Ice Castles — Attraction in Edmonton

Reasoning behind the one star rating. The Castle was beautiful but the customer service, just wow

I bought my ticket on Dec 3 for Dec 4, 4:30 -5pm time slot, I was going with a group of friends. It was supposed to be texted to me. The text did not come through. Saturday morning 6am I Facebook messaged them. I got the automated message that someone would get back to me soon. By 9:30 nothing. I went to their website, took quite a it but I finally found a phone number through their FAQ's on why I did not receive my confirmation.

The phone number was to a fax machine. So I emailed them at 9:45am. Finally someone emailed me back at 1:30 saying they could not find my order and needed my last name and the last 4 digits of my credit card. I sent the information back to them, No reply. Facebooked them again, got an almost instant reply now. An a apology especially about the wrong phone number they were going to speak to a manager. It is now 4:10pm. Obviously I did not go with my friends.

Now we are on Sunday morning still no reply to my email. I Facebooked them again asking for a phone number where I could talk to a real person at this time I had found 3 online. None worked. About an hour later I get a new number. I call it and it is for the ticket agency and boom fixed in 2 minutes. So in the end I did get to go with my friends but I went alone, it was beautiful but why no one just gave me that number on Saturday when they could not find my order is beyond me. The agent found it right away and was able to send it to me because it was never sent to begin with. It was a glitch on their end.

Now here we are Monday morning still no reply from Ice...

This facility is not as family friendly as they would like you to think.

My 15 month old daughter was getting a little bit cold and standing by their fire pit wasn’t warming her up so I decided to take her back to the vehicle to warm her up and come back in to finish visiting the place.

When I explained the situation to the person at the exit door he said that I won’t be allowed back in because reentry is not allowed. Also I should use their fire pit to warm up.

I was quite surprised to hear this response. I have been to many family and touristy events and reentry is never an issue.

In fact I find this policy to be very offensive and insensitive to families. Reentry should not be an issue for any facility as it’s as simple as a stamp on the hand! It makes Ice Castles seem like they only care about grabbing your money and really don’t care about families and babies.

I will never visit an Ice Castle put on by this company again. I prefer to support companies and facilities that care about families and not about ridiculous douche bag policies.

I also didn’t find their castle that spectacular. It’s kind of overrated in my opinion. Certainly not worth the $13-15 per person that we paid.

I hope karma pays them a visit for their insensitive policies and gives us an extremely warm February and melts...

A unique experience.. For some reason I was expecting more for the price paid per ticket and got bored pretty quick after visiting..

But I found for a short time for it to be really neat. A little bit of a maze with tiny rooms you have to squat to enter and some cool designs, some neat lights and a really fancy ice chair to sit on.. After about 15-20 minutes I ran out of things to do but for the price paid I felt that it was worth returning to the same things over and over to feel some value towards my ticket purchase..

All in all it wasn't worth the price of entry, if it was cheaper I would be more enthusiastic, but with that entry price, I naturally would have expected a much larger experience. I can't say I'd recommend this, solely due to the value of the experience does not match the entry price.

Maybe if the ticket price was more in line with the experience there would be more repeat customers and more sales.

Possibly more of an ice maze and more enclosed areas, maybe longer slides, more chairs. Maybe a big igloo.. Maybe more sculptures and a few themed vendors working out of partially ice-made facilities would make the experience worth the ticket price.

Looking forward to improvements in one way or another next year.

Until then I can't say I would recommend this. 3/5...