Things I wish I had Known Before Staying at Universal

1.   Complimentary transportation is very confusing.  When going off site (Sea World or Aquatica) you can only book transportation the day before, not sooner, so if you are out for long periods of time at the parks it is difficult to find time to do this. I would prefer to have all of that booked in advance. Also, they are very vague about where you need to go. Thankfully, they give you a ticket - do not lose this, and the bus drivers are helpful with telling you if you are in the right spot or not. This is a view of the parking lot at night when it is less crowded.

2.   Staff are not on par with Disney by a long shot.  Expect the staff do the bare minimum. They except you to already know how everything works and do not want to waste words explaining anything to you. If you ask them anything it is like you are inconveniencing them. Twice I saw staff being short with disabled people. At our hotel I saw the cleaning staff sweep the dirt to the rug and walk away.

3.   We were told early admission was happening at both parks but on different days but when we got there it was only at one park.  This was upsetting to a lot of people the week we were there. We overheard a lot of conversations between tourists and staff about this.

4.   Go at least a half an hour early, even for early admission because it will be lined up.  People will be there earlier than that and some people will actually run once they are through the turnstile. It is nice to be in the park when it is so quiet because you get to see everything in a lot more detail and it is less crowded in the stores and line ups. It is also great for taking pictures because later in the day it will be hard to get any without the crowd in it.

5.    They do not check for your hotel card when you go through the turnstile when gong for early admission (why I do not know!!!) but they do check it just before you enter the Harry Potter section of the park so you end up in two line ups.

6.   Early admission is only available in the Harry Potter section, the rest of the park is closed.

7.   You have to go through city walk to reach the parks.  There are interesting shops, photo opps and restaurants in this area as well as a movie theater and mini golf

8.   Security at these parks are scary looking.  They are dressed severely and they yell at people, go here, go there. And they expect you to have already been there a million times and know exactly what to do. It was very intimidating the first few times we went through. Also, I saw one security guard completely miss the rest of my family going through the metal detector because he was staring at a woman’s backside. Funny!

9.   The restaurants do not have the same hours as the park itself.  Some of the places we planned to have supper were no longer open when we wanted to eat and so we ended up eating either in City Walk or at our hotel. It was a little disappointing because some of them looked interesting theme wise and I wanted to be able to try as many as possible while we were there.

10. Some weeks the parks are open a lot longer than other weeks.  My friend went and she got an extra couple of hours every night compared to the week we went but we could not research that until after our trip was booked because it is not always up to date and can change. I figure we lost at least 6 hours of park time compared to her, because of this.

11. A Universal representative told me the Cinematastic Light show was every night a half hour before closing. This was not true. It was only playing one of the nights we were there and it did not start until closing – according to the closing time on their website. 

Cinematastic is boring and lame.  Someone compared Cinematastic to Disney’s Fantasmic which is kind of true in that it has lights and movie clips. I’m glad that I saw it just because if I didn’t I would have always wondered what I had missed. I wish I had gone and seen the Harry Potter section one last time at dusk instead because it was truly boring and even though we were seated near speakers we couldn’t hear what was being said as it was warbled. This is not an interesting show.

12. Staff do not know about Photo Connect.  I picked up my card from the service counter (make sure you do this before going to the park) and the woman gave me no information about it whatsoever. I tried to use it at the photo machines after a ride and it didn’t work, the woman at the desk told me this doesn’t work here, go to Gringots money exchange. The woman at Gringots did not know what the card even was. We wasted half our morning trying to figure out how to use the photo connect card and all along we had to take it to the photo store at the front of the park and have it exchanged for yet another card. This must be so that you only use them for the allotted amount of time (ours was for three days). I had assumed the timing would begin the first time you used it but I was wrong. Not knowing about this wasted a huge amount of time for us. (Please note that they have changed the name of this service to My universal photos)

13. You can have pizza delivered to your room.  We found this service really great as we are used to cooler temperatures and sometimes had little appetite during the high heat of the day but once it had cooled off some we would feel super hungry but not want to spend a lot of time going to a restaurant (or the restaurants we wanted to eat at were already closed). The pizza delivery was a great option for us.