2012 Amusement Park Ticket Price Per Coaster

There are a lot of variables that go into amusement park entrance ticket pricing but from the viewpoint of a roller coaster enthusiast – someone only going to the park to ride the coasters – might look at the ticket price as cost per coaster. I decided to do a little quick research and proceeded to go to a few amusement park web sites to see what their one day ticket price at the gate is and then went to RCDB to confirm how many roller coasters they have. I charted out the results shown above (I use Excel spreadsheets a lot).

A few interesting notes from my research:

• Six Flags has an affiliate program with 5% commission for selling park tickets. Very smart. Why don’t more parks do this (or maybe they do and I've never heard about it before?)
• Six Flags has one of the harder websites to find out how to buy tickets while Kings Island was by far the easiest.
• Holiday World has the highest cost per coaster while Cedar Point has the lowest.
• I omitted the heavily themed parks such as Disney and Universal for obvious reasons (extremely high cost per coaster).
• Lagoon Park seems to be pretty good value as it's the same price as Holiday World but offers 5 more coasters. That is until you actually see the roller coasters that they do have to offer.

Of course this is just all fun and games as I stated to begin with there are many other factors which go into ticket prices like what other perks are included - water parks, parking, soft drinks, world class shows, etc. At the same time, those folks complaining about how expensive Cedar Point is need to realize that Cedar Point is very affordable compared to other parks as well as alternative forms of entertainment.

Roller Coaster Freakonomics

I wrote an article featured in the latest issue of Theme Park Geekly where I attempted to analyize some roller coaster data in a unique way. I compared the speed of wooden and steel roller coasters versus their height and found that they were pretty much the same. Then, I looked at height versus length and noticed a very interesting trend. Joel, the Coaster Critic, was able to take my data and create a pretty cool interactive chart that you can play around with. Check it out for yourself!

Sky Rocket Design Flaw?

Sky Rocket at Kennywood is an amazing new coaster filled with wicked airtime in the inversions. However. there appears to be a design problem with the trains. Check out this picture.


It appears if you are a tall individual and sitting in row 4 the headrests from row 3 (last row of the first car)might be able to hit you in the knees. Apparently they've put a height restriction on row 3, 4, and 6. Has anyone been to the park recently and confirm this?