 Alrighty, I just got back from Season Pass Holders Day at Canada's Wonderland, and oh my goodness, that was the busiest Season Pass Holders event I have ever attended. And I'm going to go over several things in this video about why you should calm down. Okay, I know that I'm famous for taking Wonderland's side in things, and yes, there is some bias to me because I do do like media with Wonderland, and I like love Wonderland, but I am reporting with literally 100% transparency on things that were wrong with today's visit, and why we should take a step back and understand that this was the first day the park was open, and several reasons why the park wasn't ready for it. But for anyone that attended today, you probably know and understand, especially based off of my DMs today, I think I received over 30 DMs of people upset with today's visit, and based off of everyone that we kept bumping into, it was just complete chaos. I'll start off with what was wrong, and then I explain why it's okay. Everything will be worked out. Wonderland is a great steam engine that figures its problems out and solves them. Okay, so problem number one. The front gate. The front gate is always going to be a problem at Wonderland until it is renovated, and just from open until that first three hours, it was just chaos to get into that park. We have people reporting to us that it took anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half, including parking tolls and front gate to get into the park. In my opinion, that is unacceptable, but there are things the park will probably do over the coming years to fix that. I can't see them ignoring it any longer. COVID was used as an excuse as to why that was occurring, and right now there's no more excuses for why people should be waiting an hour, an hour and a half to get into the tolls and the park together. Problem number two. The food. The food lines were absolutely insane, and the quality of food was questionable depending on where you went, and there was just a lot of confusion, chaos, and running out of products. Actually, from the start of the day, some places were out of cutlery, and throughout the day, even like about three hours after opening, some stores were shutting down, and then by the end of the day, almost every restaurant was out of food or out of product. Now this was opening day technically, season pass holders day, and to be out of product in my opinion, a little weird, but I'm going to explain why this was all happening based off of my opinion. So I want to stress this out, this isn't an official statement from the park, but as someone who works in business management, I kind of understood and figured out what was going on just by analyzing it. Problem number three. The crowds, and this is a problem that is causing all the problems. So for those of you that went today, it felt like a busy July and August day. Every line was spilling out beyond belief, Yukon was all the way to Mindbuster, Leviathan was spilling out and around towards Go-Karts, Behemoth was spilling up towards Sledgehammer, and all the flat rides were full, even Dragonfire had a full queue. I don't really look at Flight Deck, but I know Time Warp had an overflowing queue, Spinovator had an overflowing queue, Rage was beyond full, and the kids area was insane. So those are the problems. Sounds pretty serious, right? Well, it's operating day number one. And for those of you that have gone to Wonderland for many years and have gone to many season pass holders events, you'll understand that this was unexpected. There is no way the park could have prepared for this. The reservation system is no longer in place. So out of full honesty, the park had no idea how many season pass holders would go because most of us have the free parking on our passes and none of us are booking ahead of time. So there's no pre-warning for how many people are coming to the park again. So Wonderland was probably expecting what they would normally get on a season pass holders event when they're open 5-9 or 4-9, whatever they end up doing, 6-9 or 6-10, whatever it usually is. They're probably expecting around there, you know, busy but not busy, if that makes sense. Well, no, it ended up being a really busy summer day and obviously the park hadn't planned or prepared for that. And to be honest, as someone who works in business, I wouldn't have prepared for a busy summer day myself. I wouldn't have expected that. The only reason, and for those of you that have been watching my videos, I've been warning you guys, this is going to be Wonderland's busiest season. They are going to break records this season in my opinion, as long as things like this don't continue to happen over the next month. If what happened today continues to happen over the next month, then it could lead to people not wanting to attend anymore, but I know Wonderland. And for those of you that know me and know my videos, I strongly stand behind Canada's Wonderland in accomplishing tasks and fixing problems. Wonderland has always taken a step back and fixed things in the past. Wonderland has always taken what doesn't look like it's going to be completed on time and suddenly finished it. And a lot of things were working against them this season, from COVID to weather to hiring. So this is all very last minute. But again, staying on topic with the crowd, it's just, it was, it, there was no way for Wonderland to prepare for what they had today. And that's why you saw the food running out. They probably didn't staff the park to nearly as well as they should have. I know a lot of people who work for the park who