If you are thinking of bringing your kids to Legoland Windsor, make sure you plan it well. It’s probably not a good idea to arrive over there at the height of summer unless you are prepared to spend a small fortune on Q-Bot passes that fast track you past the interminable queues for almost every ride. My advice to anyone on a budget is to go there in low season, early in the week when English children are in school and the park is quiet. If you go in peak season, rain is your friend because it cuts the queues in half and you are going to get soaked anyway if you go on the splash rides. Hopefully this hasn’t put you off because for someone who usually endures theme parks, Legoland was a bit of a revelation. It has a friendly, laid back atmosphere and doesn’t have music pumping from speakers at every turn like Disneyland Paris. The site is vast at 150 acres but seems manageable to get around. You will need a map, though, or you could find yourself going around in circles as the signposting is confusing.
It took us two days to get around the park but if you are just going for the day I’d recommend downloading the free resort app (at legoland.co.uk) and researching the attractions that suit your child’s age group so you don’t waste time wandering around aimlessly. It’s also a good idea to check the height and age restrictions on some of the rides beforehand to avoid meltdowns when you get there. What impressed us the most was the quality and range of the rides and attractions. One of the first we came across was the Atlantis Submarine Voyage which takes you underwater into a giant aquarium with a coral reef, tropical fish,sharks and manta rays. Two of the kids’ highlights were in the Lego City area of the park – Coastguard HQ where you steer a battery powered boat around obstacles on a marina and the driving school where kids get to drive electric cars and have to observe the rules of the road. The park is aimed at children between the ages of three and 12.
To my relief, there were no white-knuckle rollercoasters, although my 10-year-old son was a bit disappointed. There are two rollercoasters in the Knight’s Kingdom, one called the Dragon’s Apprentice for younger kids and a faster, slightly scarier one called the Dragon for older kids, which my boys, aged 10 and eight , loved. Other highlights included the Laser Raiders in Kingdom of the Pharaohs, which is like a ghost train but you shoot your way with a laser gun through a labyrinth, targeting mummies and skeletons. When the pace starts getting to you, there’s an X-box Gaming Zone in the Imagination Centre, where parents can collapse into a heap while the kids play. There’s also a 4D cinema in the Imagination Theatre which screens short films at regular intervals. It was bucketing down the second day we were there and we had the run of the place. This was the day we devoted to splash rides, the main ones being the Pirate Falls Treasure chest – where the boat suddenly plummets at speed down a steep descent – and Viking River Splash where you surge downstream in a spinning boat.
There are family dryers outside the splash rides where everyone can hop into a booth and jets of hot air dry you (while fully dressed) standing up – an Irish mammy’s nightmare. Think of the arthritis in years to come! We stayed in the Legoland Resort hotel in the grounds of the park which is very convenient but expensive. It’s a matter of weighing up whether you want to spend the price of a holiday in Spain on a short break including flights or make savings by staying outside the resort. The food in the resort was of varying quality and not cheap. There are five restaurants and cafes and we opted both days to have our lunch at the Burger Kitchen in Pirate Shores which has meal deals for about £6-£7 each. The only bum note of the trip was the new part of the park, Heartlake City which has a Lego Friends theme and is aimed squarely at little girls. It’s very pink, very girly and the sentimentality is laid on with a shovel. There’s a show every evening featuring young women wearing different coloured long wigs who lip-sync to Lego Friends songs.
It felt totally out of step with rest of park and even my six-year-old daughter who is the target audience, found it cringeworthy. Our two-night trip for one adult and three children flying British Airways to Heathrow over the June bank holiday weekend and staying at Legoland Resort Hotel cost €1,325. For that we got a themed room, breakfast, and two-day entry to the park, lego gifts in the room and access to a splash pool in the hotel. There are cheaper package deals available on a number of sites if you are willing to travel a distance to the park. Legoland also has a number of partner hotels in nearby Windsor. Kellogg’s has an offer on some cereal packets for free entry for one child with a paying adult and with Tesco’s Clubcard UK Days out offer, €11 in vouchers will give free entry for an adult or child. If you just turn up at the gate, entry for a family of four will cost £188.40 but this reduces to £113.04 if you book online two days in advance. There are one and two-day park tickets and savings per person if you go in a group of seven or more.
