If you like waiting 2 hours for a 30 second ride or 1 hour to order food, this is the place for you!
I went with a friend and her son recently, on June 1st and won't be back.
We arrived at 11:30, much later than I wanted to start and everything was packed.
First off, if you want to find a chair and aren't there immediately, you aren't getting one. We hunted for a while and every chair had a towel or bag on it, but nobody there. So we hunted for a locker and all of them were full, finally found one after an hour of searching and would just leave our towels and flip flops near where we were riding to avoid having to trek back. The locker system is decent at least. For $10 you can keep your stuff in there all day and they use credit cards. Just don't forget your birthday you use, color you picked or where the locker is.
The lazy river was packed with people and there aren't enough tubes, so people fight over them and grab at them once you come back around. There wasn't even room to stretch out at all going down the lazy river because it was too crowded. After that, we decided to try riding a ride called River Rush. There are no signs to indicate how long the wait would be. We got in line at 1pm, and didn't ride the ride until 3pm. It took us 2 hours of waiting on hot boards before we got to enjoy the ride for 30 seconds. If we'd know we would wait 2 hours, we'd have done anything else. The ride was cute and a simple ride, but not worth a 2 hour wait.
But it gets better! If you're willing to fork over double the price for your tickets, you can get their version of the fast pass and for $120 instead of $60, we watched for 2 hours as a few people rode the ride over and over and over again while we just waited to ride it once. There needs to be balance with this stupid system. The ride signs claimed they'd put us with other people to help the ride move faster. We watched two girls ride the ride at least 15-20 times. They would get off, run back around and get right back on with about a 2 minute wait. We saw them ride over and over and over again, slowing our line to an absolute crawl. It was great for them, but for us we just got angry. When we finally got up there after two hours, they even got right ahead of us as a final gesture of holding us up. Some other people had the $30 version of the pass and for them, they had to wait x amount of time before riding, but it was never very long. It only takes a few families to ensure that everyone else will wait a very long time to ride the rides.
So it was now 3pm and we decided we were going to get lunch. We walked to the campfire grill and the line was insane. There were at least a hundred people each in two different lines leading up to it, so we decided not to eat there and found the mexican place and ordered there. It still took us 45 minutes in line, plus having to walk in crowds to get there. So we ate lunch finally at 4pm. There are not enough workers and with how expensive the food is, you'd think they'd have a ton made up in back to quickly get it out, and quite a few cashiers working but they don't. It's also next to impossible to get a table, and people fight over those too and won't share them even if there's only two people sitting there and the table can hold 6.
We finished eating around 4:30, then got a dipping dots cup for dessert (took another 30 minutes). Finally, with only 1 hour left we just went in the wave pool and sat in there until it was 6 and they kicked everyone out. Why does a water park close at 6pm in the summer when it's light out for 2 more hours? What the heck is wrong with Splash Country?
I'm still mad and it's been over a week. To pay $60 a person and to get to ride one ride, one pass of the lazy river and the wave pool, while the rest of the time is spent in lines.
Dollywood splash country needs to hire more workers, fix the fast pass system so people can't abuse it endlessly and post signs to indicate how long the wait will be for a ride. They should load more people into each raft like they say they will which would speed the lines up dramatically, and stay open later to give people a chance to actually ride the rides. They also need to greatly expand the park so people spread out instead of all being on top of each other. I will never come back here. What a waste of money. read more