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LegoLand - First Impressions

pluk

TS Member
A sordid confession for a theme park geek living in the south east of the UK. Until yesterday I'd never been to LegoLand. Embarrassing I know, but when I was a kid it was a safari park where they didn't keep the lions and tigers at bay with tiny detachable plastic bricks, and nothing had ever drawn me there as an adult.

I'd heard pretty unanimously negative things about the place from anyone (geek or non-geek) I'd ever spoken to about it in recent years; long queues, low capacity rides, general rundown feeling, poor value. So I wasn't expecting too much from my first ever visit today, breaking in our new £69 annual passes, with a 3 and a half year old daughter who has no real interest in lego but loves a ride. knowing the local kids had an inset day I was expecting the worst...

Overall I was impressed with the place. It still has a whole bunch of infuriating Merlinisms, but I'm going to say there is more good than bad and we really did enjoy our day.

Arriving to chaos is not the best start, according to the bag check person they hadn't realise it was an inset day so had minimal staffing at the entrance. When pretty much everyone pre-books that's inexcusable. No signage about where to go, no barriered lines, just a free for all. Once we edged our way to the front of the scrum we had to show both the annual passes and day booking confirmation. Why? How does the entrance system not know my AP has booked today? Slows everything down hugely. Over 20 minutes down, a shoddy start to the day.

It was busy but it mostly seemed to cope, we waited no more than about 20 minutes for anything and just a few minutes for what were the bigger and newer attractions. For a child orientated park there seems to be a heavy cut off at the 1m mark and they could probably do with a few more universal/0.9 restrictions; as it is the queue times throw up some weird anomalies like The Dragon being walk on but Dragons Apprentice holding a 40+ min queue all day (skipped, obvs). But with ours being just over the 1m mark it is the perfect age to visit.

As I'm one of the last people on earth to visit the place no one needs a rundown of the rides, but overall we were quite impressed with the selection. It is a decent park. Sky Lion is excellent as a new addition, I expect to see a few of these pop up in the UK. Hydra's Challenge is so much fun, how are there not more of these? The shows on the lake were pretty well done. There are a good number of supporting flat rides and diversions that are not rides, something the rest of the Merlin estate really struggles with.

But it is still all sorts of Merlin sloppy.
- Signage is poor for someone that doesn't know the place.
- Look to your left on The Dragon lift hill, that's where we store panels of temporary metal fencing with bits of old advertising on them. Look left on the log flume hill, that's a service are with old broken things and bins. Magical. Ride areas and backstage areas should not mix.
- Still 'theme breaking' covid signs up about queueing to the marks on the floor, but there are no marks on the floor any more. Take the signs down then.
- It could be a lot cleaner. The bins for Lego walls in the new ride queue had more than a days worth of rubbish in, and no lego.
- The food is atrocious. £7.50 for a hotdog and drink. No toppings, no onions, no side to make it a meal. A dry bun, an average size frankfurter, a pretty small drink. A piss take. Was going to get a sandwich for the journey home. £4.50 for two slices of bread and one or two thin slices of cheese. Ha!
- Laughably poor and inefficient operations on a few rides. No batcher? Just stop the ride for whole minutes for the ride op to split the queue every other dispatch.
- Fastrack and VIP is objectionable to me at any time, but just not at all appropriate for small rides with small throughputs. Infuriating a whole queueline of guests to take a couple of quid of a couple of others is not good.
- £7 to park somewhere that has no need to control parking use can not be justified. Then to have to queue for the pleasure of using it as the ANPR that they are supposedly using doesn't work so everyone has to unexpectedly search for their order to get out. A mess. The worst way to end the day.

My daughter wasn't 100%, recovering from the latest round of pre-school germs, slowing our pace and cutting the day a bit short, so there's plenty we missed including pretty much all of Duplo, Lego City and Mini Land. I will quite happily return a few times with the pass, hopefully when it's a little quieter and the kids are at school, but I'll be taking a packed lunch, that's for sure! And quite possibly parking on their nice grass verge and walking the last bit!
 
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Oh, and I've just remembered they extended opening by an hour because it was a bit busy, which was really pretty good and well communicated on the queue and information screens. I still struggle to understand how this wasn't forseen and amended well in advance, but there you go. Unfortunately it rained really heavily as that extra hour started so most people abandoned at that point, but it was a nice gesture.
 
I thought one of the reasons they kept the pre booking for passholders in place was so they could get a rough idea of how busy the park would be and plan accordingly. Bit weird for them to be taken by surprise like that.

I went to legoland a couple of weeks ago and it was good but a little rough round the edges in places. I also noticed that Dragon’s Apprentice had a 40min+ queue for pretty much the whole time we were there, same with the coaster in the Duplo area, whilst The Dragon was half an hour or even less at points, you’d have thought The dragon would be the one that was constantly busy, maybe operations on the other two aren’t great which is causing long queues.
 
The Dragon has a far higher throughput than the others because it runs three 28 seater trains instead of one 10/12 seater train which also means the Dragon always has a train in the station while the others cannot load and unload while the ride is in operation.
 
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In terms of food its pretty much the same as the other Merlin parks. The pizza buffet (in the central town area next to the lake stunt show) is still a reasonably decent option (although probably £15 for adults now) as at least includes drinks in the price. I have never and wouldn't pay for a Merlin Rollover hot dog in any of their parks. Burger Kitchen (next to the log flume) is a similar price for a meal. I think its long gone (due to the homogenisation across Merlin parks since the Tussauds buyout) but my favourite at Legoland was the rotisserie chicken they used to do in the castle, it felt themed as meat on the bone is "medieval" in a way.

But yes on a quieter day Legoland is a nice enough park, but they don't have anywhere near enough high capacity rides and the ones they do have are ruined with fasttrack on busy days.
 
I had my first visit to Legoland Windsor a couple of weeks back as well and I agree that the signposting isn’t great. My kids are big Lego fans and my son and daughter were incredibly excited to visit the Ninjago land and the Lego Friends Heartlake City (the absolute highlight of my daughter’s day was a meet and greet with the characters). I have to admit though that I was maybe expecting a little more from the themed worlds, they look very nice but there isn’t actually so much to do in them as I thought there might be, but having said that the Lego Friends show on the lake was excellent. Highlights for me were the Monster Party madhouse, the Lego City Deep Sea Adventure (which I thought was brilliantly done), and of course The Flight Of The Sky Lion. I think they could really do with a new family coaster though at some point in the future.
 
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