Q-Bot passes cost from £15-£75 depending on the level of access you want.Legoland is somewhere Hubby and I had always wanted to take the children to. It’s one of those places we didn’t bother to go to before having kids but both of us have always lived fairly close to Legoland and when we were offered tickets to go we knew that LP would love it – and that we would too! Unfortunately, the first thing we realised when we got to Legoland is that you have to pay £4 to park for the day. I personally think that on top of the huge ticket prices, to then charge parking is disgusting and this is something that will always grate on me with tourist attractions – I don’t mind paying a reasonable parking cost if ticket prices aren’t inflated or if we’re visiting a free attraction but I am sure Legoland ticket prices more than cover the maintenance of the car park. After parking we walked the short distance to the entrance and got in line. We were then advised by a member of staff that we had to go through one designated pushchair entrance at the end of the line of entrance turnstiles.
I was amazed that somewhere like Legoland, aimed at young families, only had one turnstile that was accessible for pushchairs and wheelchairs. This is definitely something that needs updating as the queue for this turnstile was three times as long as the one we had been in and on top of the parking charge it didn’t really start our day on the right foot! Fortunately though we were soon in the park and because it was school holidays Legoland seemed packed. We soon realised though that the ‘Beginning’ part of Legoland is just very busy with people coming into the park, using the toilets and visiting the gift shops. Legoland is so big that the number of people soon seems less as you wander through the park. Legoland is split into clear areas with different themes – A Duplo area, Pirates, Vikings etc and most areas have rides suitable for different age children. We went on a few rides throughout the course of the day and they were mainly ones where the child had to be over 1m tall and accompanied by an adult or any height children but accompanied by an adult also.
There were plenty of rides in the park to happily entertain shorter/younger children and I felt that Legoland have done a great job of merging rides for slightly older children in with ones for younger children to make sure that they are catering for the whole family. Throughout the park there were plenty of play areas and things to look at that didn’t require you to queue or have an extra charge – LP loved the Duplo Valley play park and we could have spent the whole day in MiniLand – There was just so much to look at and LP was fascinated with it all being her size. LP also didn’t mind that a lot of the Lego buildings and figures in MiniLand and the rest of the park were starting to look old, dirty and in need of a bit of TLC. New areas are being added all the time but the older parts could do with a refresh every so often too. Everywhere in Legoland there are food outlets – restaurants for a proper sit down meal or kiosks to grab something to eat on the go. Overall the prices are as you would expect from a tourist attraction – quite high!
But, if you don’t want to pay the prices, bring a packed lunch. Although having said that, places to sit and picnic are few and far between. We chose to have lunch at the Duplo Family Buffet which was £11.95 each for Hubby and I whilst under 3’s eat free. This includes an eat as much as you like style buffet and drinks – fizzy drinks or juice but the juice machine was sadly out of service when we went. The restaurant was clean and the food was varied – A soup and bread section, salad, chips, fish fingers, sausages, beans or proper meals like chilli, curry, lasagne, pasta. It was typical hot plate food and we didn’t have any complaints except that the highchairs didn’t sit at the tables very well and we had to rearrange the benches to make everything fit. There were plenty of water areas within Legoland too – water rides, splash parks and just places for kids to get well and truly wet. We avoided this although when Little Man is slightly older and more confident on his feet I think that both he and LP would love these areas.
Like with any theme park there are added expenses but these are optional. When the children are older they’re able to learn to drive and afterwards you can buy them a driving licence – for £10 each. However there is a free card version you are given that you can then add a photo to at home. Many rides also have a photo taken on them and these have a cost of £10 per photo or £25 for four. Then there are the gift shops… So much lego and lego themed souvenirs! We bought LP a pink Lego sword and a fridge magnet but we could have easily spent a fortune! But, at Legoland once you’re inside you really don’t need to spend anything else and it needn’t be an expensive day out – Take a packed lunch, give a £5 budget in the gift shop and don’t get sucked into photos and things unless you really want to spend the money. One thing we did spend £3.50 on was panning for gold as Hubby had said before we even arrived at Legoland that he would love to pan for gold with LP. So he did and LP walked away with a shiny gold metal medal that she loved – Well worth the £3.50!
Legoland is a fantastic day out. Make sure you get tickets when they’re on offer through Tesco vouchers, cereal boxes or any other way as they’re expensive otherwise and plan which things you would like to see and do. Duplo Valley is quieter in the mornings and most rides had a 20 minute minimum wait and one – the submarine – we queued for over 40 minutes – some had waits of over an hour and we didn’t even bother getting into the queue. Go on your most important rides first as we found that the day flies by and before you know it you’re heading home and only made a small dent in all that Legoland has to offer. We’ll be going back to Legoland soon to go on some more rides, play on some more adventure playgrounds and maybe even go in the splash pools! If you’re looking to go maybe even make a weekend of it, there is far too much to see in one day. Disclosure: We were given tickets to Legoland Windsor as part of the Samsung #100DaysofFamily campaign but we weren’t asked to write this review.