As many know from our social media platforms we visited Paultons Park Saturday for our first time. Admittedly we did choose a Saturday during the school holidays so it was expected to be busy really. But we hope you all enjoy this blog and feel free to share with us your thoughts on the park below in the comments.
Entrance / Car Parking / First Impressions:
First impressions always begin by the car parking. We arrived around 9:30 and it was fairly quiet meaning it was simple to park. Same as every other park we’ve visited there’s obviously people guiding you to your space. No issue simple parking system and super easy to find the entrance too.
The entrance is very pretty and in a weird way looks like a shopping centre from the plaza really. I loved the Paultons Park sign out the front it’s a lovely touch. If you’ve pre booked online you do not need to collect any tickets just go straight to the turnstiles. Entering the park was perhaps the easiest we’ve experienced and seemed to be really organised.
First impressions were 100% fab its a very clean and beautiful park. Once your pass the cafe and the shop then outdoors again. It’s quite strange how beautiful it looks and there’s not really a theme park feel at first.
Gardens / Animals:
Whilst waiting for the rides to open we took a stroll around the gardens & animal bit. The park take a lot of pride in their appearance and that’s something which surprised us. Videos do not do it justice at all the park is easily the most gorgeous within the UK.
As for the animals there’s a few questionable small enclosures mainly for their parrot near Peppa Pig Land. Other than that it’s not a zoo as such yet there’s plenty animals scattered around.
Rides / Throughputs:
There’s a decent variety including 5 coasters and several flat rides. The Gerstlauer Bobsled Cobra is so fab and a real standout attraction for us personally. Something we noticed which is quite unique is how majority but not all coasters have loads of theming within the coaster / ride area. A lot of parks don’t tend to add such attention to detail however Paultons have and they’ve done a fab job.
Sadly throughputs wasn’t how we had expected and sadly let the park down for us. There’s small queues which could of easily taken 5 minutes which ended up taking 20-30 due to slow dispatches. It definitely has a connection to the lack of staff but more about that below. That’s one thing we’d love to see improve is faster dispatch and better throughputs.
Staff / Theming:
On a Saturday during summer holidays you’d expect there to be a lot more staff then there was. However in majority of the major coasters there’s only one staff member doing it all so checking restraints, opening and closing air gates, loading air gates and doing the ops job, you’d be lucky to see 2 staff members in the station. It took us by surprise how little staff they actually had. However all the staff members we encountered were incredible and doing an amazing job.
Theming was something which blew us away as it looked good on videos but so much better in person. You could identify the newer areas to the older for sure though. Which isn’t an issue as you can see the improvements that has been made over the years. For example the area around Cobra isn’t themed at all whereas The Lost Kingdom is heavily themed. 
Tornado Springs:
It’s coming on leaps and bounds this construction site. We didn’t take any images over the construction boards as we don’t really want to intrude. However for what we’ve seen from the water slides the footers are in and the station & new restaurant building is almost complete. It does look as if the Mack Spinning coaster will only have 1 train due to how small the station is. But either way this new area from the concept art and audio looks to be a game changer and beautiful.
Overall:
I think next season we’d definitely re-visit during an off peak day to try and embrace the whole park more. As mentioned above there’s only a few things we didn’t quite enjoy and that’s the slow dispatching and the throughputs. But other than that it’s really a lovely park with some gorgeous scenery and theming.
I’d personally say it’s one of my favourites within the UK if I ignore the smaller issues. The appearance is something which I can’t quite get over. Coasters are definitely fab but I’ll be uploading a different blog to discuss them in more details.
Let me know if you’ve visited Paultons Park & your opinions below in the comments or across our socials media.
Thank you for reading
