Last night I went to HOS Orlando for the first time since it’s inception. I’ve been to HOS Tampa before, but it’s been over 10 years since my last visit and it wasn’t enjoyable at all.
My wife, son, and I arrived right at opening, and entry went smoothly. Our first stop was the Collector’s Curse house, which I thought was pretty good overall. After that, we decided to ride Ice Breaker since it was posted as a 5-minute wait. I’ve lost nearly 80 pounds over the last year and wanted to ride it as a personal reward. The posted wait wasn’t accurate and was closer to being 20–25 minutes.
Afterwards, my son wanted a burger, so we grabbed food. The burger cost $20 had the same taste as one of those 7-Eleven microwaveable burgers.
Next, we tried Rave Yard, and that’s where things started going downhill. The line itself wasn’t long—only about three switchbacks—but the pulsing was egregious. They were sending only about 10 people in at a time and waiting nearly 5 minutes before sending the next group. What should have been a 20–25 minute wait was closer 45 minutes. Inside, staffing was minimal, so I’m not sure why they were holding the line so long.
We then headed to Farm 51. Before getting in line, I asked event ops for the wait time since they weren’t posted anywhere, and they told me it was an hour and a half. We decided to skip it for the time being and try something else.
At Water’s Edge, ops told us it was a 20-minute wait. The setup was similar—3–4 small switchbacks—but after waiting 15 minutes and barely moving, we realized it was going to be closer to 45 minutes to an hour. We bailed out of that line.
We stopped at Monster Stomp to take a break. The show might have been decent, but the singing wasn’t great and the audio on the mics was awful—either too quiet to hear them or so loud it overpowered the music.
On the bright side, Mako was a walk-on and fantastic. After that, we checked Widow’s Nest, but ops told us it was also over an hour. Finally, we rode Pipeline, another walk-on, which was great.
Here’s the bottom line: I’ve been going to HHN for years, so I’m used to waiting in lines. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that the park was nearly empty, yet the houses were being pulsed so poorly that it made the lines way too long. I even saw other guests confronting ops about it. In one case, I overheard ops respond that “they wanted to try something different this year.”
My guess is that they slowed everything down on to push people toward buying the front-of-line pass for $80 a piece. Unless they make some serious changes, I don’t see myself going back to Orlando—I’d rather make the drive to Tampa