We went to Volcano Bay a few weeks ago, Tuesday the 13th. I wouldn't normally go to a new park within the first few months of opening but we happened to be in Florida for a wedding (we live in MO) so we thought we would hop to Universal and add Volcano Bay as part of the 3 park ticket package Universal was advertising in the winter.
My take? Very cool park with very cool slides. My kids had a great time. However. We stayed at the Hard Rock, which meant we had early entry into the park. We got in line right at 7:30AM and entered at rope drop. The kids had a great time walking on just about every ride from 8am to approximately 9:30AM. We rushed to do as much as we could. By about 1pm it was super crowded and the wait times were pretty crazy (these are the wait time pics seen on twitter). Overall, we had a really good time but had we not had early entry I'm not sure our experience would have been so positive. A few other takeaways:
- The employees at VB were super helpful.
- My Tapu pay stopped working, right as we were paying for lunch. A manager came over to troubleshoot it and couldn't. Rather than hold up our lunch she let us sit and enjoy and come back and pay later. I asked the manager if this happens a lot, and she shrugged her shoulders and said 'yes'.
- Themed water park or water theme park? I know there's this debate. My two cents. Whenever you climb to go on a ride, you get a panoramic view of hotels, stores, roads and highways. You don't feel immersed. Does this bother me? Not really, but it does take away from the whole experience of being taken away to a new place.
- Park could definitely use more signs to show how to get to slides. Again, this is where the VB employees were super helpful with directions. The names of the slides were also confusing. We kept asking "how do you get to the orange slide?" or how do you get to the big blue slide?". We heard other guests using colors and not the names for slides.
Bottom line, we had an enjoyable experience. Would I go in July without the advantage of early entry? No way.