Splash at Butlins Bognor Regis

We are lucky enough to have tried out the brand new Splash swimming pool at Butlins, Bognor Regis and we were certainly not disappointed. We had to drag our little one out of the pool on a daily basis (after 2-3 hours), it really was the highlight of the holiday for her.

Splash is located at the end of the fairground. As you first drive into the resort, it is the first building on the left.

The changing rooms are well laid out with plenty of family sized changing rooms which are all equipped with a baby changing table and a booster seat so you have somewhere safe to secure your little ones while you get changed.

There are two entrances from the changing rooms to the pool but both bring you out by the toddler pool. The toddler pool is warmer than the other pools and has 5 baby/toddler friendly slides, boats with funnels and water canons and flowers which spout water.

For older children/adults who want to swim, there is a large pool with various water features dotted around.

The third pool is equipped with a wave machine. On some days we were there the waves seems quite rough and other days they were a lot more sedate but either way it was fun for both adults and children alike. When the wave machine is not operating, there are water fountains which spout up at the edge of this pool.

Rides

Most of the rides were suitable for riders over 1 meter with the exception of the biggest flume.

Seaside Garden Rapids

This was by far my favourite ride. It’s a new concept for Butlins but Center Parcs visitors will be glad of the introduction of a river rapid style ride. Children over 1 meter can use this ride with or without armbands. If you’re taking a non-confident swimmer or a young child on this ride I recommend riding it first yourself to gauge it’s suitability and also to ride it when there’s hardly anyone else on it (you can see the queue from any of the swimming pools) as it is easy to get swept along by the current in places and crashes are likely.

The ride is mostly outdoors and fairly sedate when your just getting swept along. There are a few slides which can be where you’ll get held up if there are lots of people riding at the same time. There are two different routes, one is marked out as the short route and requires you to branch off to the right after the first slide. It is sometimes easy to get swept straight down this route, so try to stick to the left side if you want to ride the full ride,

Family Raft Flume

This ride is suitable for riders over 1 meter.

The Family Raft Flume is a tunnel slide which you ride down in a dingy. It was a fairly fast ride and our daughter did not seem to enjoy it (neither did I for that matter) but if you like water flumes then I’m sure you’d enjoy it. The ride is completely covered but there are lights in place along the whole slide down. If you don’t like going under water, this ride is perfect as there’s no dunk when you reach the end.

This ride had the longest queue out of all of them (understandable as the ride time is fairly long only one raft can go at a time).

There is a maximum of 3 people to a raft. We were two adults and a toddler and it was a tight squeeze!

Stick of rock and racer slides

These rides were fairly similar and are regular water slides. The stick of rock slides look extremely pretty and colourful though. There was hardly ever a queue for these rides and the staff were happy to let family groups go on against one another.

Helter Skelter slide

Riders must be at least 90cms to go on the Helter Skelter water ride. We didn’t get the chance to go on but it looked pretty cool so maybe I’ll get to go on it next time.