Magic Mountain say hello to the Flash Pass!

[onyxhotel08]

Six Flags official site confirms the park will be adding the Q-bot Flash Pass system just in time for the 2009 season. Thoughts? About time! Finally you can skip lines and pay more to ride X2, Goliath and Terminator quick and more often!

[JordanSDMF]

Sweeeeet. I am going down there for Spring Break I think, and this will really help.

[zjohn1988]

Thank god! They've really needed this..

[CoasterNick3157]

I thought all six flags did this, well this explain one reason they are in dept if they only did this 6 years ago.

[UWW-10]

^ I'm fairly certain Six Flags is not in debt because Magic Mountain decided to not have flash pass 6 years ago .

[BP317]

Magic Mountain has had Flashpass for a long time, it was the paper system that SFGAm used to use.

[demonbulleagle]

I liked the paper system better.

[onyxhotel08]

What was that again?

[UWW-10]

I believe you paid $25 and got 5 paper tickets. The catch, though, was that each ticket admitted one person through the flashpass entrance. So, if you had a group of 4 and you all wanted to ride Batman together, you had to hand the attendant at the flashpass position 4 of your 5 tickets. In this case, everyone in your party had to purchase their own set of tickets, otherwise you'd only be able to do one ride.

Each system (paper and Q-bot) had their flaws...

I remember the biggest issue with the tickets was that there were actually an extra ticket but it wasn't actually "valid" and it said that on the ticket near the bottom, but people constantly tried using it and then became furious when they couldn't...especially if one person in their party had to sit out because they thought they had enough tickets but they actually didn't.

With the Q-Bot, people think they have to wait in the flashpass line until their device beeps, which causes confusion and anger, especially when these people who are waiting think others are "cutting" in front of them. Another big issue is the ratio of time allotments where people can reserve a time. The biggest issue I see with this is Giant Drop, although having 2-3 rows of a train filled with flashpass on is probably not the best either. There have been times on Giant Drop though where they won't even open the gates for the standby line because there are too many Q-Bots going off for one particular time slot.