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 Topic: Big ouch! Alton Towers entrance fee
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17/5/2023 at 4:45pm
Location: London
Outfit: Lunar Cosmos 524
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It's a long very time since I considered a day out at the likes of Alton Towers, but even though times were tough (I'd been made redundant), could still afford to take the family back then.
It's not just Adventure Parks that have become extortionately expensive, one of my passions is vintage (WW1/WW2/Cold War) aircraft displays, these days a great many shows are at least £45-£65 a ticket (double what they were only a few years back), some like Duxford also charge £5 car parking on top (that was also included in admission a few years back!), most are advance ticket sales only, no on the gate tickets available.
A show is usually 4-5 hours of flying, tickets are non-refundable, and shows going ahead are HEAVILY dependent on weather conditions, a great many vintage planes can't/won't fly in bad weather even if at the airfield already, many planes fly in from distant airfields and can't/won't transit in bad weather, so on a particularly windy/wet/low cloud day there can be virtually nothing to see in the air! And believe me, few places are as miserable as an airfield in driving rain, they have a magnitude of miserableness all of their own, often no shelter, just suffer it!
Most of the shows are 2 or 3 hours drive from me, so there is also the cost of fuel to account for, so in all a show can hit £100 in total cost (excluding any over priced food/drink purchased from show vendors!), now to me as an OAP, £100 is quite a lot of money to spend for potentially very little to see on a bad weather day! When tickets were 'on the gate' sales, I'd judge the weather on the day and decide if it was worth going or not, these days I have to gamble on a ticket purchased often months in advance (they sell out if not bought in good time). I'm not a gambler by nature, and have attended too many shows absolutely ruined or cut short by bad weather in the past, so a great many airshows have been dropped from my potential interest list, and I'm only left with 1 or 2 in a year that I'm likely to attend, instead of the 5 or 6 (or more) in the past.
Some shows run over 2-3 days, and VERY basic camping facilities (portaloo/showers, a standpipe for water and NO EHU) are sometimes available, but often at £30-£40/night for a pitch (minimum 2 nights as well), and that doesn't include admission fee, again advance booking only. A bad weather spell can make for a VERY expensive washed out 'non-show' indeed! Airfields tend to be remote, so you can't even treat it as a base for visiting other points of interest in the area whilst you're there if the air show is scrapped!
All that said, there do seem to be people that can afford to throw away hundreds of pounds on a family booking to see very little in return, whilst that happens it seems those of us with more frugal budgets stand no chance of seeing more affordable ticket prices or better terms of purchase!
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