were off today. And again, justified. You don't overstaff something labor is one of those controllable costs in a business. You do not overstaff based off of a hunch, you don't go, oh, I think it's going to be busy. So I'm just going to throw all of our employees in on this day. No, most businesses will throw one or two extra people. So for a theme park, it's like throwing one, two extra people per place. That would very well not translate to being able to fix the problems that you are seeing here. So again, see the food line for that one restaurant. There's just no way around it. And I know Wonderland is going to have this fixed. I know Wonderland, you know, in a month from now is not going to look like this. On top of that, there were a lot of restaurants not open. Coasters was getting renovated. So that was closed, unfortunately, which leads to more crowds spreading out to other restaurants. Marketplace wasn't open as well. Again, I assuming that's getting renovated on the inside. And maybe that's why or the menu's not ready. They didn't have any of the items in the freezers or had delivered yet. So that could be why or even staffing. But that's two pretty decently sized restaurants that were not operational today that were spreading out. And then the drink stand lineups were long because not all the drink stands were open. And again, that could be staffing. They didn't expect this big of a crowd. And that's pretty much it in terms of that. It's just, again, I know a lot of people are probably rolling their eyes. Oh, here's amusement insiders defending Canada's Wonderland. But in my opinion, it was chaos today. But it wasn't utter chaos. It was something that I could see fixed in two weeks. And I trust that Wonderland's going to have it fixed maybe even by next weekend. You know, a lot of Canadians can't afford to travel anymore. A lot of Canadians can't afford to go across the border. So Canada's Wonderland is now becoming that family destination. There were a lot of French Canadians there today for a season pass all this day alone. I heard a lot of French accents, a lot of people speaking French. And what that tells me is exactly what I've been forecasting in our videos over the last month is a lot of Canadians are now going to choose Canada's Wonderland as that family destination, that summer activity. And a lot of Canadians and Ontarians have been locked up a lot longer than other people around the world. Obviously not all places. Please don't take this. I'm not trying to like, you know, pick a side or give a political opinion on COVID. But nonetheless, we have been, you know, gone through winter and it's felt like a longer winter for a lot of us. And, you know, Wonderland opening a lot of people obviously wanted to come to Wonderland. And it's translated into this. So is this going to simmer down? Is Wonderland going to be less busy? No, it's not. In fact, it's going to get busier. July, August is going to be busier than this. So plan your visits. Obviously, Wonderland will try and fix as much as possible, but they can only do so much to fix things. No matter how much they staff, there's only so much equipment. So food lines are always going to be long. So maybe eat an hour earlier. If you eat around 11am to 12pm, you won't be waiting in these ridiculous lines. And if you eat after 6pm, the lines simmer down as well. And you want to look for restaurants that are kind of like hidden in certain areas. The mess hall by Yukon's usually got a shorter line. So that's a good place to check out. Or marketplace marketplace can be good if you go at the right time. Obviously, there are times where it's very busy. So just picking the right time and place to eat around the crowds. If you notice, a lot of people eat at the same time. It's just like this timed thing. Outside of that, my best advice for everyone is just understanding that Wonderland is going to be busy this year. If you don't have all season fast lane and you can afford it, get it. If you can't afford all season fast lane, go to the behemoth side of the park when the park opens at 10am and get those rides out of the way while everyone rides Leviathan and the med fair side of the park. And then, you know, by 12pm-1pm, the park is going to be busy. It does take a really long time for people to funnel into the park because of that front gate problem, which hopefully Wonderland tackles over the next 5-10 years. That front gate needs a Renault desperately, and it is becoming very hard for me to ignore that as a guest fairly. But like I said, I do trust and I have, Wonderland has proven that they will fix things and things will get better. And I love that about Wonderland. In fact, you're seeing it. They're already building a really massive restaurant that will seat about 500 people. So if you think about this video right now and you're seeing 500 people dispersed to that restaurant, it will lower lines. And especially once that new restaurant coasters and marketplace is open, that's a lot of people out of these lines that you're seeing in this video. So it's very hard to draw a conclusion for what Wonderland's going to look like when things aren't necessarily ready at the moment. So that's what I'm saying. A lot of people were really upset with their visit today, but in reality, it's going to look different. You're getting a very not complete analysis of what the park is going to look like when things aren't ready. It was just a sample event for what the park is going to look like. So I'm going to definitely use this camera again next week on opening day and do a walkthrough again to give you