On July 20th, 2021, Kennywood held their first Season Passholder event of the year. This event, taking place in Lost Kennywood, was a 90 Minute event from 8:00-9:30 PM. Today, I wanted to give my thoughts of the event.
Part 1: Beginning
First, I want to touch on the beginning of the event. The start of the event was horrible. There were a lot of problems entering. I overheard someone give the perfect explanation: Nobody wants to buy a single day ticket for $60, so people are just getting the Season Passes for pretty cheap.
Because so many people bought Season Passes, the entire place was packed. Usually, the park let's people just exit pretty quickly after close. This event, however, started as the park closed, so they had to kick a lot of people out of Lost Kennywood. People were already in line for Phantom's Revenge, SwingShot, Wave Swinger, Exterminator, Black Widow, and Whip, so those people had to get out, but that was pretty chaotic.
There were 2 massive lines for the event. The shorter line wrapped around Phantom's Revenge's drop. It went back to Musik Express. Because that line was massive, we went towards Kennyville for the main entrance to Lost Kennywood, but that was an even worse line. It backed up to the Midway Games, leaving Kennyville. That line was just massive, so we went back to the other line.
When they started bringing people into Lost Kennywood, it was not very well organized. You basically had to raise your hand with a season pass in it. They were yelling at kids who didn't have a chaperone. The line was massive. Everyone headed to 3 rides: Exterminator, Black Widow, and Phantom's Revenge.
When I got in, I ran to Black Widow. Luckily, I got the second Black Widow ride of the event. That was lucky. When I got off, the line was spilling out of the cave and was going towards Pedro's.
Overall, the beginning was chaotic. Tons of people came to the event and it was horribly organized. There was no way to make sure that people had valid passes or ways to control the crowds.
Part 2: Rides and Operations
There was a decent ride collection. The rides included the 2 best flat rides in the park (Black Widow and SwingShot) along with Phantom's Revenge (more on that experience in the review on Friday), Exterminator, Wave Swinger, and The Whip. These are all good, fun, smooth, well maintained rides that I could lap all day and have fun on all day.
The rides themselves may have been good rides, but I am not a fan of how bad the operations were on Phantom's Revenge and Black Widow.
I got on 3 rides at the event. SwingShot had decent operations. Black Widow and Phantom's Revenge didn't. On Black Widow, dispatches were several minutes long. On Phantom's Revenge, dispatches were around 90 Seconds to 2 minutes. This was with 1 train ops! They were only running the green train all day! It was pretty busy, especially for a Tuesday.
Part 3: People being Assholes
At Phantom along, I got line jumped by more than 6 people! There were an additional couple of people that tried cutting in front of me. Most of the Line Cutters got no punishment. They split up and ran away after seeing a park security officer (they thought it was a police officer, though) who watched it all happen. 2 of the line cutters were kicked out, though.
2 of the several line cutters stayed. When the Park Security officer came over, the kids who cut started defending themselves before the Park Security officer even said anything. The kids got kicked out since several guests and an operator told the Park Security guard what had happened.
I also do want to mention that the guests that cut defended themselves, threatened people who called them out, and even used a homophobic slur. Like I said with the title of this segment, these guests were complete assholes.
Part 4: Final Thoughts
This event was completely mismanaged. Nothing about it was done properly. They underestimated the attendance of the event. They had issues enforcing the rules. While the outcome of the most fun moment of my entire life was well worth it, I think that this event needs to be reworked and then brought back.
For this event, they need a lot of improvements. I think that they need to have a Reservation System and they need to cap capacity. They need to offer this on more days. They need to increase the amount of time from 90 Minutes to up to 3 hours. A Reservation System could be put in place that, based on the number of reservations, could change the planned time.
I really liked the idea for the event, but they needed to make some changes to make this event better. The highlight was the front row night ride on Phantom's Revenge. The event needs improvements, but I loved the event and would love a similar event in the near future.
Before the Article Ends:
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