Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights Strategy

220327 Universal Studios Florida Entrance

Our family of five has our first ever trip to Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights (HHN) scheduled for October 2023. With that comes the need to strategize how to maximize our time at getting most everything done while also trying to minimize the outpouring of cash.

This post is not meant to be an all-encompassing Hollywood Horror Nights post with every detail and strategy of the event. It is honestly more of a means for me to organize and talk through my own thought process to try and justify the cost and planning strategy. In no way is this going to be the perfect HHN strategy guide, and in probably most cases, will not impact your planning process. However, it really helps me with the planning.

Tickets and Frequent Fear passes are now on sale for the 2023 season, and OMG. I know anytime guests visit Disney or Universal, it is stupid expensive, but the prices are crazy. How do these parks remain packed to the walls at these prices? As you will see at the end of this article, the HHN are not even necessarily the high costs; it is the crazy approach they take to pricing day tickets when it is essentially the same number of hours in the park.

From what we have seen during our research, one thing HHN is not short on is crowds. Which means the parks are going to maximize the amount of money they can bring in, all while trying to manage crowds. So maybe, just maybe the high prices will defer some people from attending and make our visit more enjoyable. Wishful thinking.

Lets start with single day tickets.

The Universal Studios side of the park shuts down and reopens under a separate ticket for Horror Nights. This means guests are paying full price for a day, but only getting part of it. You would think tickets might be cheaper. For example, a 1-park, 1-day ticket to either Universal Orland or Islands of Adventure during the HHN season is the exact same price (i.e. no discount for the Universal Orlando side which closes early) (I get the whole argument that guests still have full day access to the Island of Adventure side if buying a 2-park ticket.)

However, on the day of our visit, a single day, two-park ticket runs $204. After tax, we will be shelling out $1086.30 for one day. And we still have to add on evening tickets for Horror Nights. That is absolutely insane when you are only giving me a part day at one of the parks.

So the question is then how to we maximize our strategy? Day tickets are what they are unfortunately as we are visiting with a friend who has never been and want to spend the day with her seeing Harry Potter.

Due to logistics of our family’s schedule and flights, we have the potential for 3 days/nights at Universal on this trip, encompassing a partial day Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. We had hopes that the Frequent Fear pass would save us some money versus purchasing single night HHN tickets. However, here is the breakdown.

3 nights of Horror Nights tickets (Wed-Fri)- $1437.59
Frequent Fear Passes (include Friday nights)- $1437.70

Therefore, the only way to make the Fear Pass that include Friday nights viable is to visit more than 3 nights, which is not feasible for our trip. So now we need to realistically look at how we will approach visiting the parks.

220329 Universal Studios Florida Werewolf Monster

Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights Strategy

Wednesday

When we get into Orlando on Wednesday, we can not check into our house until 4, which means we have two options. Either go straight to the parks and then when we stumble out of Horror Nights potentially at 2am, then we are trying to check into our rental home that we are sharing with lots of other families. That could not bode well for both us trying to figure out the configuration of the house in the middle of the night and the potential of waking other guests. Not the best strategy to start out a shared vacation with other families.

The other option is to check into our home and then make our way over to Horror Nights. This means a more casual evening enjoying the sites and sounds of the event without too much focus on knocking out too many of the haunted mazes. This seems to be the ideal situation for our family. And maybe we get lucky knocking out several of the haunted houses.

Our Horror Nights tickets for Wednesday evening will run $452.57. I find it humorous that HHN tickets get me access to the park from 6:30pm-2:00am (7.5 hours) and are far cheaper than a day ticket that only gets me into the park from 9:00am-5:00pm (8 hours).

I also want to make sure our very first night doing Horror Nights, we do not go balls to the wall trying to fit it all in, and then be bored with it come Friday.

Thursday

Assuming we stay till 2am from our Wednesday visit, the idea would be to rest during the day, taking in the enjoyment of the shared house and pool.

Our initial thoughts of the Frequent Fear passes was to head back at night for another evening of fun. However, we also need to think about Friday, where we plan to spend the full day at Islands of Adventure and Universal Studios and Horror Nights in the evening, meaning a very long day. So going Thursday evening and staying till late is not the best strategy.

Maybe we take a swing over to Disney Springs during the evening or something casual. I think our best strategy for Thursday is lay low and prep for Friday.

Also saving the money of another $85 HHN ticket per person.

Friday

Again the plan is to spend all day and night enjoying Islands of Adventure and Universal Studios and Horror Nights.

