Free cubbies are out and paid lockers soon will be in for three roller coasters at Knott's Berry Farm.
Starting September 8, Knott's will introduce pay-per-use ride lockers for GhostRider, HangTime, and Silver Bullet. Loose items no longer will be allowed on the platforms for those rides. If you can't fit it in your pocket, you will need to place it in a locker - and pay for that - before entering the queue.
Rates will be $3 for up to two hours, plus $2 for each additional hour. If you are hoping to ride a lot during the day, Knott's will offer a "moveable locker" (i.e. an all-day locker pass) for $15. Ride lockers will measure 10”x13”x17”. Larger items will need to go into the larger, all-day lockers located near GhostRider. Those rates start at $15 a day.
Up until now, riders have been able to dump their bags into free cubbies in the load station. However, that takes time, slowing down dispatch and thus ride capacity, leaving longer waits for everyone. In an ideal scenario, dispatch and wait times should decrease if no riders have to deal with bags or loose items when boarding their coaster train.
However, plenty of other theme parks have provided free use of lockers on rides that cannot safely accommodate loose items. Double-sided lockers in a coaster's queue can be especially convenient for visitors, allowing them to store items just before boarding and retrieve them right after getting off the train.
Without a free option, paid lockers essentially become an upcharge on rides that require them. Now, Knott's is allowing fans to avoid the lockers if they do not have any bags, bottles, or other loose items. There will be no metal detectors scanning for phones or other items that can be kept in pockets while riding.
Again, the new locker policy at Knott's Berry Farm goes into effect September 8.
Cedar Fair/Six Flags doing everything they can to become most hated amusement parks on Earth. Gross.
More greed by Cedar fair.
I always found it funny that they use throughput as the reason for this as if these parks care about throughput lol. Its a blatant money grab. But when you give away season passes for nothing (that now includes admission to almost every major regional park in the country), and give season passholders a bunch of free and discounted tickets on top of that...I guess what can you expect?
Before everyone jumps on the "money grab by Six Flags chain," I think it's important to note that Canada's Wonderland, Carowinds, Cedar Point, Kings Dominion, and Kings Island all employed paid lockers on their most popular attractions well before the merger. There was a point where Six Flags had similar policies at many of their parks, but in recent times it's only been a select few that have maintained such a policy. Thus, while paid lockers for bags are not ideal, this has been standard industry practice for quite some time.
Personally, I don't have a problem with parks charging for storage of bags at attractions as long as that is made known in advance. When guests have that knowledge, they can plan accordingly as to whether or not it is worth bringing a bag into the park. For 95% of visitors, a phone (and perhaps car keys) is all they really need at a theme park these days, and chances are most of the 5% that need to bring a backpack probably aren't as likely to be experiencing the major thrill rides. If guests had to empty their pockets before going on a ride and pay to store all those items my opinion would be different, but as long as keys, phones, and wallets can be kept on your person, paid storage is fine.
As for capacity, I was actually doing some calculation with that yesterday and determined HangTime is the only one of the three coasters that will likely benefit significantly from this policy. Based on my firsthand observations at the park this year, GhostRider and Silver Bullet routinely run at 85-90% of their practical capacity with the current cubby setup, so while consistency will probably increase, they'll still only be getting 2-3 more trains per hour at best. On the other hand, HangTime's setup often has that coaster running at 65-70% of what it should be able to do, so I could absolutely see that ride dropping from a 50-60 minute wait on average down to 30-40 minutes as a direct result of this operational change.
It's been a while, but if I remember correctly, Busch Gardens does this as well.
Most rides at Busch gardens do have lockers outside, but most people just throw their bags and phones on the other side of the station. The ride ops are usually okay with it.
@VelocicoasterFan - Busch Gardens (both Williamsburg AND Tampa) can be really inconsistent on bags on station platforms. It can often be dependent on the crew and wind direction. At Tampa, the biggest culprits are Cobra's Curse, Iron Gwazi, ShieKra, and Tigris, while at BGW, Pantheon, Griffon, Tempesto, and Verbolten have inconsistent ops. On all of those, I've seen instances of ride ops strictly and aggressively enforcing the no-bags policy both at the ride entrance and on the platform (to catch folks slipping by). Iron Gwazi is the only coaster where I've seen station ops forcing guests out of line to put bags in lockers just as they're about to board or may have already boarded the train. In my experience, the ops at the entrance catch most folks and if a few here or there make it through, the station ops let it slide. However, if there's no one at the ride entrance, that usually indicates an indifference from the crew to enforce the no-bag policy.
Generally I agree with AJ that parks have a right to charge for lockers so long as they let guests know of policies in advance. For the most part, there's very little reason for guests at regional theme parks to be bringing bags full of extra stuff, and you can enjoy a full day with just a wallet, phone, keys, and maybe a few other items that can fit into pants pockets or a small fanny pack/purse. If you're spending time in the adjacent or connected water park, it makes far more sense to put your swim bag in the car when you're visiting the dry side of the park.
Now, if parks are forcing guests to put souvenirs, prizes, or refillable drink bottles into lockers, that's another story - you can't willingly sell guests stuff that they have to carry around with them and then force them to spend more money just to put it in a locker when they want to ride. Parks should offer a place to store refillable cups/mugs at every attraction, and if you're not going to offer a free package pickup service at gift shops and game centers, there need to be places where guests can store these items at the rides for free.
In terms of what regular guests take into Knott's, a majority of groups seem to be carrying around at least one (and often multiple) souvenir drink bottle good for the whole calendar year that Knott's encourages you to buy at their food locations and when buying a ticket or season pass online. (I personally like to carry around a large insulated metal water bottle, especially during the summer.)
Friend groups (typically younger adults) and families at Knott's seem to ride these three coasters as a group unless the families have young children, so in most cases there is no one in your party with whom to leave your items. This is the other alternative Knott's suggests for riders in the explanation about its new policy (see the Ride Lockers section in its FAQ page: https://www.knotts.com/frequently-asked-questions).
Putting loose items in cubbies for these three coasters seemed to be working decently well for all three coasters, so I can't see any other logical reason for Knott's to spend the money to build lockers for these coasters except to generate more revenue (with possibly more ride lockers coming for Xcelerator, Pony Express, Montezooma's if things go smoothly?).
I belong to several Knott's-specific groups on social media platforms, and people are up in arms about this change. I predict this will not go over well at all since people have gotten used to the free cubbies on rides at Knott's for so many years.
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The Six Flags-ification of legacy Cedar Fair parks continues...TBF, there are some other coasters at legacy Cedar Fair parks that don't allow riders to dump bags on the platform or don't provide bins for loose articles that can't fit into pockets (Copperhead Strike for example). Also, for coasters that require guests to empty their pockets like Twisted Timbers, Steel Vengeance, and TT2, the free lockers that are provided are not large enough for anything more than glasses, wallets, keys, and cell phones, so while they're free, it's not the same as a bin that can hold reusable cups, water bottles, backpacks, and other larger bags.
I understand that the goal here is to eliminate the chaos that occurs on the platform when guests are scrambling for bins to either pick up or drop of their loose articles, but poor queue and station design should not be an excuse for trying to profit. Also, I haven't been to Knott's in a while, but I don't recall a time when either Ghost Rider or Silver Bullet operated anywhere near optimal capacity, and guests stowing loose articles was not the reason for woeful throughput - it's typically been dawdling or insufficient ride ops or minimal trains running. Additionally, Silver Bullet being an inverted coaster requires guests to remove loose fitting shoes, so you're still going to have guests needing to store loose articles somewhere on the platform.