Aquafan — Attraction in Tigre

We planned our holidays specifically for water parks and theme parks, choosing Riccione because of Aquafan. Aquafan was the wrong reason.

Some people would call Aquafan an outright false marketing scam, but I try to give more details and context.

Arrival:

On a weekday, prepaid online tickets, late after lunch ca 2pm. It was a very full parking space, see "Leaving took 90 minutes" below...

... but almost instant entry to the park with QR codes from phone.

Lockers:

I am still puzzled, how few and how ridiculous small lockers are available for a park of that size. For estimated 5000 daily guest they have less than 300 lockers.

The place where you have to pickup a locker key was closed and we had to go back to the entrance and "information counter" to get a locker key after lots of queuing and 14 EUR.

DO NOT TRASH the receipt, or you won't get back your deposit.

Attractions:

The first slides we did were so slow, and outright flat in their slope that I almost stopped.

I am a pro water slider, and I don’t ever recall being in a similarly slow and boring slide.

This wasn't the only lame experience...

M280:

You sure have seen that video on the website... it's a scam and uses the same clips in a loop - now I know why... to make it seem a long slide.

It is NOT a 280 meter slide.

It is an overall construction that has an at least 120 meter long and flat escalator where they pull up the 3-4 riders in their 1 tire.

Yes, most of the times, only 1 such rider tire was pulled up, leaving the throughput at only 3-4 people per 3 minutes of max. 70 people per hour.

With a queue of ca 160 people that results in 2,5-3 hour wait time, for a really unimpressive ride.

It's basically a long and boringly slow escalator, a small curve entering that U Pipe and then you're done and swim slowly in another 50 meters "buffer"

Ridiculous slow and unspectactular.

Wave bath:

You can tell this was built in the 80ies.

The overall wave strength was nothing worth mentioning, weak, and probably undermaintained.

Combined with an absurdly warm water temperature and lots of cocky italian "young wild men" that were obviously drunken or drugged shouting and singing like on a football stadium left a particularly odd memory, and we left quickly - as did many other families with teen kids.

Staff:

In every flat rate park they pick the cheapest staff. These were especially demotivated.

Several rude groups of teenagers or even adults were not corrected or stopped in their asocial behaviors, by the "guards" when skipping queues, not following queue order, etc.

Leaving took 90 minutes:

bottlenecks everywhere extremely packed due to few lockers and exchanges ridiculous key return, 1 person for all guests 2 machines for parking fees 25 minutes to leave parking lot because of only 2 gates constantly blocked by people not having paid at above mentioned parking fee machines INSIDE the park

We wasted way too much time, money and nerves with Aquafan, for very little entertainment.

NOT...

Aqua-dud

First of all, staff was great. They were friendly (even when reminding that you have to leave your sunglasses, etc.) and engaged. When waves started in the big swimming pool, you could feel that those 8+ lifeguards immediately focused all their attention on the water, therefore you could feel safe for your children. At any point you did not feel the lifeguards or staff were there because they were forced to. Park was tidy and the food selection was broad and tasty.

Unfortunately, the main experience is not the staff and the food but the overall infrastructure and this is terrible. I could not stress that enough, but it is absolutely pointless to take a kid below 140cm to the park, especially if you have another that is above that level. Most attractions have that limit, so you cannot go there with whole family, making the whole trip more or less pointless as a family attraction. I have no idea what was in most of the rides that prevented 130cm kids to go on them with parents. I checked another water park, I went as a kid to (Aquasplash in Italy) and there all the rides were limited to 120cm. To put that into perspective, my 9yo could not ride almost anything in Aquafan, while year earlier in Disneyland Paris he could ride (and enjoyed it) e.g. Hyperspace Mountain, that could be compared to Black Hole ride (but way more extreme).

You might think, “this is not a flaw for me, I have older/no kids”. Hold your horses, now comes the biggest problem of the park. It is beyond me how park can be so poorly organized. Every pontoon attraction’s throughout is ridiculously low. 20-30 people queue (which is almost nothing compared to other parks or even rides without pontoons) can last the same amount in minutes. On every pontoon attraction the amount of pontoons is cut by half from the optimal amount. You see it could go twice faster but it does not. Sometimes the bottleneck is the speed of people walking with pontoons on stairs – in such cases the pontoons should be transported to the tower. On other rides you have 4-5 people pontoon that can be ridden by max of 2 people. What is the sense of having big pontoons that go down half empty? What family fun is it when you divide your family in half before the ride? If the ride cannot safely be ridden by full pontoon, then it was badly designed, period. It is however most annoying to see the biggest rides having too few pontoons. The biggest ride have 3, four-people pontoon and they usually ride 2 people. On the pontoon lift there is 1 pontoon (max 2) and it lasts around 1 minute. If you doubled the number of pontoons you would cut queue time in half and there was a room for it!

It is a real shame, because most of the rides were decent, some were even great, but the waiting time was ridiculously long and you cannot blame high season for that. Think twice before planning your...

The park itself is quite nice. Theres a whole bunch of rides, but I do have some cririques.

The key and band that they give you for the lockers are quite wide and would fall off of most peoples hands, therefore you must hold on to it very dearly or have someone else hold it for you which may be inconvenient.

Speakijg of lockers, they have a weird system, where they rent out the locker with the machine for the whole day so even if you leave, that locker is unusable to anyone else for the rest of the day. That means theres a limited amount of locker space. I'm not sure if this causes trouble but it seemed weird to me in comparison with other parks.

Another critique i have is the pavement choice, the bricks are quite a dark color and knowing how hot the Italian summers are...the combo doesn't go well together. Some areas dont allow flip flops(for example walking up the the rides entrance) so you must walk barefoot on the really hot pavement.

We also had a misunderstanding at the wave pool. The times on the board show that from 10:40 every hour the wave pool comes on for 8 minutes. Disregarding the fact that it occurs rarely, they skipped an entire session. On the board it showed that at 14:40 waving was to begin, but on the stage there was a DJ. A large crowd of people waited for the waving to begin, but it did not. We looked at the sign multiple times. It said 14:40 but nothing was happening. At about 14:50-15:00 people started leaving the pool, so we understood that it wasnt just us. We didnt notice any signs that the 14:40 wouldnt happen, maybe they said it over the loud speaker and we didnt hear :(

Putting all that to the side, the park isnt bad. They have creative slides and areas that are fun to roam around. Quite long queues, but that isnt the parks fault.

Staff walk arounf the park with cameras and offer to take photos of you. They give you a bracelet with a code on it. Once youre leaving the park, theres a booth where you can buy the printed pictures. 7euro for small, 9...