Busch Gardens adds free locker time to Iron Gwazi
Lockers are now free for two hours for riders on Iron Gwazi at Busch Gardens Tampa Bay.
The Florida theme park announced its new policy today, via its social media accounts. Previously, park visitors needed to pay to rent lockers for the Rocky Mountain Construction roller coaster, which does not allow loose personal items.
I don't want to give Busch Gardens and United Parks too much credit for the change, since this is reversing a policy that never should have been implemented. Let's be clear. No theme park should charge guests to use a locker on a ride with an empty-pockets policy.
Ideally, parks and ride manufacturers would design ride vehicles so that nothing will fly out of guests' pockets on-ride. Now, I know that is not the real issue on most rides with an empty-pockets policy. The real problem is guests taking stuff out of their pockets - usually a phone - as soon as their vehicle leaves the station. So parks ban those items on the ride and insist on locker use.
That's one valid approach. But with almost all parks now making in-park phone use pretty much mandatory, with tickets and reservations and even payments managed through apps, I would prefer that parks not create hassles for rule-abiding guests in an effort to control the rule-breakers.
Spend the money to staff people to monitor on-ride cameras and then kick out and trespass guests who take out phones on thrill rides where they are banned. But if parks don't wish to do that, at least make the lockers free for riders while they are in the queue and on the ride.
That also means that parks should not implement a fixed maximum amount of time for free locker use. It's not fair to limit a free locker to two hours on a ride when its wait time pushes that limit. Other parks have figured out how to extend free locker time when a ride's wait time grows or there's a downtime without a queue dump. All parks should do the same.
So, credit to Busch Gardens for taking one step toward doing the right thing. That's better than not taking that step, I guess. All other theme parks now charging guests to rent lockers on rides with empty-pockets policies need to change that policy, as well.
Back-door upcharges for what should be included with park admission need to stop.
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Replies (5)
Well, sucks to happen two weeks after I visited and paid $4 for one of these, but at least I was able to get eight rides on the coaster during my two hour rental (it was the only major coaster running two trains, so lines were nonexistent on a Tuesday) and I was then able to redeem my receipt for a $4 discount on a drink purchase so it was essentially free. Glad the park has finally wised up that making their signature coaster a pseudo upcharge isn't doing them any favors.
As for the time limit, this is the same third party locker system employed at a majority of Six Flags properties, so I'm guessing two hours is simply what the programming defaults to and it can be overriden by employees if circumstances warrant. Though given that the lockers are at the very beginning of the queue, I question how many guests would actually be willing to tough it out in line for over two hours without access to their precious phones.
About time .....
I might actually go back to BGT now :)
Related or unrelated to the recent firing of John Vigue?
We all know where this started, and sadly, desperate parks still think blackmailing guests into renting lockers will somehow help their bottom line. As Six Flags proved over a decade ago, charging guests for locker rentals for loose articles may provide a short term boost in revenue, but eventually guests get frustrated with what becomes a mandatory upcharge for their favorite thrill rides. Happy customers are the ones who will open their wallets over and over, but angry customers will just walk away and will cost even more money in the long run to earn back. Loyalty is an underrated trait, and even though United seems to bend over backwards to give Members and Passholders rewards and other perks, policies like this undermine all of those efforts and deter potential future members/passholders from upgrading their loyalty to the chain.
Giving guests 2 hours of free locker rental at Iron Gwazi is an absolute no-brainer, but the fact that it took so long for the park to realize this points to the lack of awareness and savvy from management. The problem is that the damage has probably already been done, and now the park will need to work twice as hard to earn back the faith in their guests that they're more than just contributors to the ledger.
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I let my pass expire and wrote a letter explaining for the first time in over 15 years I was not renewing and going without a pass. I will take full credit for this you are all welcome.
In all seriousness more people need to be speak with their wallet with companies like this. Of course the locker fee wasn't the only reason, but it was a contributing factor.