The nice thing about our visit on this day is we will already be in the park and can easily take advantage of the Stay & Scream strategy, where we will be able to queue for select houses inside the park and ahead of other guests.

The cost for day ($1086.30) and evening ($532.45) tickets will run $1618.75. That’s insane! The day tickets are what really is just absolutely shocking.

Express Passes Strategy

One of the options we had to determine if it was worth was adding on Express Passes to one of our visits, giving us quicker access to all the haunted houses plus select rides and attractions. This is a very enticing option given limited time to take advantage of HHN.

However, that would add on another $1064.95 to our trip, and I just can not justify the additional cost.

I had considered it if the Express Pass gave us access all day to both parks and the rides + HHN. However, I called and confirmed the HHN Express Pass was only for the special ticketed event.

Scream Early Strategy

Universal also offers an add-on of allowing guests into the park early ahead of Horror Nights. This runs $40 per person. The idea is guests can queue early ahead of guests who come in from the main gate. Since we would not be able to use it on Wednesday due to checking into our house, and Friday we will already be in the park, this option was not necessary.

Is it not just crazy the idea of having to pay to queue early?

Summary

Before we finalized our itinerary, I wanted to look at one more option.

The current plan calls for:
– HHN on Wednesday
– 2-park day + HHN on Friday

The total cost for those two days would be $2071.32 for our family of five.

However, what if we skipped Wednesday, doing only Friday and adding Express Passes.

The cost for day ($1086.30) and evening ($532.45) tickets will run $1618.75. Adding on Express Passes for our Friday nights adds another $1064.95. Bringing the total to $2683.70…for one day! Yeah I can not justify the extra $600. I would much rather spread it out over the two nights.

In summary, we determined doing one evening Horror Nights tickets + one full day + evening tickets was the best strategy for our family. Everyone has their own preferences to what they feel comfortable spending versus the luxury it provides. When you scale in our family costs multiplying it by five, you can quickly see how the costs skyrocket and maybe are not as easy to swallow as those that might be single or a couple.

We are really excited to finally go to Hollywood Horror Nights and scratch off that bucket list item. Since we are not local, I can not see us outpouring this kind of cash again in the future when we get such great Halloween passes with HalloWeekends and Haunt at Cedar Fair parks thanks to our Cedar Fair season passes. Follow along on our sister site, the CPFoodBlog, for all things Cedar Fair related.

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First Visit to Waldameer Amusement Park

No matter what business you work in, one of the healthiest things one can do for their career is check out the competition. Often when working in the same position for an extended period of time, we can get fixed in our ways and fail to see the bigger picture of how things can be done differently, and perhaps even more efficiently.

As the long time curators of the CPFoodBlog.com, our family and team cross North America each year visiting Cedar Fair amusement parks since 2014. Our website has become the go-to resource for all things associated with food and beverage throughout the Cedar Fair chain. In addition, our heads are often crammed with all kinds of useless information in how the Cedar Fair parks are operated. Of course like all things, there are things the company does extremely well, and of course things that can be improved.

Often time working in an environment, we can see the problem, but perhaps the solution is out of reach either because of means and methods, or because we do not know any better.

That is where we love to visit other amusement parks and see how they operate. Are they clean? How are the operations? What are the things we really enjoyed as a paying guest, and where do we see the Cedar Fair parks already excel compared to their competition?

As a resident of Ohio, we have limited, albeit very good, amusement park options. It might sound weird, but the promised land actually resides over in Pennsylvania, with parks ranging in size from Hershey Park all the way down to little mom and pops amusement parks. Perhaps the reason Pennsylvania is of such interest to our family is because we have not been to many of them.

To date, we have visited:

Dorney Park
Hershey Park
Knoebels
Kennywood

So when we were trying to find a new local park to visit, we opted to check out Waldameer located in Erie, PA over the Labor Day holiday weekend.

Going into the trip, we knew very little about the park other than it was free to enter, and for guests wanting to partake in the attraction, they bought tickets to ride each or purchased an all-day wristband. Since it was our first time at the park, we opted to purchase the wristbands so we could ride as many of the attractions as possible and not have to worry about balancing how many tickets we had left for each ride.

Despite visiting over the busy Labor Day Saturday, the park is dealing with a shortage of staff like everywhere. As a result, the park did not officially open until noon. The nice thing about being a “free” amusement park is guests could purchase their tickets/wristbands and then roam the park ahead of the actual opening.

210904 Waldameer Ravine Flyer II

Our family started out the day on the famous Ravine Flyer II and were on the second train of the day. It was quite interesting to see that they only cycle the trains one time ahead of opening. If this had been a Cedar Fair park, they would have been cycling for an hour or more ahead of guests for the day, and that is only if there is enough staff to operate the attractions that early.

