Wonderverse — Restaurant in Oak Brook

I was so excited to check this place out. What an awful experience.

As soon as I got there I had asked two employees how things work in regards to eating at the restaurant and not losing your line in place at the VR. Neither of the two employees were properly trained, and couldn’t answer the questions. They brought an older gentleman to me who is a manager, and he also was clueless. At that point, I’m like all right let’s just go to the restaurant and try to ask people there.

So we go to the restaurant and ask the waitress would it be OK if after we place our order and then do our five minute Ghostbusters reservation game while we’re waiting for the food because it overlaps with our reservation. She said not a problem, and then I got a second confirmation from the waitress. She dropped off The first part of what we ordered, Our reservation was ready we double checked again. Everything was good. As soon as we come back after the experience from the VR, everything was gone from the table.

A younger manager came by, was super apologetic and a really nice guy. He felt terrible about the food and our drinks and that everything was gone so he offered to get us a new sandwich and a dessert to go. This guy was a nice guy and he definitely did feel bad and he definitely said he was going to make it right and that was great for us and we would just take our food to go.

We make our way over to the Jumanji VR experience. Then 10 minutes into the experience it shut downs and we’re are sitting in a room and ask we see black. After five or 10 minutes of just standing in the play area room while we’re waiting for them to get it fixed, they tell us that we would have to wait at the end of the line because it’s about a 40 minute wait before we would be able to do the experience again. They said it broke down and that we would have to wait because there’s other people ahead of us now.

So now we lost our my meal, we were super excited for jumanji as I’ve been following “The Void” for years prior to them launching this new concept in Chicago. (this is the same team / company that had the original concept with multiple locations around the globe when it used to be the Star Wars experience and the Wreck-It Ralph experience).

Now we’re waiting and waiting And they never bring us the dessert that the manager wanted to provide us for the troubles.

Then another manager comes out, which appears to be the general manager I think, and he was listening to everything. He did provide us two tickets to come back with a little bit of an arcade credit.

The general manager when I was speaking to him was not rude, but had a cold personality when we were dealing with these issues. He also happened to be the same guy that explained the Jumanji game to us , and when he did explain the game to us he was very animated, so I know he has it in him.

Other than the GM (I’m not 100% If he was the GM, but he looked like he was in charge.) I do want to make it clear that the staff was extremely friendly. They just are VERY undertrained, and I hope that they can correct this because the concept is great.

Based off of this experience, I’m not rushing to come back, and I’m not going to be recommending this place to people at this time until they can get their management under control.

Hopefully corporate cares a little bit more about the customers experience than the vibe I got from the GM. He clearly has failed to get his team prepared for the launch of this new concept.

Also, anyone that read this to the end if you were curious if they ever got us the free dessert they offered to us, the answer is NO, we...

Last week, I called to see how to book a reservation for your virtual reality experience, along with having dinner at your restaurant for my wife’s 35th birthday. The lady said that we can make the dinner reservation over the phone and then make the reservation for virtual reality at the time of arrival.

Our dinner reservation was for 3pm on 3/3/24. We arrived for dinner yesterday and the host sat us down. We asked again if we could book our virtuality reservation prior to dinner and the host said we have to wait to book our virtual reality experience after dinner. We had a table for 9, Heather was our server and was incredible. The food was amazing, seasoned and delicious.

After dinner at around 4:30pm, we tried to book our virtual reality and the guy said we would go in groups of 3 or 4 but couldn’t fit us in until 6:30pm and the last group would be completed by 7:40pm. We asked why we couldn’t book our virtual reality reservation prior to dinner like we tried over the phone as well as when we arrived. He said we could’ve and was misinformed, which is not the same information we got from the host. This ended up being a huge inconvenience for us all. We asked to speak to a manager and Jessica reiterated what the guy said so we asked to speak to her manager and that’s when we encountered our experience with Jeffery. What troubled me most was the lack of proper eye contact from Jeffrey and the absence of any satisfactory resolution from Jeffrey or Jessica. He was very aloof and it felt like he could care less that we would have to wait two hours for the first group to play the virtual reality. Jeffery offered to give me some tokens to play video games which I feel was not a proper resolution a bit disrespectful.

Jeffery doesn’t seem like he was properly trained as a manager in providing proper eye contact and address our concerns in a more effective manner. We weren’t planning to spend over four hours at your establishment. Hence, why we were proactive and called a week prior. After dealing with Jeff, we tried to go bowling at Pinstripes as well as the other nearby bowling alleys, and everything was booked so the end result was everybody went home. Keep in mind, we had people coming from Rogers Park, Rolling Meadows, and North Riverside. My wife was visibly upset and felt like her birthday was ruined.

Effective communication is vital in customer service, and unfortunately, this was sorely lacking. I believe that addressing these concerns is crucial to maintaining the reputation of Wonderverse. I hope you take the necessary steps to improve customer satisfaction and ensure that others do not encounter similar issues in the future. Jeffrey needs to set and be a better example to the employees that report to him. Our time is worth more than a few tokens to play some video games while we wait two hours for something that was mishandled by your establishment. I did reach out and never heard...

Alright I’m going to break this review down into a few parts. This review is specific to a pre-paid Hotel Transylvania character brunch with a designated time of 11:45am sit down.

The event page sold tickets per time slot with the understanding you’d be sat at your designated time. Upon arrival, we checked in and got our wristbands and were told to stand in line. This is where the miscommunication began. The line was quite long at 11:45am considering that’s the time we were to be sat. Not once did staff say “as a heads up, there’s a long wait ahead or we’re running behind, etc” nothing. So here we are standing in line waiting with 2 small kids as were many others. 45 minutes passes, we see the host randomly seating people out of order in the line based on how many people are in their party. I approached her and asked how much longer the wait would be - bomb dropped! She replies “we’re doing the best we can because we were double booked, someone booked a party of 200 at the same time as this event.” LOL! What a mess! Internal miscommunication there - how in the world do you book a party at the same time as an almost sold out event with pre-paid tickets sold and no refunds given. I have to say the staff was nice and welcoming and everyone was doing their best. Some guy even yelled and got in the face of the manager - a bit aggressive for my liking but hey it got him a table so to each their own.

We asked her to split a large table with another party so she finally agreed to sit us with another family at a table of 10.

Food: it was a brunch style buffet, unfortunately a lot of the food was running out so fast they were having trouble keeping the trays full. The food was fine, regular brunch food nothing with a wow factor. Our server only came around once with water and drinks for the kids, didn’t see her again. Maybe it was the end of shift or break? Who knows. It took forever to get someone to pay for the 2 apple juices we got since the food was part of the prepaid ticket. I have to give it up for the back of the house staff who was doing their best to keep up with this poorly planed event. Thank you!

We saw the characters plenty of times so that part was cool, they stopped to say hi and take photos with everyone. Half the characters were walking around the tables and the other half were on the other end of the dining area.

Arcade area: each prepaid ticket got a play card to go into the arcade and play those games - here’s the kicker it was packed! Everyone with the delays in seating etc finished around the same times causing a huge crowd in the arcade area and you couldn’t really play much.

As a first time visitor not knowing what to expect and excited to see this place for the first time - I can’t say I’ll return or be eager to check out another event. I really hope they learn from today’s event for next weekend and plan ahead for all of these issues and lack of communication...