Theme park family holidays are being ruined by expensive tickets and hours-long wait times for rides

With mere seconds until our fate would be decided, I turned to my husband and daughters and said the only words fitting, a sentiment I hoped would spur them on to succeed in the inevitable showdown about to take place: “May the odds be ever in your favour.”

We weren’t entering the Hunger Games arena, but it was close. Instead, we were about to race across the Wild West section of Movie World, which contains, among other things, a family-friendly ride that had a three-hour-long wait time the day before.

That morning, though, we had diligently planned our visit, and thanks to my daughter’s Road Runner legs ducking and weaving through crowds – pushing the walking pace instruction to its limit – managed to secure a spot in the front of the line as the ride was opening for the day. But just as quickly as we’d begun to celebrate, a staff member appeared and announced the ride would be temporarily closed until further notice. When it would be back in action, or how long the wait would be, they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) say.

For anyone who has visited a theme park recently, especially during school holidays, this experience won’t seem like anything out of the ordinary. Ticket prices have never been higher, ride wait times never longer, and thanks to an entire generation of parents now obsessed with “hacking” everything, a cottage industry of social media content has been created to advise parents on how to optimise their next theme park visit.

A recent article in the Washington Post titled, Disney trips are so complicated now that you need a class to plan onesummarised the problem perfectly.

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In the piece, a man named Rob Kayris admitted to “dumping a boatload of money” on a visit to Disneyland with his family of six, going so far as to take a class about how to best use Disneyland’s ride reservation system, twice.

“I feel like if you don’t know how it works, you’re going to waste probably two to three days before you have a grip on what’s what,” Kayris said.

If you think taking a course on how to best manoeuvre Disneyland is extreme, think again. Across YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, there are millions of videos offering tips, tricks and hacks for people planning trips to various theme parks, with one user even offering a 200-page guide that promises to teach you how to “do Disneyland the right way.”