Thoughts & Review: Kings Dominion (Opening Day)

I’m not the avid theme park enthusiast, but here goes some thoughts on a trip to Kings Dominion on opening day.

Two adults (Yes, I consider myself one of those :P), and two 14-year-olds make their way to Kings Dominion on Friday, April 3rd for opening day. We’re gonna have fun!

• Tickets are relatively cheap enough. If you pre-buy your tickets online, it’s only $34, and a season pass is $70 ($60 for 4 or more).
• Parking is ridiculously expensive ($10), but what can you do? The VIP season passes include parking for $20 more per person, so that’s probably the way to go unless you’re buying for a family? I don’t know if everybody has to have a VIP pass to avoid the parking surcharge, but I’m still amazed at charging $10 for friggin’ parking.
• The park’s procedures for validating season pass holders is very efficient. The line for that goes into a room with 12 computer stations and they use a webcam to lock in a photo of you with your season pass. When your season pass is scanned at the park entrance, your photo is displayed so that the attendant can match you to your pass. Now for a theme that will be echoed multiple times in this review… out of those 12 photo stations, only 3 were manned. As we saw the lines for season pass validation grow to over 500 people during the day, it seems that they didn’t have enough help to meet that need. Interesting aside, while waiting in line for my photo to be taken, I noticed they were rebooting one of the terminals and it was using Windows 2000. Hey, who needs the latest operating system? 😉
• Now that you’ve got your season pass (or park admission, whichever applies), you get in the line to enter the park. Or more specifically, you get into a line that may be an entrance to the park if it turns out to be manned. You guessed it, only half of the entrance lines were manned.
• Next, it’s on to the metal detectors from hell. Obviously, these detectors were set to “everybody must be a terrorist planning to blow up the park and gun everybody down” mode because it took me 5 attempts to finally get the lovely green light and win admittance to the park. 2 AA lithium batteries were the offending weapons of mass destruction that I arried and failed to declare. Yeah, yeah, safety, security, all of that crap. It doesn’t make it any more pleasurable to go through. I did notice a “Kings Dominion Park Police” officer there in a blue uniform shirt among all of the white-shirted metal detector operators. Interesting…
• We’re in. The kids take off to the line for the new Intimidator roller coaster while we kick back and relax. Since only the main part of park is open yet, we decide to head to the top of the Eiffel Tower. Only one of the twin elevators are running (lack of employees?) but there’s no line at all. A pleasant surprise ensues as the elevator operator is extremely pleasant and gives out lots of information on the ride up. I know he’s got to get tired of that one day. Anyway, we’re up at the top and it’s a beautiful view.
• Heading back down to International Street (the entrance area), we notice that half of the stores are not open (lack of employees?). Also, they have a big sign for a Panda Express restaurant coming soon. Feh. I just don’t think that Chinese food goes well with a theme park, but I guess the name brand will sell. They do have a Chick-Fil-A in the park (more on that later).
• The signs outside the entrance area say that three rides will be out for the day. The Hurler and Shockwave roller coasters and the log flume are quite dead. Later in the day, I went over to the log flume area and um… it looked like nobody had even been in the vicinity of the ride in a few years. Later on, we heard an park employee say that they hadn’t had enough time to get those rides going yet. That’s not good.
• Since Paramount no longer operates the parks, all things movie-related have been removed and rides/areas have been re-themed. This leads to some weird things like all of the “star” plaques around the Eiffel Tower attraction were replaced with plain old steel plates that looked cheap and quite crappy. Oh yeah, kiss Scooby-Doo and his friends goodbye too. The park doesn’t have that licensing anymore and it’s now a “Peanuts” theme (I’m guessing that licensing for that was cheap… hey, at least it wasn’t Ziggy.) It just seemed cheap to me, as “Peanuts” characters really aren’t that popular anymore.
• A lot of the rides (that they actually had operating) stopped operating as the day moved along. This became more obvious as you went around the park and saw the red-shirted employee smiling and telling people “We hope to have this ride operational in a few hours”. Yeah. Right. Our teenagers figured out that was a lie rather quick. Kiss the drop tower goodbye for the evening. Say “Sayonara” to the ferris wheel (how in the hell does a ferris wheel break down?). You get the point.
• As we progressed around the park, we noticed that around half of the shops, restaurants, and food vendors never opened for the day. I’m chalking that up to lack of employees, but it was very disappointing. I know that the typical theme park’s worker is still in school/college on April 2nd, but that’s no excuse for not finding a way to fully staff your business to get as much money that you can from your captive customer audience.
• Speaking of food, money and captive audiences… If I ever have enough money to open SouthsideCentralLand, I promise to you that I will have normal food and drink prices. A footlong hot dog, corn dog nuggets, fries and a drink cost $18 at “Johnny’s” in the Grove area, and quite frankly, the food quality sucked. Fooey on theme parks like this that screw over their customer base with pricing policies like this. Oh yeah, don’t forget the drink machines that will gladly give you a 20 oz. Coke product of your choice for the outrageous price of $3.75
• You expect the skill-based carnival games to be near-impossible to win, and they were. That’s why we stayed away from them. Who the hell even wants a six foot tall Pikachu stuffed animal? Pikachu was popular 10 years ago.
• Kings Dominion has moved to “designated smoking areas” which were largely ignored by the visitors and non-enforced by the park. The “Planet Snoopy” kids area was supposed to be smoke-free. It wasn’t.
• We noticed (and it was quite obvious) that the entire park could use “freshening up”. Examples include leaves and debris inside some of the arcade areas, paint chips gouged off the carousel horses, and birdcrap all over one of the mirrors in the carousel. You didn’t have to look hard to find something that could use a fresh coat of paint.
• Now for the review on the Intimidator (the new 300+ foot drop rollercoaster): Drew gives it a giant thumbs up! ‘Nuff said.

Recap: If you’re going to open for the public, the public expects for you to be fully operational for business. They made enough money on just the over-inflated parking fees to hire temp employees for the opening day. Having three of your most popular rides not ready for opening day wasn’t smart, and having souvenir shops and restaurants closed left a lot of customer’s money on the table. Overall, the teenagers loved every bit of it until they noticed that rides were starting to break down frequently although they just switched to other rides and still had a good time. The adults took a look around and wondered is park management had their eye on the big picture. Kings Dominion has a lot of potential to be an excellent theme park, but it can also become a glorified Lakeside. Rating: 82 (B)