Skyride at BGT is now an upcharge

This really doesn't make much sense to me. I can kinda see making the Skytower an upcharge, since that attraction can be operated on demand as the carriage fills up. The Skyride is a constant operation attraction that can't just be cycled when there are guests in line to ride. In other words, the park is paying to operate the Skyride whether anyone pays for it or not, so it makes absolutely no operational or financial sense to try to extract an upcharge from guests to ride. Do they really think they will make any meaningful revenue from this?

Parking fees are the biggest nuisance fee ever invented, but I wouldn't be surprised if Six Flags parks around the country aren't pushing $40/50 for parking this year. Personally, I'd rather them charge a little more for parking and generally raise other prices around the park than charge the ridiculous 5% "because we can" fee on all in-park transactions.

I'm of two minds about this...

On one hand, it really sucks that something the park used to offer for free is now an upcharge. It sucks even more that the attraction in question is a useful transportation ride that pretty much anyone could ride, especially at a park that is surprisingly lacking in kid-friendly attractions outside of the Sesame Street area (the Pantopia upgrades this year should hopefully help with that). To me, it feels similar to the 5% surcharge nonsense, but slightly less egregious since it's a lot easier to simply not ride the Skyride than it is to not make any purchases during a day at the park.

On the other hand, I can also see some justifications for it. The Skyride is a Von Roll 101 Gondola from 1974, a model which has not been in production for forty years and which is not actively supported as there are only ten left in operation worldwide (compared to over a hundred that were built). As such, the maintenance costs on the attraction are likely very high, which is probably part of the reason it took so long to reopen the ride. Another factor is staffing...most amusement park rides can be staffed by 3-5 employees, but with two terminal stations and a turn station the Skyride requires 9-11 employees minimum to operate. It is also not a high capacity ride, likely moving somewhere around 500 guests per hour per direction (for reference, WDW's Skyliner does 3,600 guests per hour per direction). Lastly, while it is a transportation ride, it isn't one I'd consider vital as two of the Serengeti Express stations are within the same general area as the two ends of the Skyride.

So yes, it's disappointing that the upcharge exists, but it's a bit more understandable to upcharge for this sort of attraction (I'm used to it at SeaWorld San Diego and the San Diego Zoo, both of which upcharge for identically designed Skyrides and still draw 10-30 minute waits depending on crowd level). Plus, if you're a passholder, you can ride it all you want for free, and if you're not a passholder, is $5 per person really going to make or break your day if you want to ride? While I'd rather the upcharge didn't exist, I'd much rather have a Skyride with a small upcharge that hopefully helps to keep it running than not have a Skyride at all.

As for BGW's attraction, I don't think it's likely that one would ever be converted to an upcharge model due to the triangular layout making it difficult to price one way trips (especially when going two stations isn't allowed), the short distances between stations making it difficult to justify a charge (~2 minutes per leg vs. a ~6 minute one way journey in Tampa), and the stations generally being far enough from the railway stations for it to serve as transport to different sections of the park (rather than more or less serving as an alternative method to get between the same points as the railway).

I still can't get my head around the Parks charging customers an exorbitant entry fee and then expecting them to pay again if they want to actually go on an attraction.
So a $5 charge to use the skyliners seems small beer in comparison to Disney+ and all the other associated fastpasses.

@AJ - I see where you're coming from, and can kind of see what the park is trying to do here by attempting to offset the increasing costs of maintaining an antiquated attraction. However, I really wonder if they've done the math to see if the juice is worth the squeeze. As I noted, because of the nature of this attraction, it's not like they can just cycle it when there are enough people wanting to ride it. It has to be running almost full time, which as you noted necessitates having staff at both ends of the line as well as at the turn station. While it's possible the park may utilize limited operating hours for the attraction (maybe 6-8 hours per day, not open to close), it's still not the kind of attraction that they can simply shift staff to a nearby attraction when no one wants to ride (like many parks do with kiddie flat rides that are in close proximity).

Beyond that, how many non-members/passholders are really going to pay the $5 to ride this? Let's say on a busy day, they run the skyride for 8 hours, which at full capacity could see a total of 4,000 rides. Given the $5 upcharge, you're probably going to reduce demand from non-members/passholders, so you might get @2,500 rides in a day. Even if half of the rides are upcharge-paying guests, which I think is pretty generous, the park would make @$6,000/day against an estimated $3k+ in just labor costs to operate the attraction. Again, that's on a perfect day with the skyride running at optimal capacity with a near non-stop flow of guests, half of whom are willing to pay the $5 upcharge. I just don't see this as a sustainable plan financially if they are indeed trying to cover the cost of operating and maintaining this attraction through this upcharge.

My big issue with this is when one park does something like this it gives everyone a bad reputation. When visitors to BGT/SWO see that they charge $35 for parking (which there is no way to avoid, lets be serious the parks in the USA are not public transit friendly), $100 for a one day ticket, $20 for a burger and fries, etc...and then they get to a ride and its an additional $5, for absolutely no reason other than it can be, it gives people a bad taste in their mouth towards the theme park industry.

The other problem I have with this, and this is coming from 25+ years experience working in parks, I can say once you start that its extremely difficult to get rid of something like this. The expectation for park VP every year is that the park is going to make more money than the year before, so no matter how badly a park executive may hate it, in order to get rid of it they need to make up all of that money somewhere else. No one ever gets points from corporate for being a nice person. Sadly this is one of the main reasons Bob Chapek got promoted to CEO even though the parks went downhill with him running them (which did not turn out well in the long term, but let's be serious these guys very often miss the forest from the trees).