We’ve been to Portaventura World on two separate occasions, and spent a total of around 6 days at the park which I feel is enough time to make a mind up on a park.
For me, the park is great, maybe even excellent but not perfect and the small problems the park has start to add up!
The biggest issue that Portaventura World has, is operational. I don’t mean that everything is awful as it isn’t, but ride operations could be vastly improved.
The first problem I have is that every day we’ve been in the park, we’ve had an extra 30 minutes as hotel guests. This was what we were told anyway, but literally 5 minutes after the hotel guest entrances open up, the main gates open so that extra 30 minutes doesn’t count for too much.
So you’ve gotten to your first ride. You’ve picked Uncharted maybe or gone to Shambhala, Dragon Khan or Furius Baco to find a queue has formed which is fine, so you wait until 10:30.
10:30 rolls around, the queue still stands and not a lot is happening in the station. This is a practice called rope dropping, where by you arrive at a ride ready for its official opening, as the rope drops so you can one of the first to ride and avoid a lengthy queue.
The problem is, the large rides don’t seem to start testing until 10:30. So, yeah the rides are advertised as being open from 10:30 but a lot of them aren’t ready for their opening time, and with our visit to Shambhala, we didn’t see first riders on until at least 10:50 which isnt the worst thing in the world, but surely it should be ready for 10:30?
Sure, the other rides that do open later shouldn’t be ready for 10:30 such as Tomahawk or Volpiute, but if a rides is advertised as being open from a certain time, is should be ready at that time, not start testing!
Then there’s the way the rides are boarded. A lot of the attractions have you take your bag on the ride which I don’t particularly like but it’s only a small issue. The bigger issue is that when a train comes into the station, the restraints will open and then guests can get off. However the air gates for new riders don’t open until the station has cleared completely.
That means no one is boarding, the train is sat there doing nothing and ride ops aren’t checking restraints ready for the next dispatch so a dispatch that could take 45 seconds, now takes 1 minute 30 to 2 minutes and this happens for every train!
When queues are touching an hour for the smaller rides and 2.5 hours for Uncharted and Furious Baco, every second they can shave of dispatches improves guest experience!
It’s far from awful, it really is, but you would get a lot more done in the day if each attraction was 30-45 minutes queues, as opposed to 45-60 minutes. Coupled with her fact that a lot of the queue lines are very hot and sweaty, it doesn’t make for the best of experiences.
They do seem to have tried to combat the heat by installing large ceiling mounted fans that shift a lot of air, but they’re not everywhere, and some of the uncovered stations could really do with mist sprayers in them to keep temperatures down little!
It’s a similar story with food establishments too. You’ll queue a lot longer than I’d like to for a drink as there isn’t any self service options besides vending machines. When you do get served, the servers are lovely and multilingual, but they’ll take your cup to go and fill it and then come back and start the card transaction when they get back and their card machines are quite slow to load too!
Once again, this isn’t exactly a disaster, but surely start the card transaction first, allow me to pay and be collecting my drink/food while the transaction resolves? It doesn’t come across as the staff being lazy or anything of the sort, it just seems like an operational ‘we do it this way’ approach that could be streamlined?
Another, quite a bit bigger issue that the park has, is it’s seeming reliance on express passes. Every queueline for the larger rides has a vending machine that will dispense express passes in order to shorten your queue time. I don’t fundamentally hate 2 tier queuing systems in parks as some people are happy to wait, while others want to experience as much as they can during their visit. Express passes allow this.
The problem here, is that Portaventura knows their queues are lengthy and almost comes across as uncaring to resolve the situation, and express passes are their solution!
Compare Portaventura to Efteling or Europa Park. Neither of these have express passes and their queues during peak times are much more manageable as they have the fundamentals in place to operate their attractions efficiently.
It’s not all bad with Portaventura World though. It does have a very good line up of rides, from top tier thrill machines like Shambhala and Furius Baco, down to the their children’s rides like Tami Tami, Street Mission and Cobra Imperial.
The areas are all very well themed and the park has a lot of atmosphere to it. Dare I say charm in places too? The entertainment is great and plentiful, and fits each area. The merchandise could be a lot better but that’s only due to its lack of breadth. There are still plenty of offerings to go at for a first time visitor at the very least!
Prices aren’t terrible either, at least I don’t think so. Staring off with their holiday packages, I feel they’re very competitively priced for what you get, food in the park isn’t a rip off, and neither is the merchandise too.
Express passes are expensive, but they should be expensive to keep them something like exclusive otherwise everyone would just buy them. I will say the Ferrari Land express passes with their hotel guest discount are a steal priced at €25 which includes Red Force and Maranello Grand Race, as well as 4 other attractions too.
I think at this point, I’m waffling now so I’ll conclude by saying Portaventura World is still well worth a visit. Especially if you go during lower season times when queues are shorter and the temperature is lower, but during high season, the parks cracks really do show. And it is a shame as it can easily be a top resort in Europe, but the likes of Efteling, Europa Park, Parc Asterix, Phantasialand and Disneyland Paris all operate much better, and offer a greater guest experience.
You can watch our vlog of the day here:
loopsandlapbars.com 