Universal opens Hollywood Drift as pay-to-ride for Horror Nights

They've got to fund the Toluca Lake slush fund somehow I guess.

To be fair, there were a number of threads on various forums suggesting that buying an HHN ticket (and Express Pass or RIP Tour) might be the best chance of riding the coaster, so this move might be aimed to manage demand for the new coaster and not just the cash grab it appears to be, especially if it needs to stop operating at a specific time.

If Disney did the same thing for an attraction at 'Mickey's Not-So-Scary Halloween Party' the haters would howl about a "Cash grab!"

Utter disgrace!!

My assumption is that its closing early either due to noise or maintenance concerns (needing more time third shift to do maintenance) and they need to have a very short line when it closes.

That being said the way they are going about this is definitely a shameless cash grab, which is compounded by the fact that HHN is already an extra-ticket event that is not included with day admission or APs. When this happens at Disney with after hours events they open a new virtual queue, and sure it may run out quickly, but at least its not a shameless cash grab (although selling one shot fastpass during the day while they are out of VQ is a shameless cash grab).

I believe the kids call this "late stage capitalism." The art of the shameless cash grab is only going to get worse as long as the lemmings keep paying for it.

So Lightning Lane+ then? Now where have I seen this before?

Fast & The Furious: Hollywood Grift?

It’s the best I can do on short notice…

With Orlando's version opening next year, I wonder if attendees at HHN '27 will have to pay the upcharge?

Time will tell

It's especially a bad look because Universal sold tickets Express tickets including Fast and Furious access ... only to change their mind and stop allowing new Express tickets sold the same access. So now if you have an Express ticket that allows you access to the ride, you've got to go to the Dreamworks Theater to reserve a ride time.

What they realized is they actually do have enough capacity for the three hours the attraction is open to serve all the RIP Tour guests and those with eligible Express tickets. But instead of opening the attraction up to anyone with an Express ticket... we get this.

If they called it Dollywood Drift they could charge twice as much.

Honestly, they probably should have done this from the start rather than bundling it with Express. With the ride reportedly getting less than 800 riders per hour and pulling 1.5-2 hour waits during normal operation, it totally makes sense not to open it freely to HHN attendees when the last train needs to be sent just three hours into the event, but this absolutely needs to be a one year thing. For future HHN events, either the coaster needs to operate normally for a majority of the event hours, or the coaster needs to be excluded from the event offerings completely, because running it as an upcharge is going to sour a lot of guests.

Unpopular opinion, but I wish new attractions would be "pay-to-play" for a limited time until operations can be more streamlined. Any excess capacity can then be given to non-paying guests. Disney sorta does this already with ILL + VQ. This would reduce the number of riders initially and help recoup the park's investment faster.

@MyHandsDontScan - That sounds great in theory, but how long does it take for those rides to reach a point where operations are streamlined enough to handle normal queues? By establishing upcharges for new attractions, parks would essentially be disincentivizing themselves to spin up operations to handle full demand. Also, after a certain amount of time, the upcharge then becomes an expectation and entitlement from guests that will force rides to stay in upcharge mode longer and longer.

Now, I'm not necessarily against the idea of going back to the old ticket system or an alternate that assigns points to attractions and gives guests a certain number of points to spend as part of their admission, but leveraging the popularity of a new attraction to generate discrete revenue (in addition to increased admissions) is a slippery slope.

I will reiterate that I just don't see this as a blatant cash grab, because Universal is just trying to protect the guests that already invested in RIP and UE when F&F was advertised as being included. This all goes back to the fact that F&F ended up being delayed much longer than initially anticipated, and the "carrot" Universal used to sweeten the deal and encourage more people to buy RIP and UE for HHN has backfired on them. This move is just trying to protect the guests that were already promised access to the new coaster while trying to manage the remaining very limited capacity - there just isn't enough space left to simply throw open the gates to every HHN guest.

I agree, Russell -- the additional revenue might be too sweet for the parks to ever shut off. This is already happening with SDMT in MK -- it's still on ILL despite opening during the Obama administration. ROTR is another example: it has a ton of downtime and broken effects, but Disney seemingly doesn't want to go in and fix it due to lost ILL revenue.

The demand should dictate when an attraction rolls off the "pay-to-play" model (likely whenever the next attraction opens up in the park--maybe even sooner). If the capacity isn't being hit due to low ridership, it's time to open the standby queue and transfer the ride to the standard "skip-the-line" entitlement (LLMP/Express).

If it was not suppose to be Open - Then they added it as a new paid option
Sure Why not?

Corporations don't care about you - This has been True for the last 100 plus years....

$20.... for one ride?

I better be riding with Vin Diesel... or at least Molly McCormack.