u/snatchasound

Made the journey to SFOG today, headed back home now! Wanted to share the good, the meh, & the ugly in case it helps anyone in the future.

We bought Premium All Day Dining Passes & a Fast Lane Reserve Pass for me, as my wife doesn't ride coasters. Easier for me to just jump in, ride, then rejoin her.

The Good:

• Goliath is a PHENOMENAL coaster. Easily in the top 3 I've rode in my life of the ~10 parks I've been to. Smooth, fast, & thrilling. Absolutely worth the trip for this one alone if you're into coasters.
• Monster Mansion was cute, Batman was intense, & Superman is such a fun ride all-around.
• The Fast Lane Reserve system worked well for the most part. Pretty much everywhere but Superman- I'd go from the entrance to sitting on a train in less than 10 minutes, often less than 3 minutes.
• Vibes were great overall- had some good conversations with people in line & the park in general seems to be better taken care of than I remember it being ~5 years ago when I last came.

The Meh:

• Early opening info I got from multiple Reddit threads was bad/outdated. They DO start letting people into the park at 10:30, but only season pass holders can ride any rides. Not sure how recent that change is, but it was an unexpected slow start to the day. But to be fair, their posted open time is 11:00, so not too torn up about this one.
• The food quality left a lot to be desired. My home park is Dollywood, so maybe I'm just spoiled by their cinnamon bread. But the only thing we ate all day we could rate above a 4/10 is the pizza from Primo's and some Dip n Dots. Lowlight of the day was a pretzel we got that could be described more as leather than bread.
• The ride wait times in the app are super inaccurate. Was rare for the app to report anything north of 15 minutes, but the filled lines were very clearly longer than 15 minutes.
• Cashier at our first food stop didn't understand that the all day dining pass came with a drink. Wound up being a confusing ~5 minute transaction of her trying to sell us an additional drink.

The Ugly:

• The rides are unreliable. Throughout the day, I personally saw Blue Hawk, The Riddler, & Daredevil Dive go down (I actually got stuck on Daredevil Dive, but it was only ~10 minutes thankfully). Goldrusher & Scorcher never opened at all. I know there a few other rides on delay/closed in the app, but can't remember which they were for sure.
• Back to Daredevil Dive- I used a Fast Lane reservation for this which had an hour countdown. When it got to 3 minutes, the ride went down, so I had to cancel it. When it came online later in the day, I re-did my reservation, waited, & then wound up stuck on it for a bit. 1/10 ride experience all things considered, especially since the ride itself was very underwhelming compared to literally every other coaster I made it to today.
• Ride operations at Superman are in absolute shambles. The superman fast lane wait was just short of an hour (standing in line, not the time until reservation was ready), in comparison to my 2-10 minutes for every other ride. They completely ignored the fast lane most of the time. I didn't count, but I'd estimate they were sending 10-15 trains of normal line groups before they'd let one fast lane group through. This caused a massive back-up of people in the fast lane line. Also, when they finally DID let the 2nd group through in the ~40 minutes I was standing near enough the front to see, all of the gates opened & people ~20 or so behind me swarmed through & the employees didn't care. Just shut the gate when I was 3rd from the front & I continued to wait there for ~15 minutes before they acknowledged that line's existence again. Not sure if the app is grossly mishandling the amount of fast lane reservations available at any given time or if the staff is the problem here. But something REALLY needs to change for that ride.

Overall, 7/10 day. The (working) coasters were great & we didn't run into any truly major issues. But there were definitely multiple things that could have been notably better.