Kicking off the summer at Busch Gardens

closeHey, just so you know ... this post is now about 11 years and 10 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

Other than our usual Memorial Day weekend preparations for the upcoming hurricane season we had no plans or obligations so we decided to go to Busch Gardens for the day. Even with Tropical Storm Beryl approaching north Florida, we had gorgeous weather for our outing.

We had purchased vouchers for our Fun Cards (pay for one day, come back all year) online the night before, hoping to avoid any long holiday weekend lines at the ticket windows. An early start got us to the park before the parking lot even opened so we got a great parking spot (once it opened) and were on the tram and across the street at the entrance with plenty of time to spare. We redeemed our vouchers at the automatic machines to get our Fun Cards and still had a few minutes to wait before the official park opening.

Once inside, we made a decision to go ahead and get Quick Queue cards. We had been debating whether or not to spend the extra cash ($35 per person!) on this since a) we were getting to the park early but b) it was the start of a holiday weekend and c) we had to leave by 4:30pm. Not wanting to risk wasting most of the day in (what we expected to be) long lines, we decided to go ahead and purchase them. After about 20 minutes in line (probably the longest line we waited in all day) we had our Quick Queue passes and were finally off into the park.

By lunchtime we were starting to regret purchasing those Quick Queue passes. The crowds were pretty light and we had been able to pretty much walk onto every ride we wanted. At one point we had the entire Gwazi Tiger train to ourselves!

The same went for ShieKra so my daughter and I were able to ride it twice in quick succession (that’s me waving from the back row).

We did finally use the passes for the water rides, which had slightly longer lines, and they worked as advertised. We went right to the front of the line and got right on the ride. And it really came in handy for Cheetah Hunt, the newest coaster. The line was at 90 minutes by the time we got to it mid-afternoon (the crowds were starting to build by then) by we zipped right into the boarding area and only had to wait for 3 or 4 trains before we were riding. I love launch coasters and this one was no exception … plus it’s a triple launch! Thumbs up from me.

The only coaster we didn’t get to ride was Montu, which was having technical problems when we went to get in line. So I guess the Quick Queue did help us do everything we wanted to do, but I’m not sure I would buy them again. There are two types: the regular (which we got) and unlimited. The unlimited is a wristband that basically lets you use the Quick Queue lines all day as many times as you want (so of course it costs more). The regular one is just a card (the same card stock and size as your admission ticket) with the QQ rides printed on it. When you go through the QQ line, the attendant crosses out the ride’s name so you can’t use it again. Technically, the QQ isn’t tied to a single person or ticket so you could conceivably share if there were people in your party who didn’t want to go on certain rides. In fact, since we had quite a few rides left that we didn’t use, we handed our cards off to a family coming in as we were leaving the park figuring they could at least get a few quick lines done if they wanted to.

Although I didn’t use it much, Busch Gardens (Sea World Parks) has a cool free iPhone app. It has lists of attraction wait times, distances from your current locations, the park map with filterable points-of-interest, even a way to mark your car in the parking lot so you can find it later!

This is something Disney should seriously consider. There are a ton of third-party Disney park apps out there, but all the wait time ones rely on user-provided feedback. Having an official feed from Disney would be a lot better (and I can’t believe it’d be that hard … maybe they don’t want to “scare away” potential customers).

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *