The Wave Waterpark — Attraction in Coventry

This review is for the fitness suite/gym if you are considering using it.

TL;DR: On-boarding process is overly complicated, gym is smaller than expected, and machines are unlabelled. However, facilities are clean and new as you'd expect.

First though, the on-boarding process was incredibly painful. First, the way to sign up for the membership isn't as simple as you'd hope. This would be fine if it was easy to navigate to the right place to find where to pay (CVLife) and was explained properly, but was a pain finding the gym membership for it. The staff at the front were nice, however they are absolutely understaffed. I came in with no queue, only the two receptionists were occupied, fair enough, I'll wait. Took 20+ minutes for them to walk another customer through the sign-up process in an iPad, and had a chat with a family, before finally getting to me so I can pick up my wristband for access to the gym. Then came my own 15 minute interaction to pick up my wristband.

The amount of ID you need to provide, and security questions, is idiotic to have to provide at the front desk: make sure to bring your Student ID, GoCV card, card you paid with, and proof of address. I'm not sure why they'd let you pay at all before walking you through providing this evidence online, and why they don't tell you you'll need all of these things on your first visit. Not to mention, after this, the wristband did not even work with the lockers as it should.

Finally, we get to enter the gym floor. Do not be deceived, it is significantly smaller than it appears in photos. Only one of each machine, one squat rack, one bench. Some weights might've been missing off the dumbbell rack, I'm not sure. Apart from this, the equipment is new and works. However, despite it being new, I suppose the clean look of the facility would be ruined by guide photos to help you figure out what a machine is for and how to use it safely. I actually am not sure why they opted for this- I thought the machines came with the photos by default.

Of course, in the end, the gym has gym equipment that works and the staff were nice. I'd suggest going for a different local gym if possible, it's unlikely you'll find one with less equipment. As for the price, I was lucky to pay the £23 student price. Anything above that, I'm not sure I'd consider this over any other gym in the...

I visited The Wave this week with my 12 yr old daughter and we had a great time! I'd read some awful reviews of The Wave and so went there (at daughters insistence) in some trepidation. I'd read about the long queues, cold temperatures, boring design, rude staff, lack of waves and overcrowding. We didn't experience any of those issues as a negative. Not one. The queuing system has been fixed and we didn't wait long for rides. When there was a build up, we just went on something else for a bit. There's lots of choice. It was comfortably warm everywhere, enough to raise a sweat in fact. The rides are mostly enclosed, so I can see that a long wait might have been irritatingly unentertaining at one point, but we didn't have that problem. I spoke to several staff and they were patient, helpful and good at their jobs. My daughter loved the wave pool. It delivered lots of varied sized waves during at least 3 lengthy sessions in our 2 hours. There are a lot of customers per session, but it's a big place and most families seem to stay around the lazy river and wave pool. Nobody looked unhappy in those areas and everyone around us seemed to enjoy the seaside, communal feel. My daughter went again as part of a birthday event just 2 days later and enjoyed it even more with her friends. Salt Lane car park really isn't hard to find and is well sign posted. Ok, you can get confused and head down the access road towards The Wave building - but a cursory look at the map before leaving home should avoid this. The car park discount is clearly posted and reduced my cost considerably to £1.50. Bargain. Finally, the downstairs cafe is clean, airy and pleasant. The area around the building offers other alternatives if you walk a v short distance to the left. The Cathedral isn't much more than 10 mins walk and there are even more restaurants in that area towards town, 5 mins from the car park. The area around Hertford St (for out of town visitors) is admittedly not great right now, but I gather it's up for development in the near future, further improving our choices. It's all subjective of course, but 2 sessions in one week, both highly enjoyable (and very clean!) experiences seem to indicate this is a recommendable place. So we recommend...

Being generous with 4 stars, but I appreciate the kids liked it more. Plenty of things to improve but some really positive areas too, here goes:

A short walk from the nearest car park, you will have the opportunity to see some of the highlights of what Coventry city centre has to offer, a few kids playing or washing in the fountains, how on earth are Coventry fountains better than Nottingham's, I am quite jealous.

Once at the Wave, everything is online and seamless entry, we were soon into the changing area with a free for all for changing cubicles. After while, we figure out how to use the QR scanning lockers, quite ingenious but I noticed quite a few people were having difficulty, this would potentially present a problem at the end when everyone will want to access their locker at the same time. Changed and in and I'm a bit old school and wanted to have a bit of swim first, but they don't do that.

That's right, there is nowhere to have a swim. So messing about with the kids it is then. We went up and around and found the lazy river, had a few laughs in that and then went to explore more, saw the wave pool, I suppose that's where the name comes from. It was ok, kids were a little underwhelmed as they had come for the slides so that was next.

With very long queues that took forever on the inflatable side, we chose the shortest queue and it was a good one, I would say half the slides are good, half are a bit boring, not my words, the moody children's words.

Time flies by when you are stuck and committed to a queue and before we knew it, time to go and I was keen to get to a locker qr scanner early to prevent being in another queue. Sadly, everyone else had that idea and once we had a shower, accessed the locker, had to wait ages drip drying for somewhere to change.

I concluded that I'm too old for this and looked forward for a after swim bite and hot drink.

The young man who was in the cafe area was the outstanding contribution of Coventrys The Wave, very polite, good with kids and generally seemed happy to be there and nothing was too much trouble for him. Good to see so many positive attributes in a young person at work.

Overall, I won't be going back as I'll be busy that day, but the kids said they...