Visiting Disneyland Paris: Is Dream World, Gold Coast Better?

After complaining about the privacy of Disneyland Paris, we headed to Disneyland Paris to check it out. Since we’ve booked for a week at our Campsite in Crecy, we planned to go for 3 to 4 days to Disneyland, and then go into Paris on the other days.

Price

For 3 people for a 4 day visit, cost 487 Euro, when booking online, however, after doing a little Googling, you can purchase annual passes for 119 Euro, 159 Euro, or 199 Euro. The difference is the amount of “blackout days” that you have. The cheapest annual pass has a few blackouts dates, the second annual pass has fewer blackout dates, but had free parking (usually 15 Euro per entry), and the last annual pass had no blackout dates.

The good thing about annuals passes is you can come and go as you please without spending anything extra and you also get early entry into the park. You can visit 6 half days with the annual pass, but with the 3-4 day passes, to get your money’s worth, you have to spend a whole day there which can be somewhat tiring.

We ended up getting the 159 Euro pass, because it had a few blackout dates we might have gone, and also had free parking, but really, we could have gone for the cheaper and added an extra 30 Euro to get parking included.

The Rides

Being Disneyland, I had high hopes – fun, breathtaking thrill rides, lots of rides and a huge park. However, Disneyland Paris is quite the opposite.

The rides were tame for adults, there weren’t many good rides at all, and most of the rides where tailed to young kids.

One of the good rides, India Jones Rollercoaster was closed, Space Mountain (Rollercoaster) malfunctioned whiles waiting in the queue, but opened after a 80 minute wait in the line, and Big Thunder Mine Train Rollercoaster queue was too long for the joy of the ride – thought it was a good ride.

There are a few other Children targeted rides that were still good like Star Tours – a Star Wars Motion Simulator (The Batman Ride at Movie World on the Gold Coast seemed better), Buzz Light-year as you sat in a cart and you could shoot targets to get a high score. They were my main favourite rides in the main Disneyland Park – there are two parks).

Waiting in Line

Disneyland Paris would have been better if we spent more time on the ride than waiting to ride. The average queue length was about 60 minutes for each of the rides I mentioned above. You could get a Fast Pass, but you can only have one at a time (or every two hours), but the wait for a Fast Pass entrance was 3 hours into the day, especially if you get in late. Even with a Fast Pass, you still had to queue up for 10 minutes.

Since Disneyland Paris has two parks, the second, smaller park looked like it had more thrill rides, so I hope that will change my mind, otherwise, I think Dreamworld on the Goldcoast was better.