Great Park Balloon Ride — Attraction in Irvine

Captain's log, stardate -298255.197328476.

It has been 2 years and 21 failed attempts to ride this mythical balloon.

Lessons learned from the 21th attempt: They shielded the humans on their phone with a complex hierarchy of robot menus, the only way to reach a real person is to pick an inappropriate number from the menu. They make you sign a waiver collecting and storing all your PII before you can talk to the people at check-in, and the waiver expires in 24 hours, so you will have to re-sign it on every "attempt". I made the mistake of only asking on the phone if the balloon is operating today, and the answer was YES. Believe me, that is not enough, you want to ask how long is the current line. Because if the waiting line is 2.5 hours and they close in 2 hours, there is no point of going there, is it? If you are there at 1pm and the line is 2.5 hours, you are out of luck because they close at 3pm. And they do not allow you to enlist for the rides that start at 7pm: you have to go home, come back "around" 6:00-6:30am, and pray the line is not longer than 3hours.

In summary, this ride is a mountain of bureaucracy and disappointment. At this point I'm not even curious about the view anymore, I hate this balloon. But after so many attempts I just want proof that this ride is real.

We get...

Over 3 hours to wait from being in line from 6:30pm. We are from out of town visiting and leave after the flight. Waste of time vs doing something else fun before leaving back home. Absolutely ridiculous. Worthless apology. Especially because......technically the above review is our 3rd time attempting to go on the ride. The 1st time, we showed up on Friday at around 3:30pm. Saw the hours and of operation. Two times a day they are open and we got there when it was closed. No big deal. We decided to go have dinner then go back for the evening operation which is from 7pm to 10pm. We show up at 9pm am and go to the attendant. He tells is all flight are full for the day. I ask how best get on the ride for the next day. He said to get in line 30 minutes before flights start and just wait. So that is exactly what we did the next evening on Saturday. So we waited and waisted over 3 hours of our last night visiting the area from northern California. It was just me and my 2 little girls. There is not much to do in the immediate area as the carousel was "temporarily closed" too. There is no advanced tickets available. Show up and hope...

This was very disappointing. We went Saturday AND Sunday. We were in line by 6:40 each day AND did the waiver in the afternoon. When we got checked in we were told it would be between a 40 and 50 minute wait. HOW CAN THERE BE 30-40 PEOPLE AHEAD IF US WHEN CHECK IN ISN’T SUPPOSED TO START UNTIL 6:30? This group of KIDS do not work that fast. They took a few groups up and what I saw was mostly teenagers. They wouldn’t need a waiver #1 and could it be the KID Staff were only letting their friends on? At 8 o’clock we got a text message that the ride was closed due to weather. The weather was no different at 8 then at 7. Could it be that the KID staff had a party to go to and know no one will say anything if they just close and say it’s the weather? IT LOOKS VERY SUSPICIOUS. If your schedule is really 7 to 8 at night and not 7 to 10, change your hours to reflect that. It happened both nights and the weather was the...