Six Flags Great America Gurnee, IL

Here for fright night. Most rides are delayed or not working. Avoid coming here. Just awful. Kids so disappointed. Stuff are clueless. Sending us to the wrong parts of the park to purchase a fast pass which we needed otherwise we wouldn’t get anywhere near any of the few working rides. Turns out you have to buy them online.

Omar Brown is an all star employee! I cannot express enough how professional and kind he was in a moment of distress. He provided a helping hand without hesitation when I approached him with my issue and solved it within minutes. He helped me when no one else would. Thank you so much Omar for your help!

Six Flags Great America in Chicago IL has definitely went down hill. I don’t know who’s in charge of decision making as far as the parks workings go but they should be fired. I took a 2 - 3 yr brake from renewing our family’s season passes cause we just weren’t happy with their park issues and new changes on their season pass value. They changed their pass value so my family and friends decided to try again. Some of us had passes while others wore buying tickets. It was to my great disappointment when we arrived last weekend for a family funday to experience a bit of fright fest as we used to. We got there to get stuck out in the parking lot cause someone thought it would be a great idea to gate in the usual entrances where you had lines for people to buy tickets then another entrance for people to enter that already had Passes and Tickets and another entrance for the people that had the hand stamped to re-enter the park in case they had to say run out to their car for something. Now EVERYONE has to enter through one exit, making the lines wrap around the park in both directions waiting forever just to get in. Not to mention NO BATHROOMS in sight till you finally get to the park. While that might not be a problem for some, for others like me with health problems and medications it becomes a big problem. I had to leave the park to use the restroom and i wasn’t going to re-enter to pay another parking fee. I left my kids there and according to them they didn’t even have all the lines open for security when they finally got past the gate. Not to mention my kids spent an extra fee of $40 for the Haunted Houses and they say they wore severally understated. And here’s another thing that this year put a ridiculous spin on the parks attractions. While every year since I was little you can walk around the park and see all the amazing decorations with moving, talking etc. features incase you didn’t want to go inside the understaffed Haunted Houses, this year they make you BUY a device that if you want to see a decorating move or talk you use it to get the full affect now. I mean come on, what do they think they are Universal Studios Harry Potter World??? Seriously !!! Understaffed, over priced and unequipped. Very disappointing.

We experienced the majority of the roller coasters in the park in one day and enjoyed them. Wrath of Rakshasa opened this year and was a very smooth ride though our group pretty widely agreed that X flight and The Joker were our favorite rides. We did not get the Flash Pass (fast pass), we arrived at opening and were able to ride 4 coasters in the first hour and 15 minutes. After that, wait times ranged from 20 minutes to 1 hour 30 minutes for us when riding the coasters. We found the app for wait times to be pretty inaccurate and ended up not trusting it at all by the end of the day. Overall, a fun park for a day of thrills.

We visited the park from the UK on 18th August. The first shock was the $35 parking charge, this is more than Disney charge. More worrying however was the fact that the person taking the charge for parking disappeared into his booth with my credit card and took the payment with the card both out of my possession and sight. This might have been nothing sinister but in terms of cyber security and card protection it is a no no. I have frozen the cats as a precaution. Entering the park was a long and slow process simply for the time it was taking to scan barcodes using the staff mobile app, the scanner didn't always register the first time. We managed to get three rides in before all major attractions shut down due to weather. This can't be helped, of course but it was extremely disappointing. We were left to use our pre purchased dining and drink bundle which caused us some confusion. The ticket terms started the every 90 minutes we could get an entrée and a side, first stop was ChopSix where we informed that we could have the rice bowl entrée but not the side. Ok, not that bothered, the rice bowl was sufficient. After this we used the Six Flags app to filter on the map for places were the dining pass could be used, this left 33 options. Unfortunately, a lot of the displayed options were not suitable as many were considered as desserts, and not meals, so chargeable separately. It would have been nice if the meal outlet clearly showed on their menus what items, if any could be included in a meal pass. This is a failing of the app. Other failings are the new ride not being on the map, every navigation away from the map meant that the filters reset to the default options not those set before clicking away to look at menus etc. The app also crashed a few times, and once had me in the water park next door, even though the GPS clearly showed me in the centre of the main park. Niggles? Yes. Iirritations? Yes. Show stoppers? No. Theme parks should always be rated on the quality of the rides as the main measure of the overall experience. In this case we simply didn't experience enough rides to call the day a success. At a total cost of over $100 per person, without an option to come back if weather stops play. As it was the rides stopped around 15:00 and the park closed officially at 18:30, in truth most things had closed well before the final bell. In summary, it was a disappointing day but likely if more of the park had been available to us I could have given a better appraisal. Sky Striker was pretty awesome.