My family went to Chessington on 8 July 2020. My n...

My family went to Chessington on 8 July 2020. My nearly 3yrs old daughter was very excited because that would be the first time she went there as a 90cm+ height child so that she could experience more rides than her previous visits.

She wanted to try the new River Rafts ride, so she and my husband queued for the attraction. The attraction is suitable for 90cm+ children and children under 120cm must be accompanied by an adult, so we didn't break any rules.

As they reached the boarding platform, the ride attendant asked them to ride the front boat, so my husband put my daughter into the boat first and planned to go in afterwards. But the boat continued moving and my husband didn't get a chance to board the boat, so my daughter was left alone in the boat. My husband asked the operators to stop the boat, but they were hesitant and had short discussion first before pressing the emergency stop button so my daughter was carried on going alone on the ride for more than 20 metres away from the boarding platform. We had to wait for the engineers to come and rescue her.

While waiting, all we could do was asking her to be calm and sit down, which was not an easy thing to do from behind a fence with a confused 3yr old child. After more than 10mins, the engineers came and opened an emergency door and asked me to lift my daughter from the boat.
My daughter could've fallen off the boat and got injured if she didn't stay calm and decided to jump off the boat to get to us. Worse thing could've happened if my husband didn't insist on stopping the ride and the boat went up the ramp and continued sliding down.

I asked to speak to the manager and didn't get a good response. She blamed my husband, saying that the operators followed all the procedures and my husband was the responsible adult who should have accompanied her on the boat. She didn't bother to ask the details of the incident first.

The worst thing was they continued to run the attraction immediately with the same operators without doing any necessary assessment or investigation after an incident that I believe was a failure on ensuring the safe operation of the attraction that may result in something similar or even worse happen to other customer.

We then spoke to the customer service which wasn't helpful at all at that moment.

The ride manager and customer service didn't show any empathy to us. They didn't even bother to apologize for what had happened and the distress it had caused. Problematic safety procedures and poor customer service.

We are still corresponding with the customer service through their feedback email for following up the incident and so far, I feel like talking to a bot with template answers which needs more than 20hours to reply an email.