Ravine Flyer II was quite the unique roller coaster built in 2008 with some great elements like the bridge over the road and banked turn near the end. We all absolutely loved the smooth ride.

Next we immediately hustled over to check out the Whacky Shack dark ride. LOVED IT! Everything about the attraction was old school and cheesy, and the exact type of fun we had not seen in an amusement park in some time.

210904 Waldameer Wacky Shack

After we checked out the Pirate Cove, which is a walk through fun house attraction. Sadly I was disappointed in this attraction and expected to see more. We were probably half way through and I found myself asking where are the pirates? Luckily some started to appear near the end of the attraction. All for the classic attractions, just wish this one offered some more decorations and elements.

210904 Waldameer Pirate Cove

Next we went and checked out the Steel Dragon, which offers a unique take on a classic wild mouse style roller coaster. Normally I might be a little hesitant for anything spinning, but the Steel Dragon was incredibly smooth and not jarring like a normal wild mouse can be, thus making it a quite enjoyable attraction.

210904 Waldameer Steel Dragon

Sadly, the Waldameer log flume, Thunder River, was not in operation during our visit.

After a quick snack lunch, and the kids enjoying a couple of the flat rides, we made our way over to the Ferris Wheel followed by the Sky Ride.

210904 Waldameer Ferris Wheel

210904 Waldameer Sky Ride

We then closed out our visit by riding the Comet roller coaster (great little family wooden coaster), the train, their Music Express and Chaos rides. The Waldameer Music Express was quite unique as it included a “tunnel” effect, and the ride operator runs the attraction both forward and in reverse at very high speeds.

210904 Waldameer Comet

Following our visit to Waldameer, we then headed next door to eat at Sara’s. Local hot dogs, homemade fries, zucchini fries, onion rings and milkshakes made for a wonderful meal before driving back to Ohio.

210904 Sara's Erie PA

Overall, our family was quite impressed with our visit to Waldameer amusement park. Despite being a Saturday over Labor Day weekend, and with staffing of rides down, our longest wait of the day was for the Sky Ride at about 30 mins. While we understand why Cedar Fair does the things they do with seat belts, etc. to meet the requirements of certain safety certifications and thus insurance requirements, it is always so refreshing for our kids to ride some of the younger kid attractions and not have locking seat belts. The extra safety measures Cedar Fair makes ride associates go through can cause ride cycles to be very long and thus long lines. Waldameer was very good at getting people in, cycling, then off the attraction.

210904 Waldameer Landscaping Ravine Flyer II

The thing we noticed the most about Waldameer in general is the park was extremely clean and well maintained. Beautiful landscaping throughout the property.

The only negative we encountered throughout our entire day was the food staff was not the most friendly, and the food was anything but good. Although we only had some hot dogs, chicken tenders a burger and fries to hold us over till dinner, the meal was uninspiring.

The other interesting concept was how the attractions were accounted for with the tickets/wristbands. Each guest scanned their tickets (card) or wristband at the ride gate to confirm entry. We bring that up because Disney Parks are now testing the idea of not only charging admission to the park, but also up charging guests for each individual ride if they wish to “cut the line.” Either the plan is going to fail miserably, or if it catches on and comes to U.S. based parks, the Waldameer model presents an interesting opportunity. Cedar Fair parks do have scanners at select parks (i.e. Cedar Point) where Fast Lane is being used to verify validity of the wristbands. So it will be interesting to see how the business models develop over the coming years.

210904 Waldameer Wristband

190703 Knott's Berry Farm Camp Snoopy Room

National Park Road Trip: Knott’s Berry Farm (Part 12)

190703 Knott's Berry Farm Marketplace

It is hard to believe that after a year of planning, and some last minute changes, we were coming up on the end of our family’s epic 2-week cross-country road trip. Part of the appeal to head further west than we initially anticipated beyond the Grand Teton National Park was to visit Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm, two of our family’s absolute favorite theme parks!

After a full day at Disneyland, we used our Cedar Fair Platinum passes to get us free admission and parking at Knott’s Berry Farm. On every other trip, we flew to California, giving us limited luggage space to return home with a bountiful amount of Knott’s food products.

