PB has just contacted us with the following review of the Friday boarding session. I must admit that we've been going all the way up to the Snowdome recently, although not for any particular reason, so we'll see what Snozone is like in a few weeks when we go again. Anyway, PB says:

What is it with the Snozone? There's always one little thing that niggles. How do they do this? We need that hateful hag Ann Robinson to tell them to sort it out!

We've been to most boarder nights for the last few months (hence
feeling very poor now but can't kick the habit!). They've got so many things right now - the music, the rails and pipes, the side jump on the table, the fact that the table itself now sends you out rather than up, and everyone's riding is progressing amazingly - each week you see people trying things they wouldn't have dared the previous week, or nailing tricks they were just trying out before. But Snozone still always manage to screw something up.

Here is just a selection:

A few weeks ago they told us that if you wanted to do a 3 hour boarder
session other than from 7-10pm you had to book over the phone - it
wouldn't be available at the desk. So ever since then if our train gets in a bit late we call them on the way from the station and book our slot e.g. 7:15-10:15 - seems to work - until now with the £1 phone booking fee! (It also seems crazy of them to make it harder to predict the numbers they'll have to deal with, and the number of staff they'll need available.)

Another time we booked a Saturday morning 3 hour lesson for my gf's
little bro starting at 10, and at no time from booking to getting on the slope did they tell us the slope would shut at 11 for an hour. We got 2 hour tickets for ourselves, which the girl at the desk booked into the computer and wrote on the tickets at 10-12! Anyway all sorted out with little fuss, but would have been a problem if we had had somewhere else to go afterwards.

Another time we were second in the queue, and it took us 50 minutes to get our tickets. The computer was playing up, and the manager was trying to fix it. After about 45 mins we managed to get his attention and ask if they could just take the money and write out the tickets as usual, which thankfully is exactly what they did.

And the best yet was last Friday - pure chaos! We weren't too happy a few weeks ago when they wouldn't let the next person down the park until the previous one was in the lift queue, but we preferred
that to having 6 or 7 people going down the park at once. Didn't
actually see anyone land on anyone else on Friday, but I did twice see two people hit the table landing at exactly the same time, one from the big jump, and one from the side. Exciting to watch, but...

All evening the more experienced first aiders beside the jump were
radioing up to the two new staff at the top telling them to let only one person down at a time, but unfortunately the two new staff were a bit too shy to talk to anyone except their mates.

The only change made was to remove all the netting at the top of the
slope which usually acts like a bit of a funnel!

Near the end of the session, the manager came out, and skilfully
resolved the situation by standing by the base of the poma and personally handing a lift to each person! What was that all about?

They then came up with an even finer scheme of dividing the queue at
the top into two queues, one at each side of the slope (nominally for tabletop and fun park respectively, though no one knew which queue was which). This successfully doubled the number of people on the slope at any time, as there were now two queues each feeding down another person when the previous one had gone 5 yards.

The only times the fun park queuing has worked well in the past has
been when they've had the funnel in place, and made everyone put their boards on before they come through - so all the queuing is done above the netting.

Hopefully they'll go back to this, but it takes someone with the
confidence to talk to people to make this happen.

Still they've got the monopoly on snow in the south at the mo, so we'll probably keep going ;-).

I know Snozone find this sort of constructive critiscism useful and they regularly check out the site, so perhaps we'll see some changes.

Most of the concerns centre around Snozone's responsibilities to the Health and Safety Executive and of course its customers safety. What I don't understand is why there doesn't seem to be any such restrictions at the Snowdome? Correct me if I'm wrong, but as many riders join the park as the riders feel is safe and there's one guy keeping a lookout. Are there loads of accidents? No, because everybody knows it's a dangerous sport and ride appropriately.

So don't be too pissed at Snozone. They're obviously trying a few things out, but it's really HSE that is causing all the problems.

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