Chessington World of Adventures – August 2021

We recently had a fantastic day at Chessington World of Adventures and picked up many tips on how to get the best out of the day with two kids (aged 8 and 5).

This is our first year of being tied in to the school holidays, so in the past we would have always booked theme park trips during term time in order to take advantage of the quieter days.

It turns out the height of the summer holidays isn’t actually that bad to visit Chessington (when compared with other similar attractions anyway) and Chessington is definitely a great day out for younger children as there are plenty of rides aimed at their age group as well as a zoo and aquarium.

Top tips

Book tickets in advance

It is cheaper to book your tickets in advance and saves you queueing up on the day. We used Tesco Clubcard Boost which was the cheapest deal we could find for the date we wanted to visit. Clubcard Boost gives you 3x the value, so £50 of Clubcard vouchers equates to £150 to spend on tickets which covered 2 adult tickets and 2 child tickets (and in effect didn’t actually cost us anything…).

Prioritise your day

If you’re just there for one day you’ll need to prioritise what you want to do. For our visit we focussed on the rides. We got there shortly after 10am and stayed until closing time (7pm) and didn’t stop for any breaks (aside from toilet breaks) but during that time we managed to ride all of the family explorers and little rangers rides (when we were attempting to count how many we’d been on during the journey home we managed to count to 15 but may have forgotten a couple). This was just riding the rides, we didn’t visit the zoo or aquarium or attend any of the shows.

Download the app

You can download the Chessington App which tells you all the waiting times for the rides. There weren’t any physical maps being handed out on the day, so the app is your best bet for finding your way around the park.

Check waiting times the day before

Use the app to check the waiting times of the rides you really want to ride the day before during opening hours (preferably at the height of the day) as this will give you an idea of which rides have the longest queues. We found many rides had fairly short waiting times during the height of the day (under 15 minutes) whereas other rides were showing an hour (and in some cases more).

Ride rides that have longest waiting times at the start of the day or near the end of the day

If you get there early before the popular rides have queues of an hour plus, head straight to those rides first and try to ride them while the waiting time is only 20 minutes or so. Any rides you don’t get to ride early that have long wait times you can save for the end of the day (assuming you’re staying until the end) once people have started heading off home. The closing time published for the park is the latest time you can join a ride queue, so providing you are in the queue at that time, you will get to ride the ride even after closing time.

Check the app regularly

During the middle of the day we managed to walk right on to Gruffalo’s river ride by keeping an eye on the waiting times throughout the day and waiting until they dropped below the average waiting time (40 minutes or more). This saved us about half an hour and meant we got to ride 2-3 extra rides during that time. This strategy paid off for a couple of rides throughout the day.

Eat during the queues

Queueing is the worst part of visiting a theme park., It is boring for the children (and adults) so by eating your food while queueing you are giving them something to do to pass the time as well as ensuring no-one is going hungry or hangry around meal times. This obviously works best (and saves you at least an hour) if you bring food in with you… you could ride 3-6 rides during that hour!

If you need to rest….

Take the opportunity to sit down and grab a coffee while the kids play in one of the play zones. If your kids are too young to go off by themselves then check the app for the show times and head to one of those, they tend to be fairly short and the children watching all seemed to be enjoying them so use that time to re-energise.