UK’s best value theme park also has the shortest queue times in the country
THE UK theme park with the shortest ride times has been revealed – and it also happens to be the park that has the greatest value for guests.
Last year, a study declared that that Paultons Park was the best value theme park in the UK.
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Independent research looked at factors like ticket prices and the cost of car parking as well as the number of attractions to determine which gave park-goers the most bang for their buck.
Paultons claimed top spot, with its number of attractions and free parking earning it top place.
Now new insights from website queue-times.com has revealed that the average ride queue time at Paultons Park is at least half what it is at other UK parks.
Data from January 1 to July 15 2024 revealed that guests at Paultons Park queued for an average of seven minutes to go on a ride.
By comparison, visitors to Legoland Windsor had to wait for an average of 14 minutes per ride.
That time went up further at Chessington World of Adventures, where the average queue time was 15 minutes and again for Alton Towers, where the average wait time rose to 17 minutes.
James Mancey, deputy managing director at Paultons Park, explained that by carefully managing the number of visitors, they can ensure that people don’t spend their entire day out waiting for rides.
He said: “We strive to deliver a high quality, value for money experience at Paultons Park.
“A day out to a theme park should be jam-packed with fun and thrills.
“By limiting capacity and managing the number of guests in the park each day, we can ensure that every family has the opportunity to spend more time on the rides than queueing for them.”
Queue-times.com analyses waiting times for 126 theme parks worldwide, tracking data for more than 11,000 rides.
The data is collected from each park’s official queue time source.
The short queue times at Paultons Park are one of the reasons it consistently receives high scores on both TripAdvisor and Google Reviews.
Bek visited in June 2024 and wrote: “We were visiting from Australia and can honestly say this is the cleanest and prettiest theme park I have been to.
“Our longest wait for a ride was five minutes. We were able to go on our favourite ones multiple times.”
Sun Travel's view on Paultons Park
Sun Travel’s Caroline McGuire explains why she believes Paultons Park’s waiting times are the best in the country.
I’m not remotely surprised that Paultons Park has the shortest ride
queues of all the big theme parks.
As a mum of a five year old, it’s by far my favourite theme park and
the short waits are a massive part of that.
We didn’t have any kind of queue jump pass and to be honest, we
never felt like we needed one. A lot of the time, we’d wait about two
minutes to get on a really great attraction – and that was on a
weekend too.
The only place in the park where you can expect to wait in line for up
to 40 minutes (although that’s rare) is Peppa Pig World.
It’s undoubtedly the big draw of the park and everyone, myself
included, heads straight there when they first arrive.
But I’d recommend getting out of there after a couple of rides and
checking out the rest of the park where the attractions are just as good and the lines are much, much shorter.
Paultons is still family-owned and aside from queue times, it feels
very much like a park that has been built by parents for parents.
One of my favourite little details is that they have a load of those
very annoying stationary rides that you find outside supermarkets,
which your child will inevitably pester you to spend £3 on – but at
Paultons they’re free!
My son rode a fire engine for about 40 minutes straight, thinking about it…. maybe that’s why the queues for the big rides are so small.
Lucy W visited on July 4 this year and said: “…I realised what good value it is because the park is fantastic and there is so much to do there.
“We spent most of the time in Peppa Pig World and most of the rides did not have a wait at all; for some we were able to get straight on.”
Paultons Park further expanded its ride offering this year, with the opening of Splash Lagoon in May.
And it’s also already got its sights set on a new ride opening next year too, with Ghostly Manor set to open inside the park’s old 4D cinema in May 2025.
The new interactive family-friendly ride will require guests to capture a number of ghosts that have escaped in the home of Dr. Kinley, “a renowned ghost hunter”.
They will do this with the use of “groundbreaking phantom phasers”.
Meanwhile, this is a list of the new rides and attractions that have opened this year.
And these are the best new theme park rides in the UK.
