lesser extent KI (and Carowinds and Canada's Wonderland), should be priced as the premium products they are, rather than become de-facto baby sitters and glorified FECs, which harms the brand and can result in a death spiral.

Sure, but not sure how they're supposed to get in front of an unauthorized photo that was taken and posted in violation of their agreement with vendors? Are they supposed to prepare a media package before moving forward with the actual ride removal?

The picture seems to have been unauthorized, so it's possible they had planned to announce it at a time of their choosing, but were forced to respond to an earlier than expected press request. Also pretty stupid of whoever took that photo to not be more careful. It won't be difficult for the park to figure out who took it, considering you can see the side of their vehicle in the photo...

I cannot imagine a ride of this scope and complexity hasn't been testing already for some time now. A ride like this is almost certainly going to be considerably more complex compared to any roller coaster, at least from a controls perspective. And as the controls system complexity increases, so too do the number of potential failure modes, etc. All of that takes time to work through.

I don't see how anyone could take "lowest price of the year" to mean anything other than the year 2025... What else would "year" refer to?

I'm sure this is ignorance on my part, but how are folks getting what is effectively a $300 discount? Is it because the pass itself is $~300 cheaper? Because at the Midwest parks it seems all season Fast Lane is still $1,000.

I wouldn't worry so much about the price itself - it was either "worth it" to you or not at $1,000. But the issue I see is that cutting the price in half will likely saturate and dilute FL/FLP even further than it already is. The daily prices have been far too low, and so too have the season long FLP passes, judging by the ever-increasing FL/FLP queues.

I haven't been following the SF pass strategy insanity closely. What are you referring to here?

Are you familiar with the "fast, cheap, good - pick two" axiom? The idea is that a project/product can be any two at the expense of the third: It can be done fast and cheap, but it won't be good. It can be done cheap and good, but it won't be fast. It can be done fast and good, but it won't be cheap. Obviously the park cannot sacrifice the "good" component, so you're left with options 2 or 3. And considering park installations are meant to provide entertainment value for decades, it's hard to justify spending significant sums of money to achieve "fast", when all that really means is opening a few weeks earlier for a product that is expected to operate, say, 400 weeks over its lifetime. Does it make fiscal sense to increase a budget by several percent to achieve an additional <1% of operating weeks? Parks seem to have settled on "no" for that answer, which makes sense. I don't recall the announcement. Was AlpenFury ever announced to be opening on the park's opening day? Or was it announced to be opening "this summer" or whatever? Because if it's the latter, it makes no difference what pass holders expected. They were provide what the park announced - a new coaster that opened in the summer.