We visited today, a family of two adults and two teenage children. Having visited on two occasions previously pre-pandemic and the park being the highlight of our orlando holiday hopes were high, which is why i am so disappointed writing this review!
The positives, it goes without saying that the coasters themselves are truly first class! Iron Gwazi is one of the best coasters in the USA at the moment and the rest of the line up offers something for every coaster enthusiast young and old. For this reason it's wrong to give the park less than two stars.
Unfortunately there were so many negatives beyond the coasters and all areas have gone down hill since the pandemic struck.
Firstly, the cost! To visit with a day ticket requires a small mortgage with tickets costing more than disney or universal. Once in the park the nickel and diming is awful. Quick queues, a must if you are to get on a reasonable number of rides due to the shoddy operations, $50 per person. All day dining, that'll be another $50 please, parking, standard is $30. All in thats almost $700 for a day out for a family of 4! The all day dining changes are also sneeky and worth noticing - previously good value at $35 per person where you could eat once an hour its now $50 to eat once every 90 minutes and also excludes drinks in between which were included before. Did I mention a bottle of disani is $4.50? Never did I think I'd be calling water in disney good value.
Secondly, park operations. These were truly awful from having coasters operating at the lowest capacity (one train operation on kumba and montu) to over 3 minutes to dispatch trains on iron gwazi. Queues are awfully managed with no staff controlling the merge of quick queue and regular lines or batching riders on most coasters making boarding a virtual free for all and forcing trains to leave with seats empty on each row. What other theme park would do this? It makes for a stressful and frustrating guest experience that is unnecessary if the park just put an extra person in place to give operations a bit of order. As a result queues moved far slower than needed requiring the purchase of the quick queues, perhaps that's the ploy!
Thirdly, the park is looking run down in places (literally there are piles of rubbish that can be seen whilst riding scorpion), with theming broken or worn out. Staff morale and engagement also severely lacks, guests felt like an inconvenience and there was no positive energy. I appreciate its 100 degree summer temps in florida but if your two competitors up the road can do it then why can't busch?
Finally, and not something the park can directly control but worth considering if thinking if paying out and visiting, if there is lightning in the area then all operations stop. We lost 2.5 hours of park time due to storm activity. I accept that the park isn't responsible for weather but the offer of a free return ticket (with no recognition of the loss of value of quick queue as a result of ride down time) doesn't really cut it if visiting from out of state.
All in all, the experience made me feel like I'd been ripped off. I don't mind paying out if the experience merits it but at the moment operations are shickingly bad and the guest experience is poor. I'd say keep your money in your pocket and take another day at universal or disney world until things change here.