guys another glimpse. And I think I'm going to do this every week that it's open to kind of show you the park's improvement. And I'm going to guarantee you right now, you're going to see improvement in every video because I know that Wonderland's already well aware of what happened today. In fact, they were probably aware the first hour when the tolls were lined up all the way past like a Halloween haunt day. And then it was taking an hour and a half for people to go into the park. They know they're well aware and they're going to fix it. And I don't work for the park and I'm not making any promises, but me as someone who has watched Wonderland continuously fail and then fix knows that they're going to fix what people saw today. So I'm really excited to see what Wonderland accomplishes over the next couple of weeks. And I guarantee that Wonderland is going to be a completely different park in another couple of weeks. Now I'm going to touch on a few things on top of that. You're going to get in everything new for 2022 video tomorrow, but right now I'll give you a little sampler as I rushed this video out just to kind of cover all the DMs that we were getting in the conversation because I felt it important to come out and defend Canada's Wonderland because a lot of people don't understand business and businesses do fail. Businesses are like people. They make mistakes. There's a lot of human error that can occur. And there was no way for Wonderland to know that they were going to be summer day, July, August, busy on season pass holders day with no new ride or attraction. I know that you might be frustrated. I know that you might be upset with your experience today, but there was no way for them to predict this. There was no way for them to fix this. There's nothing they could have done once those gates opened and they got this slammed. They had to just continue serving and serve as many people as possible as quickly as they possibly could. Close the park, brainstorm and learn from their mistakes and fix it next week. And I guarantee you they're doing that right now. It's 10pm. They're probably having their meetings, having their text messages through emails, and there's going to be a solution. And I just want to say an honest thank you to everyone that worked today at Canada's Wonderland. I can't imagine how stressed it was, how stressful it was, and it didn't ever look to be that stressful from my personal opinion. I didn't see any employees completely crumbling, especially the rides department. You guys are your strongest. The rides department is the strongest I've ever seen it. The amount of talent that Canada's Wonderland has this year, the amount of connections the teams are having with the guests, there is an evident difference in the guest interaction and just the overall capability of the teams this season. I don't know what Wonderland did, but it is extremely evident that this park is being really well run now in the rides department. So I would love to see whatever the rides department did between the last two years to this year, like last year was a huge improvement in itself and this year is a significant improvement. I want to see that applied to the food department. I would love to see whoever is in charge of rides maybe giving advice on how they coached their teams or inspired their teams to be that much more friendly, that much more like in the game and just knowing, and obviously there's going to be mistakes. You know, people are probably looking at me or listening to this and being like, well, I was at Behemoth and it's stacked. Yeah, rides are always going to stack no matter how you could put like clone the best worker at Wonderland 10 times over and work that ride and they're still going to stack here and there. So not everyone's going to have the same experience, but overall Yukon's team, Leviathan's team, Behemoth's team, killing it. Absolutely killing it. The best I've ever seen and I stand by that. So I'm really excited for this season. I know it's going to be amazing and I'm looking forward to it. So hopefully you guys understand that it was just opening day. It was just season pass of those days. It's going to get better and hopefully you can commit with me to not taking it out on Wonderland and just giving them another two to three weeks to get their, you know, this figured out and sorted out and prepared for business. It may not even be ready next weekend because it takes a while to order more product. It takes more time to train and hire. So give them two to three weeks and let's touch base again. Hopefully you liked this video. Hopefully you found it like informational and that it, you know, helped calm you down after today's visit because I know a lot of people were stressed. A lot of people are panicking. And yeah, if you have any questions, comment down below. I'll try and answer them to the best of my ability. I just want to remind everyone again, I do not work for Canada's Wonderland. I do not speak on behalf of Canada's Wonderland. And these are all just my opinions and my analysis of what I thought is going on at the park or what I think could fix the park. Anyways, thanks so much. Had a really great day. Thank you to Canada's Wonderland for inviting us out to media day. And thank you to everyone that took time to say hi to us at Season Passholders Day today. It was honestly, at the end of the day, so great to be back at that park. Thanks so much for taking 16 minutes out of your day, 17 minutes out of your day to listen to me, event and calm any nerves down from today. And yeah, thank you. Have a good one, guys. Bye.