We went to Movie World/Dream World and Sea World during the year end holiday period. Not accidentally. Not naively. We knew exactly what we were walking into.
We’ve done theme parks plenty of times outside school holidays and they’re usually fine. Busy, yes. But manageable. This was something else.
By mid-morning, the big rides were already showing wait times of close to two hours. That wasn’t shocking – it was the kids’ rides that got us. Standing in line for nearly an hour for something that lasts a couple of minutes feels very different when the sun is beating down and you’re negotiating snacks, water, and bathroom breaks every five minutes.
At one point, we stopped queueing and just stood there for a bit, trying to decide whether to commit to another line or call it. That was the moment it really clicked that this day wasn’t going to look anything like our usual theme park visits.
On the drive home, we went back and forth on it. Was this just the price of school holidays? Or were there people who somehow made this work without it feeling like a test of endurance?
So we asked our Facebook community.
Not because we expected a magic hack. Mostly because we wanted to know whether everyone else felt the same way – or whether we were missing something obvious.
The replies didn’t land neatly. They were all over the place.
Some families said they walked straight onto rides during the holidays and barely waited. Others sounded exactly like us and swore they’d never do Christmas week again. Once dates started getting mentioned, the picture sharpened. Mid-December came up a lot. Late January too. Christmas week itself? Almost universally described as chaos.
A few locals were blunt in a way that was actually helpful. They just don’t go during school holidays. Not because they can’t -because they don’t want to. They’d rather pull kids out for a random weekday or wait until term time than spend half a day in lines. That honesty stuck with us.
What also came through was how many families had quietly changed how they use theme parks over time. They don’t aim for opening time anymore. They don’t try to do everything. A lot of them turn up later in the day, stay for a couple of hours, do a handful of things, and leave. No pressure to squeeze value out of every minute.
That idea probably shifted our thinking the most.
Because if you go in expecting a school-holiday visit to feel anything like a term-time one, you’re setting yourself up for frustration. It doesn’t mean the day is a write-off. It just means it has to be treated differently.
Ride order came up, but not as a miracle fix. More as damage control. Pick the one thing your kids care about most, head there first often towards the back of the park and accept that everything else is optional. A few parents mentioned they’d stopped lining up mid-day altogether and used shows or animal exhibits as a breather instead.
No one pretended school-holiday theme parks were easy. And that was probably the most reassuring part.
For us, the answer landed pretty clearly. Christmas week isn’t worth it unless you’re willing to lower the bar fewer rides, shorter visits, and no expectation that you’ll get through a checklist. If that sounds fine, it can still be a decent day. If it doesn’t, waiting for a quieter window is the better call.
We’ll still go back to theme parks. Just not like that.
