My wife and I made a special trip to Long Island to revisit some of my childhood memories. Unfortunately, we had a terrible experience at this aquarium. We purchased admission tickets online before our trip, including tickets for the penguin encounters experience. This penguin encounters experience was essentially a key reason we decided to include the aquarium during our trip. My wife loves penguins and has never gotten to be up close with them.. much less meeting/petting one. The penguin encounters was scheduled for 11:15am so we got there about an hour early. After checking out the sharks for a little, we checked in with a few of their employees up front asking where we go for the encounter. The majority of them did not know for some reason but one pointed us to a sign near a bench by the turtles that said something among the lines of “encounters meet here”. We sat on the bench promptly at 11:07am waiting for the guide to pick us up. We kept our head on a swivel looking for the guide as we were excited to see the penguins together. We saw no one else waiting around so we assumed we were going to be the only ones on this encounter. 11:15 strikes and we still see no guide. I walked over to their information desk and asked “what time does the penguin encounter start and when will someone pick us up?” The employee stated “11:15 and someone should be over any minute now”. I informed the employee we were waiting over by the bench and walked back. We waited exactly 10 minutes and afraid that we were going to lose time with the penguins, went back over to the information desk to ask where the guide was. A different employee informed us that everyone was already picked up and it’s too late to go. Frustrated now, we explained that we already purchased tickets, asked numerous employees where to wait, and that we saw no employee picking anyone up for the encounter. Luckily, the original employee I spoke to at the information desk backed me up and confirmed we were here ahead of time and this made no sense. A third employee came out (assumingely a manager) who began quietly talking with the second employee and looking at stuff on the computer. They talked for about 10 minutes before we butted in asking what is going on as we just want to go meet the penguins like we paid for and are losing time. They came to a conclusion that, and I quote, “there were 5 people scheduled for this encounter and all 5 were picked up, we believe two people came for the 1:15 encounter and must’ve gotten in”. We asked if they could just bring us back because we already paid for the tickets and just want to at least each get a photo with a penguin at this point in which they responded it’s too late and there’s nothing they can do. We were absolutely speechless at this point and my poor wife was about ready to burst out in tears. Literally. They offered to get us into the 1:15 show instead but we could not do this as we were visiting from 7.5 hours away and had to travel to our next destination (1.5 hours away) in about an hour. We then asked for a refund at this point and I will say, they did “make this right” as much as they could for the situation at hand I suppose. They apologized, explained that this is fully on their employee and not our fault at all. They refunded our admission, penguin encounter admission, gave us 2 admission tickets that don’t expire for whenever we can come back, and allowed us to stay in the aquarium until we had to leave to our next destination. All in all, we are very disappointed in what happened after essentially making a trip specifically to this aquarium from 7.5 hours away to meet a penguin. We tried to meet in the middle offering to accept going in late but unfortunately had to settle on a refund. Hopefully, if we are able to return next year, we actually get to meet a penguin and this review will be changed.