Kidzania - anyone been recently?

[Coffeeandme]

Has anyone been to Kidzania with primary-age DC recently? What did you think?

The TripAdvisor reviews are terrible and I’m unsure but there is mention of extra costs once you are in there - reviewers are talking about paying extra for DC to make their own burgers, asking for passport refunds etc. Is this correct - you might need to pay even more for some activities?

It will be £59 for DC and I, plus train fares of £30, and even if we have lunch beforehand I’m sure I’ll have to pay more for food as if we go it will be with others. It just sounds like a very expensive day out, and if the reviews are anything to go by it has very rude and disinterested staff, extra costs when you are there, queues of at least 15 mins for each activity, rundown in places, too many toddlers when it’s not aimed at them (age range is 4-14 yrs), very crowded, and the shop to spend Kidzos at the end is a rip-off.

So, what is the attraction of this place and to spend so much to do it??! DC is at school so no option to go term-time on a weekday.

Not worth it at all - grossly overpriced, grubby, crowded and long queues for most activities, most staff don’t give a shit about working there, the food is so over-priced it’s unbelievable, and the shop at the end to spend your Kidzos is a con. Adults can’t join your kids to see them do the activities so it’s a money-making enterprise to charge adults so much for nothing in return.

Such a shame as it’s a great concept. Believe the reviews.

It’s almost worth going just to see the lack of interest among most of the staff. They act like they’re in prison. I actually laughed at the way I heard one talking to kids whose parents weren’t with them. They asked how long an activity would take and in her reply she was pure Catherine Tate, “uh it takes as long as it takes innit”. Many of them couldn’t be less helpful and the staff in the burger place were actually having a kick about in the football space since there were no kids about there (and if there were, they would just have assumed the place was busy with bigger boys). There must be no supervisors or incentives for good customer service. And it must be really badly paid.

My children did like it overall though.

If they got more enthusiastic staff who were helpful instead of ignoring you, and if you had an idea of how far in to an activity the previous group are so you knew how long you’d be waiting for things, instead of standing about aimlessly whilst staff just chatted amongst themselves looking grumpy, it would be much better. There’s a lot of waiting around for kids and obviously as an adult that’s pretty much all you do.

The food was expensive but I thought it was quite nice.

The shop were they could spend their earnings was crap. They basically all got to choose one shit thing, regardless of what they had earned. Like a 10p moon ring.