Welcome, it’s November, which means it’s cold - and theme parks are closing
(at least in the UK they are). Fortunately though there’s still news to go around!
First up, plans for a new 2023 attraction at Dollywood have been approved by the Pigeon
Forge Planning Commission. The 20 acre site plan reveals a large family ride,
one which looks remarkably like a big roller coaster perhaps?
Dolly Parton said ““We’ll make some announcement a little later on,
we don’t want to spill the beans on everything, so we’ll have that to talk about later.” Sadly
that means we’ll have to guess at what the new ride could be for now, but exciting nevertheless!
There’s big news coming out of Energylandia - I mean there’s always news from that park,
is there not? The polish theme park confirmed that 2021 was their busiest
season so far. The park welcomed 1.8 million visitors this year,
breaking their previous record of 1.6 million in 2019. For context, Energylandia opened in 2014.
In its first year, the park attracted 250,000. 7 years later, it’s attracting just shy of 2
million - madness. But it doesn’t stop there! Energylandia will be open for a Christmas event
between the end of November and the end December, so the numbers are likely to increase.
Whoa we’re not done yet, there’s even more news. Energylandia have also begun to share
more videos and information about the new land opening in 2022 - Sweet Valley Zone.
The Sweet Valley Zone will be home to a range of rides, including two roller coasters. The area’s
major attraction will be Choco Chip Creek, a large Vekoma mine train featuring three lift hills.
Energylandia have also confirmed that they plan to expand even more in the future.
A graphic shows the park sat across 26 hectares in 2014, 43 hectares in 2021, and will cover
almost 200 hectares in 2025. What!? Are they building a theme park or a new country, jeees.
I personally can confirm that’s all the news we have from Energylandia this time.
Moving on, Skyline Park in Germany plans to debut a new roller coaster in 2024.
The park wants to build their tallest and fastest roller coaster so far - to do this, they’re
employing German roller coaster manufacturer, Gerstlauer. The ride will stand 70m 230ft high,
making it a hyper-coaster. However, a few years ago, Skyline Park planned to build
the world’s tallest roller coaster. However, it seems these plans fell
through. Hopefully their new Gerstlauer hypercoaster won’t share the same fate.
In other news, Blackpool Pleasure Beach is changing Icon! Kinda. They released a video
onto twitter last week depicting a circle with the words “Enso, Icon with a twist”. Many quickly
speculated that the park will be adding spinning trains to their MACK Rides multi-launch coaster.
Last November, MACK unveiled a seat modification for their launch coaster train,
which would allow the two rows of the back car to be converted into two spinning seats.
The company demoed these seats on their own launch coaster,
Blue Fire - and it looked great. If Blue Fire can be good with spinning seats, just imagine
what Icon could be like! Obviously this is all speculation right now, but fingers crossed!
Theme parks are doing well? What, how is that possible after the doom and gloom of covid!?
Turns out, both Cedar Fair and Universal have reported strong revenues in the third quarter
of 2021. Cedar Fair stated that net revenue was up 5% compared to the third quarter of 2019,
driven by record in-park spending per capita. Universal Studios Orlando on the other hand
reported their most profitable quarter in its history - not bad going I guess.
What makes this more remarkable is that these large resort theme parks still have relatively
low numbers of international visitors. So it seems there’s a big demand for theme parks, yay!
Woman Woman Golden Lasso Coaster at Six Flags Fiesta Texas, you know the ride with the McDonalds
colour scheme, has been closed recently. The park’s RMC raptor is temporarily closed for
“track improvements”. The park is allegedly making changes to the ride to make the experience
smoother for guests. What this means for a ride that is only 3 years old is still unknown.
Just over a week ago, 30,000 people were trapped inside of Shanghai Disneyland over fears they had
contracted COVID. Currently, Chinese authorities are being extremely vigilant for new COVID-19
cases. After it was discovered that someone who visited the park had COVID, it went into lockdown.
All 30,000 had to be tested, before being sent home via 220 special buses. They were then told
to isolate themselves at home for two days whilst waiting for their test results. In the following
days, Shanghai Disneyland remained closed to guests. However, the park has since reopened.
And finally, the most important news of all - Vote Coasters, the world’s largest annual
roller coaster poll is back! The amazing people over at Coaster Bot *epic smile*
have produced an easy-to-use poll to find the world’s best roller coasters. But to do that,
we need your help. You can use our ranking portal to search for the roller coasters you’ve ridden
and rank them in order of best to worst. You have until the end of November to rank your rides.
After that, we’ll collate the results and find out what the world’s best roller coasters are.
So there you go, take part in Vote Coasters and share it with your theme
park friends to help us spread the word. You can click the i button for the link,
or visit the description, where links to all of the articles can be found. *long pause*.
Oh don’t mind me, I’m just waiting for you to take part in our poll, I’ll wait all day if I have to.