No matter what business you work in, one of the healthiest things one can do for their career is check out the competition. Often when working in the same position for an extended period of time, we can get fixed in our ways and fail to see the bigger picture of how things can be done differently, and perhaps even more efficiently.

As the long time curators of the CPFoodBlog.com, our family and team cross North America each year visiting Cedar Fair amusement parks since 2014. Our website has become the go-to resource for all things associated with food and beverage throughout the Cedar Fair chain. In addition, our heads are often crammed with all kinds of useless information in how the Cedar Fair parks are operated. Of course like all things, there are things the company does extremely well, and of course things that can be improved.

Often time working in an environment, we can see the problem, but perhaps the solution is out of reach either because of means and methods, or because we do not know any better.

That is where we love to visit other amusement parks and see how they operate. Are they clean? How are the operations? What are the things we really enjoyed as a paying guest, and where do we see the Cedar Fair parks already excel compared to their competition?

As a resident of Ohio, we have limited, albeit very good, amusement park options. It might sound weird, but the promised land actually resides over in Pennsylvania, with parks ranging in size from Hershey Park all the way down to little mom and pops amusement parks. Perhaps the reason Pennsylvania is of such interest to our family is because we have not been to many of them.

To date, we have visited:

Dorney Park
Hershey Park
Knoebels
Kennywood

So when we were trying to find a new local park to visit, we opted to check out Waldameer located in Erie, PA over the Labor Day holiday weekend.

Going into the trip, we knew very little about the park other than it was free to enter, and for guests wanting to partake in the attraction, they bought tickets to ride each or purchased an all-day wristband. Since it was our first time at the park, we opted to purchase the wristbands so we could ride as many of the attractions as possible and not have to worry about balancing how many tickets we had left for each ride.

Despite visiting over the busy Labor Day Saturday, the park is dealing with a shortage of staff like everywhere. As a result, the park did not officially open until noon. The nice thing about being a “free” amusement park is guests could purchase their tickets/wristbands and then roam the park ahead of the actual opening.

Our family started out the day on the famous Ravine Flyer II and were on the second train of the day. It was quite interesting to see that they only cycle the trains one time ahead of opening. If this had been a Cedar Fair park, they would have been cycling for an hour or more ahead of guests for the day, and that is only if there is enough staff to operate the attractions that early.

Ravine Flyer II was quite the unique roller coaster built in 2008 with some great elements like the bridge over the road and banked turn near the end. We all absolutely loved the smooth ride.

Next we immediately hustled over to check out the Whacky Shack dark ride. LOVED IT! Everything about the attraction was old school and cheesy, and the exact type of fun we had not seen in an amusement park in some time.

After we checked out the Pirate Cove, which is a walk through fun house attraction. Sadly I was disappointed in this attraction and expected to see more. We were probably half way through and I found myself asking where are the pirates? Luckily some started to appear near the end of the attraction. All for the classic attractions, just wish this one offered some more decorations and elements.

Next we went and checked out the Steel Dragon, which offers a unique take on a classic wild mouse style roller coaster. Normally I might be a little hesitant for anything spinning, but the Steel Dragon was incredibly smooth and not jarring like a normal wild mouse can be, thus making it a quite enjoyable attraction.

Sadly, the Waldameer log flume, Thunder River, was not in operation during our visit.

After a quick snack lunch, and the kids enjoying a couple of the flat rides, we made our way over to the Ferris Wheel followed by the Sky Ride.

We then closed out our visit by riding the Comet roller coaster (great little family wooden coaster), the train, their Music Express and Chaos rides. The Waldameer Music Express was quite unique as it included a “tunnel” effect, and the ride operator runs the attraction both forward and in reverse at very high speeds.

Following our visit to Waldameer, we then headed next door to eat at Sara’s. Local hot dogs, homemade fries, zucchini fries, onion rings and milkshakes made for a wonderful meal before driving back to Ohio.

Overall, our family was quite impressed with our visit to Waldameer amusement park. Despite being a Saturday over Labor Day weekend, and with staffing of rides down, our longest wait of the day was for the Sky Ride at about 30 mins. While we understand why Cedar Fair does the things they do with seat belts, etc. to meet the requirements of certain safety certifications and thus insurance requirements, it is always so refreshing for our kids to ride some of the younger kid attractions and not have locking seat belts. The extra safety measures Cedar Fair makes ride associates go through can cause ride cycles to be very long and thus long lines. Waldameer was very good at getting people in, cycling, then off the attraction.

The thing we noticed the most about Waldameer in general is the park was extremely clean and well maintained. Beautiful landscaping throughout the property.

The only negative we encountered throughout our entire day was the food staff was not the most friendly, and the food was anything but good. Although we only had some hot dogs, chicken tenders a burger and fries to hold us over till dinner, the meal was uninspiring.

The other interesting concept was how the attractions were accounted for with the tickets/wristbands. Each guest scanned their tickets (card) or wristband at the ride gate to confirm entry. We bring that up because Disney Parks are now testing the idea of not only charging admission to the park, but also up charging guests for each individual ride if they wish to “cut the line.” Either the plan is going to fail miserably, or if it catches on and comes to U.S. based parks, the Waldameer model presents an interesting opportunity. Cedar Fair parks do have scanners at select parks (i.e. Cedar Point) where Fast Lane is being used to verify validity of the wristbands. So it will be interesting to see how the business models develop over the coming years.