Brownsburg Bowl — Local services in Brownsburg

I would highly recommend to any parent that you AVOID this place for a birthday party. I would recommend to the owner that he stops booking birthday parties if he can't guarantee a quality experience. I take no pleasure in leaving a bad review for a local business. I think bowling is a great amenity to Brownsburg for kids and adults. We've been bowling here before as a family and were satisfied - it's a little dated but generally clean and reasonably priced.

We booked our party a few months ago, visiting the facility in-person. The guy at the front desk was new and asked for help from the owner. The owner came out and explained the process. It seemed like it would be a good experience. We saw them write our reservation down in their binder. We picked 4PM-6PM because there was a Special Olympics event happening at 1PM. We advised we were inviting 25 kids. Two days ago my wife calls to confirm the final count is 22 and was told.....uh...we don't have any reservation on the books. They said they could still make it work and had their party room available.

I could go on and on, but I’ll simply leave it at this:

1. We arrived 10 minutes early and were told “oh, you’re early. We’re not ready for you yet”.
2. At the party start time of 4PM, our guests started bussing tables themselves to clean up the space.
3. We did not start bowling until 4:45PM.
4. We tried to ask for our included game tokens so kids could keep busy while we waited to bowl and were told they wouldn’t give them to us because it disrupts the flow of the party. Parents ending up spending their own money on games to keep their kids entertained.
5. Our pizza was served at 6:05PM (which was AFTER the scheduled party end time)
6. Our party drinks were not served until 6:20PM.

There are so many things that could have been done better. Frankly, it would’ve been best to just light up the lanes as if we had booked 5 lanes with 4-5 people per lane and let us type names in ourselves instead of going thru their horrendously long and inefficient party check-in process.

I never blamed the staff or talked down to them, despite some of them being rude to us (they seemed upset we were doing their job cleaning tables). I went straight to the owner and I ripped him a new one. It’s hard to say “no” to people. But saying “no” to hosting a kids birthday party is much better than royally screwing up a kids birthday party. The only saving grace here is most of the kids didn’t realize something was wrong. But we had guests that had to leave at the scheduled end time of 6PM without their kids getting dinner. This is incredibly embarrassing. Some more kids had to leave before cake. Our daughter was not able to open many gifts in front of her guests because we weren’t serving cake until 30 minutes after the scheduled end time.

The owner’s excuse was I should learn how to run a business. Well, as a matter of fact I run a sales territory and I know how to run a business and take care of customers. If I ran my business like he runs his, I wouldn’t have any customers. He jumped to blaming the government for lack of workers, and I would somewhat agree with him. But there are other places you can have a birthday party in the Brownsburg or Avon area, and despite facing staffing challenges like everyone else, those other entities still manage to pull it off.

The buck stops with the owner, and the owner of this place simply passes the buck instead of taking responsibility for things he needs to change. He blamed the guy that took the reservation and said he should have known better than to book a party for 22 kids,...

If I could give it zero stars I would! We had coupons for 4 free games and we had 6 people. So we only had to pay for 2 games and a large pizza and 5 drinks and it was still $60! Ridiculous! Because even though you have coupons for free games, you still have to pay for the shoes which the worker didn't tell us when we presented the coupons when we first got there. All she said was okay, you pay afterwards so just bring the coupons back up when you pay. That's all she said, no mention that we will stay have to pay $20 to wear the shoes. Also, The pizza took an hour to arrive to our table and it was not busy, it was 3 pm on a Saturday. When we found out we were still paying $60 for 2 people playing one game of bowling and a pizza, we asked the worker why we were not informed that we were going to have to pay for shoes beforehand, she rolled her eyes and ignored us. I can guarantee that is why this place makes you pay AFTER you bowl, so they can throw charges at you that you were not expecting. This place is a mess! The worker was also extremely disorganized when we arrived, she was running all over the place not getting anything...

Wish I would have read the reviews prior to our visit.

Pricing is outrageous for a bowling alley that hasn't seen updates in at least 30 years. 'Holiday price' was $4.45 a game with no option to bowl by the hour. Food was very poor and again, over priced.

Seating is abysmal. On several lanes, I saw groups of seven people with only one table and four chairs. Everything is packed so tight that you'll constantly be bumping into the folks around you.

Several lane breakdowns across several lanes during our visit. The mechanic was relatively quick, but there is only so much you can do when the equipment is that old.

Finally, the service. The young woman working the counter could not have made it clearer that she wasn't happy to be there. When I questioned the ludicrous pricing, I was met with open annoyance, and even hostility towards the end.

As someone who has worked in several bowling alleys over the years, I implore anyone reading this to look for your fun elsewhere. This place is not worth your...