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Soak City Reservations/Entry


shadowscare
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We have reservations for Soak City on Monday, July 5th. I was surprised to see they're still limiting attendence! June was a jam packed month for us and we haven't been to the water park yet.

How have the crowds been with the reservation system?
Is early entry still unavailable? (website says unavailable, but maybe it hasn't been updated?)
Any tips on getting there early and snagging loungers by the wave pool?

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3 hours ago, Born_in_'72 said:

This is awesome to hear!  I have reservations on Sunday, and was hoping for a manageable crowd.  Thanks for the information!!

I am in the water park right now. I typically don't attend Soak City much at Kings Island, and don't have a whole lot to gauge pre-reservations. It has been very pleasant today. Tropical plunge has been the busiest, but still not unreasonable. If it's the same busy as it is here today, I would say you will have a  good time. My family and I have.

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If they're limiting entry to Soak City through a reservations system I'd hate to see what it would be like without it. Park was extremely busy today. We entered before 11:00 am, got a locker, threw our towels down on some loungers, sunscreened up and went straight to Mondo Monsoon. Took about 30 minutes to get on. Longer than I would expect given limited reservations but... in my experience it's usually a long line so, whatever.

 

Jumped in the wave pool for a bit and decided to head over to Zoom Flume. Ended up waiting just over an hour. Them went to get lunch, figuring a late lunch means we'd avoid the bulk of the crowds. Wrong. Line was snaking out of the queue at 1'45 and all said and done it took an hour to get food. And it wasn't for a lack of staff, but those folks sure didn't have any sense of urgency.

 

Went over to Tropical Plunge, which took over 30 minutes. Ended up spending the rest of our time in the wave pool. Every food/drink station had a long line, walkways were crowded, wave pool was jammed in the afternoon.

Beats a day at the office but not an experience I'd like to repeat.

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7 minutes ago, shadowscare said:

If they're limiting entry to Soak City through a reservations system I'd hate to see what it would be like without it. Park was extremely busy today. We entered before 11:00 am, got a locker, threw our towels down on some loungers, sunscreened up and went straight to Mondo Monsoon. Took about 30 minutes to get on. Longer than I would expect given limited reservations but... in my experience it's usually a long line so, whatever.

 

Jumped in the wave pool for a bit and decided to head over to Zoom Flume. Ended up waiting just over an hour. Them went to get lunch, figuring a late lunch means we'd avoid the bulk of the crowds. Wrong. Line was snaking out of the queue at 1'45 and all said and done it took an hour to get food. And it wasn't for a lack of staff, but those folks sure didn't have any sense of urgency.

 

Went over to Tropical Plunge, which took over 30 minutes. Ended up spending the rest of our time in the wave pool. Every food/drink station had a long line, walkways were crowded, wave pool was jammed in the afternoon.

Beats a day at the office but not an experience I'd like to repeat.

Not just Soak City, but the entire park was very crowded today. To be fair, today is coming off of a holiday weekend, and most other days this year Kings Island has not been nearly as crowded. While it may have been busy, the park’s staffing issues seem to be mostly resolved which is great.

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6 minutes ago, FUN&ONLY! said:

Not just Soak City, but the entire park was very crowded today. To be fair, today is coming off of a holiday weekend, and most other days this year Kings Island has not been nearly as crowded. While it may have been busy, the park’s staffing issues seem to be mostly resolved which is great.

I would expect the park to be crowded any day this weekend but chose Soak City today based on their so called "limited capacity" and recent data points of lighter than average crowds at the water park because of it. Unfortunately that didn't pan out.

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6 minutes ago, shadowscare said:

I would expect the park to be crowded any day this weekend but chose Soak City today based on their so called "limited capacity" and recent data points of lighter than average crowds at the water park because of it. Unfortunately that didn't pan out.

Today was a very hot day, but even then, the crowds you described at Soak City seem too large for the capacity restrictions. I know in a normal season, Soak City would be slammed on any day as hot as today, but I would think that the reservations would prevent this from happening.

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I have heard many reports of them not checking for reservations at Soak City at some point today due to the heat.  So did everyone come prepared for a day at Soak City without knowing reservations were needed and benefited from them not checking or were there too many people coming off the train overwhelming the scanners and people were getting past them?

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It's all over the KI season passholder Facebook page today. Multiple reports of employees at the Soak City gates saying reservations are no longer required and I saw two people mention they heard that also announced by the train host. We rode the train on Saturday, and at that time he was still reminding of the reservation requirement. Looks like finishing up our trip on Sunday was the right move ..

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17 minutes ago, shadowscare said:

That explains a lot. It was crazy busy.

If you're going to do away with the reservations... Maybe implement that on a day that IS NOT a holiday weekend. How insanely stupid.

To be fair, Soak City would have been packed no matter when they decided to stop limiting capacity. As long as it is a hot day, Soak City will be crowded. I am surprised they chose today to do away with reservations, but I know Kings Island has some passholders who can’t stand the reservation system and have been desperately waiting for it to be removed. Unfortunately, Kings Island can’t please both the people wanting the capacity limit dropped and the people in favor of it It was inevitable, though, that they would drop the reservations and capacity limit. Again, today may have not been the best day to do that, though, and it would be nice if Kings Island gave guests a heads up.

The larger issue is that Soak City really can’t handle the crowds it gets. Unfortunately, Kings Island has no incentive to up its offering because there really isn’t much competition. Ideally, Kings Island would GREATLY expand Soak City to accommodate the crowds better like California’s Great America did. I am hopeful, though, that Kings Island will invest more into their waterpark soon as Mike Koontz has stated that he wants to add something to Soak City and to Planet Snoopy according to @KIghostguy’s book. I really hope that they rename and retheme Soak City to something more authentic.

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I remember getting in line for food and thinking... hmmmm. We might be better off getting our hand stamped and driving over to Chipotle, Wendy's, etc.

Lesson learned. I'll do that next time. Time, cost, food quality... I mean we were close to the gate with the car very close. (face palm)

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