- Monday 20th August 2012
Walibi Sud-Ouest is in western France. We had visited eight parks prior to today and Walibi Sud-Ouest was the first to charge for parking. The park is well maintained and clean, exactly what one would expect from one of the largest parks in the country.
Okay, here's what annoyed me the most today: seeing how slow service was here. I've been to a fair few parks in my time--including some really laid-back ones--but Walibi Sud-Ouest sets new standards for sure. The park wasn't busy, just a normal holiday weekday crowd. The ride operators had no enthusiasm for the job: they were chatting and probably catching up on what they had for dinner last night. Because of this, the throughput was terrible--at best, a quarter of what it should have been.
Now, if you think the ride operators sound bad, wait till you encounter the restaurant staff. They would for sure find space in the Guinness book of records. It took ages to be served a fast food meal with no queues. They had no clue at all about what they supposed to do and were just running around like headless chickens.
Back to the park. All three coasters were typical cookie cutters with Coccinelle being the best from the bad bunch. The train capacity of Coccinelle is massive but they still managed to form a line of more than a trainload of riders, since it took them so long to dispatch the train. The water rides were popular today due to it being so hot, but we couldn't ride any as we didn't have enough time--again, due to slow-moving queues caused by lackluster staff performance. The time we allocated for the park was more then enough for us to have ridden three times what we managed today. Walibi Sud-Ouest is run by Muppets and the park will never improve if the management is not changed.
Animaparc
I totally forget there's a French Walibi park. Looks like they've made minimal effort compared to the other two parks in terms of the re-brand. Shame about to hear about the staff operations, sounds like Flamingoland.
ReplyDeleteI'll be going to Flamingoland some point this year, so will be able to compare both sets of staff members. It's highly unlikely they will be as bad as the Walibi staff members were.
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