Are you ready to pay 5, 10 or 15 euros to save a few minutes of waiting? This almost philosophical question arises in a quite prosaic way in amusement parks. With family, friends, alone or as a couple, these festive places are taken by storm by the French during this summer period. Enough to clog the roller coaster, and force boaters to wait sometimes several tens of minutes before accessing it.
Rest assured, many parks have set up a fastpass system, paying skippers, to avoid queuing. In concrete terms, to take advantage of this service, you just have to buy the amusement park skip-the-line ticket in addition to the ticket. The 45 minutes of waiting in full sun are then just a bad memory. But if the idea seems attractive, this device has a significant cost, which can quickly double or even triple the price of the stay. Something to think twice about. The parks, for their part, seem to be the big winners of this system.
Each offer differs, with an increasing number of parks implementing complex systems, including “premium” or “gold” versions, which give access to more privileges than a classic pass. There are for example, in addition to the unlimited queue for the attractions, discount coupons valid for purchases in store, at Futuroscope. Unsurprisingly, these privileges come at a price. Disneyland Paris offers two skip-the-line services: the Disney premier access ultimate thus gives access to priority passage at the entrance to fifteen eligible attractions, “only once” per ride, however. To benefit from it, you will have to put your hand in your pocket. In July and August, for example, it is better to plan around 160 euros for the pass, per day and per person. For its part, the Disney first access one allows you to buy a skip the line for sixteen eligible attractions, by reserving a time slot. Its cost varies according to the attraction chosen and the day of the visit: if the first price is 5 euros per person and per ride, it can reach 18 euros in case of high attendance.
Parc Astérix has meanwhile introduced four new lines of skip-the-line after the pandemic. These bronze, silver, gold and unlimited “Filotomatix” each offer different possibilities. The cheapest allows you to enter a “virtual queue”, for ten euros, in order to no longer wait “physically at ten attractions”, when the most expensive “allows unlimited access without waiting to eleven attractions”, for a hundred euros. For its part, Futuroscope offers the “premium pass”, which allows quick access to five attractions for 40 euros, and the “gold”, for all attractions, at 99 euros.
The bill therefore climbs quickly for visitors. Thus, a family with a child wishing to visit one of the two Disneyland Paris parks at the end of August – the cheapest period – will have to pay at least 726 to take advantage of this “ultimate” skip-the-line. Or 246 euros for tickets, and 480 euros for passes. An amount that even reaches 964 euros for a family with two children. To have access to the two parks, the budget soars, reaching 801 euros for a family with one child, and 1064 euros for an additional toddler.
If these expensive sums can discourage more than one, amusement parks make it a point of honor to defend their systems. For Disneyland Paris, visitors will be able to benefit from an experience that “will only be better for it”. Among the Gauls, Sébastien Retailleau, deputy general manager of Parc Astérix, recalls that “waiting is the first rodent of satisfaction in leisure parks”. And this, even if the lines are “an integral part of the experience of an attraction” thanks to the decorations with the atmosphere and the chosen music.
Behind the price paid by visitors hides a whole logistical organization, since “the choice of attractions eligible for Filotomatix is not made at random”. The popularity of an attraction is not enough to include it in the paid skip the line offer: “We also take into account its hourly capacity”, explains the representative. For an attraction like Discobelix, which can accommodate 400 people per hour compared to 1,000 for others, the waiting time for the second queue would increase too considerably, and would degrade the experience of visitors, whether they a pass or not. This also applies to Toutatis, the new roller coaster in the park, only accessible to Filotomatix Unlimited holders or individually due to the high popularity of the attraction.
Skip-the-queue lines are therefore useful on busy days, but mainly on attractions capable of welcoming many visitors per hour. A limited quantity of skip-the-line tickets is also offered for sale each day, depending on expected attendance. However, Parc Astérix does not only rely on this system in the summer to avoid frustration. “Another way to make access to attractions more fluid is to extend the opening hours of the park. Between July 14 and September 2, we open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. We are also adding additional opening days. The more product there is, the more we unclog the queues,” says Sébastien Retailleau. Thanks to these modifications, if summer represents “the busiest months”, it is also the period during which the flow of Parc Asterix is the most “relaxed”. For its part, Futuroscope claims not to “tell visitors to get passes if they are not needed”. The management also limits the quantities available for sale, in the same way as Disneyland Paris and Parc Astérix, in order to “not impact the classic queues”. As long as the passes are offered, they will still be profitable for visitors, in terms of wait times, the three companies claim.
However, these offers are also attractive for the parks, allowing them to pocket a few extra euros thanks to impatient visitors. “It is indeed a nice complement on the economic level, but its place is not major. By transforming the Pass Rapidus into Filotomatix, this share of turnover has quadrupled. However, extending our opening hours has also been very beneficial,” says Sébastien Retailleau. Futuroscope, for its part, considers that this offer is “a service like any other, set up to improve the experience of visitors”, in the same way as the instructions for dropping off one’s belongings, the rental of pushchairs, or “the number of sandwiches planned”. But queue jumpers certainly also have an interest in the accounts of these players, who benefit from the impatience of their customers.
