Overview

Staff were very helpful, and booking the ride access pass and carer ticket was pretty simple. The site has steep slopes and are very crowded, it was difficult to navigate in a wheelchair. Most of the rides have a shared disabled access and "pay to skip the queue" line so you may have to wait 25 minutes in a queue on top of the virtual queuing. Most of the rides are very challenging to get into if you have poor mobility, and require transfering to a very low level over the side of the car. The radar key toilets are clean but you may have to wait a while for them. I had a good time but I struggled a lot.

Transport & Parking

I found it very easy to book parking online, and on the day there were plenty of accessible parking spaces. Unfortunately they are the ones where only one side of the car has extra space, but I was able to find one I could use.

Access

The paths around the site can be very difficult to navigate as a wheelchair user. There are several steep slopes, and a lot of strange camber. I found it very difficult to safely control my manual chair in these conditions given the massive crowds and children running infront of me constantly. The level access routes are generally well signposted so it's not too difficult to figure out how to get places. There are not many benches to take breaks. There is a train which runs up and down the big hill, which is definitely a big help, but there are issues with the queuing for it (more details below). I got the ride access pass, which wasn't too difficult given I already had an access card and merlin ID card. I tried to book in 4 weeks in advance and was told there was no availability, I called up and was advised that they allow you to book it on the day, which I was then able to do. Using the pass throughout the day I really struggled. You are meant to join rides immediately, and then be timed out from any further rides for the time it would've taken you to queue. It is meant for people who struggled with queuing. I found myself waiting for 5-25 minutes in either the ride access pass queue, or just afterwards where it joins the main queue. I found this very difficult as I often urgently need the toilet, but it was made even more difficult as once I was in the queue I physically couldn't go back as my wheelchair wouldn't fit. I ended up being "timed out" for the estimated queue time, and having to then also queue so was out of things for much longer. Some of the rides have the wheelchair entrance as part of the exit (including the train to take you up the hill), these pathways are not wide enough to fit 2 wheelchairs (or a wheelchair and a buggy). I found myself having to reverse back many times which was very difficult, due to this poor design choice. I found it very frustrating that when the accessible queue became full, you were no longer able to book onto or use the ride. I was in several queues when this happened and speaking to others queuing, the majority of them had actually paid for a pass to skip queues. You can book this in advance by paying and it doesn't run out of capacity unlike the ride access passes, despite using the same queues. It seems very unfair that disabled people are being denied access to rides because of this combined queue. I also showed up to a ride which said the queue was full, just to see how bad it was, to discover there was noone in the accessible queue. They'd just forgotten to reopen it after it was busy hours before. I'm very lucky I was able to go on, but they'd just banned disabled people from the ride for ages for no reason. The access guide on rides is decently good, but it doesn't include information on how a wheelchair user could transfer onto the rides. I found it very challenging to transfer onto many of the rides even with help from my carer. I can just about stand but am extremely unsteady while walking. I had to crawl on the ground to transfer onto a few. I understand access is difficult, but if there were photos of the carriages and queuing areas online, it would be much easier to see which rides you may be able to transfer onto.

Toilets

Half of them are radar key locked, so these ones were quite clean. However one of the toilets I used didn't have an emergency pull cord at all. There are few accessible toilets, and I found myself waiting up to 15 minutes to use one which is very challenging if you have urgency issues!

Staff

All of the staff I spoke to were very friendly and helpful.

Photos