The Knott’s Berry Farm Marketplace, located outside of the gates of the park, offer some of the most spectacular food items that are great for us cooks! Since introducing the Berry Market line of products, all of the sauces, jellies, etc. feature premium ingredients with none of the filler colors or HFCS that is found in many other brands. Also, since Knott’s is the home of the boysenberry, they offer a spectacular array of sauces, including boysenberry punch concentrate. Driving all the way to California meant we could try and fit as much as we possible could into our van for the journey home. Jackpot!

We had hoped to grab an early breakfast at Mrs. Knott’s Chicken Restaurant, but despite saying they opened early, the doors were locked, so we headed next door to grab some DoughKnotts, fancy doughnuts, at the nearby shop. We highly recommend the boysenberry DoughKnott, which is topped with a smashed piece of boysenberry pie! Heaven!

190703 Knott's Berry Farm Boysenberry DoughKnott

We had not been back to Knott’s Berry Farm since the introduction of HangTime to the boardwalk area of the park, so we headed there first thing. Following we also got our first ride in ever on Xcelerator, which is similar to our Top Thrill Dragster at Cedar Point back home.

A large portion of our morning was spent in the area surrounding Timber Mountain Log Ride, since it was down. Little did we know it was the first day of testing our new seats on the logs, so we were excited to be among the first to try them out and this fantastic attraction!

190703 Knott's Berry Farm Boardwalk

We also got to try our first meal at the Boardwalk BBQ using our dining plan. WOW, what an upgrade! The food was all fantastic, with great portion size and terrific variety of entrees and sides. With a lot of the Cedar Fair parks receiving BBQ style restaurants in the past couple of years, The Boardwalk BBQ might rank up there as our favorite!

We also spent a portion of our day enjoying Ghost Town Alive!, the interactive experience where you become part of the storylines. Our family is big fans of the character driven experience, and our boys fit right in trying to decipher the clues. It was also very interesting seeing props and aspects that are very similar or the same as those at Cedar Point’s Forbidden Frontier on Adventure Island.

190703 Knott's Berry Farm Ghost Town Alive!

Another first for our family was getting to check out the brand new Calico River Rapids. Knott’s Berry Farm overhauled the former Bigfoot Rapids with a new theme and loads of new animatronics that help it tie into the western town of Calico theme. Very cool changes to Calico River Rapids, and it is something we would love to see implemented on tube rapid rides at other Cedar Fair parks. Cedar Point is the perfect example where the overlay would fit in well on the Frontier Trail!

190703 Knott's Berry Farm Calico River Rapids Wolf

190703 Knott's Berry Farm Calico River Rapids Dynamite

The only areas we did not get to see on this trip to Knott’s Berry Farm were Camp Snoopy and Fiesta Village. I am always shocked how much we did not get to see in our visits to the Farm, as there is so much to see an explore. One of these visits we are going to have to force ourselves to enjoy a couple full days at the park to really take it all in, as I always get home and say, darn, I did not see ________.

Knott’s Hotel Camp Snoopy Room

At some point in the day, I had to sneak out of the park and switch over our belonging to the Camp Snoopy room so we could surprise the boys later in the day.

We had opted to change over the last night of our stay into the Camp Snoopy rooms, which are specially decorated and include plush Snoopy for the kids. Of course the best part about staying in a Camp Snoopy room at the Knott’s Hotel is that Snoopy personally comes to tuck you into bed each night between 8-8:30 pm. Imagine your kids surprise when there is a knock at the door, and the big dog himself is there at the door. After some quick pictures, he tucks each of the kids into bed and gives them a dog kiss goodnight. It is worth every penny!

Well that about almost wraps up all the FUN packed into two full weeks, and in the morning we start chugging along with four days straight driving back to Ohio. There is a long road ahead!

190703 Knott's Berry Farm Camp Snoopy Room

National Park Road Trip: Cleveland to Los Angeles (Part 1)
National Park Road Trip: Cleveland to Minnesota (Part 2)
National Park Road Trip: Traveling to The Badlands (Part 3)
National Park Road Trip: The Badlands (Part 4)
National Park Road Trip: Mt. Rushmore, Mammoth Site & Needles Highway (Part 5)
National Park Road Trip: Devils Tower and Onto Cody, WY (Part 6)
National Park Road Trip: Yellowstone Day 1 (Part 7)
National Park Road Trip: Yellowstone Day 2 (Part 8)
National Park Road Trip: Grand Teton National Park (Part 9)
National Park Road Trip: California or Bust (Part 10)
National Park Road Trip: Disneyland & Galaxy’s Edge (Part 11)
National Park Road Trip: Knott’s Berry Farm (Part 12)
National Park Road Trip: Journey East (Part 13)
National Park Road Trip: Worlds of Fun (Part 14)