Alton Towers: ‘I ended up buying a fast-track ticket, but I was still queuing’

Alton Towers opens at 10am. We, the ticket-paying parents, aimed to get there early. Inevitably, anyone with teens will know that actually getting the teens out of bed in the daylight hours is an achievement.

Eventually, we arrived around 10.30am with queues on the countryside roads gridlocked with traffic. This is how I envisaged we’d spend most of the day - queueing.

Fortunately, with our pre-booked tickets and a pushchair, once we were into the site, we were able to park up, and get through the gates swiftly.

We then queued at guest services for 20 minutes for an access pass, as my brother, who joined us for the day, has special needs.

We had tried to prebook an access pass, but they were sold out; instead, we were advised to enquire on the day.

The woman at the counter said to keep checking our phone in case there were any cancellations. The access pass allows you to enter rides queue-free via the exit.

We also costed up the prices of fast-track passes for our older kids. For the ‘big six ‘ rides; Nemesis Reborn, The Smiler, Rita, TH13TEEN, Oblivion, and Galactica, these would have cost £65 per child on top of our admission fee (£39 per person). We decided to save money initially and see how we got on.

The older teens ran off to The Forbidden Valley to queue for Galactica - the world’s first flying coaster, which is due to close at the end of the 2025 season to make space for more parking.

Fortunately, Alton Towers is huge and split up into segments enclosed by trees and bushes.

As a parent of teens, it means I don’t feel required to have to wait for hours to watch the kids scream above me on a rollercoaster because it’s hard to make out anyone who may whizz past.

Instead, my husband and I took our toddler to CBeebies Land, situated near the entrance of the park. It’s bright, colourful, and it’s full of sensory experiences from the moment you walk in.

Everybody’s favourite CBeebies characters are celebrated there, from Mr Tumble to Jo Jo and Gran Gran, Hey Duggee, and The Octonauts.

We spent a couple of hours walking through the play areas and fun houses as well as going on a gentle boat ride around CBeebies Land. We then caught Andy’s Dinosaur Adventures’ mini show and Bluey in the main area.

The older kids emerged at this point because they were hungry for lunch. They’d been gone for over two hours, but had only managed to get on one ride so far with a 90-minute queue.

We made the mistake of saying they could grab a hot dog without realising a hot dog and a drink alone costs £15.50. Ouch.

At this point we reluctantly decided to make the most of the day and buy individual fast-track passes for two main rides. These are £10 per person per ride.

Using these fast-track passes the kids and I decided to book a time slot for Nemesis Reborn which reopened in 2024. Ideal. Or so I thought.

I left our toddler with my husband on the promise we would be “just 15 minutes”. Fast-track queues aim to be under ten minutes, and then the ride itself is only one minute and 20 seconds.

What I hadn’t envisaged was the fact that once we’d walked inside to the entrance there was a queue into the fast-track entrance.

Here, we were waiting for around 20 minutes to finally enter the fast-track queue and scan our passes. Once we were through, it was only five minutes after that that we were boarding the ride. The ride was fun with four inversions.

All in all it had taken half an hour to queue and go on the ride. That said the main queue looked incredibly long, it would have easily been 90 minutes all in all again. Not to mention the fact that fast-track queues cut in front of the others.

We later queued for 20 minutes to get a cable car to the other side of the park. As I had feared it was a day of queues - other than for food, probably because of the price.

We decided to go on Hex as there wasn’t as long a queue before heading back to CBeebies Land because at least there we’d had some freedom without too many queues.

Rather than all the additional costs of fast-track passes I would rather book in advance for individual rides, and pay for what I was going on in my ticket price rather than one admission price as we had to do.

Without the passes it would have been hard to do more than two or three rides in a full day out.

Alton Towers is great for little ones, as well as very patient thrill seekers. In future, we would return with a clear strategy, budget, and definitely a picnic.