To be honest, we didn’t plan to visit the water park this time, as we didn’t want to go back to Laguna, and 20,000 roubles is not the price I’m willing to pay for a water park, even if it is one of the best in Dubai.
To cut a long story short, Aquaventure is an excellent water park, but there is nothing there that you cannot find in other similar places, where I believe there are water parks that are just as good.
However, when booking a hotel in Dubai through Booking.com, I received a notification about a discount on about 80 different attractions in the UAE, including all major water parks. We got a 28% discount on Aquaventure, which also included a visit to the Atlantis Aquarium ‘The Lost Chambers’.
The cost of tickets to Aquaventure for three people, including a discounted ticket for a child aged 7 to 12, was about 20,000 roubles (a little less). With the discount, we got them for about 13,000 roubles (plus admission to the aquarium, which costs about 2,500 roubles per person without the discount). You can also cancel your purchase with a 100% refund of the amount paid until 6 p.m. on the day of your visit, which I think is more than fair.
I think we will continue to use this life hack, as the discounts on entertainment through booking are decent. I read that discounted tickets can also be purchased through online sellers, but I don’t know any reliable ones, and I’m afraid to contact the first one I come across.
So, the taxi dropped us off at the entrance to Atlantis. Through these doors, you can get to the water park, the aquarium and the hotel itself.
The road leads us through the aquarium. By the way, our booking did not include the aquarium’s opening hours, so I decided that it was open at the same time as Aquaventure. We wanted to spend an hour of our time at the water park visiting it, but we didn’t have time, which turned out to be a lucky coincidence because the aquarium is open until 10 p.m. So, after splashing around in the water to our hearts’ content, we relaxed in the beautiful ‘The Lost Chambers,’ which will most likely be the subject of a separate review.
I studied many reviews from tourists who had visited Aquaventure before. Everyone agreed that during the hot and cold off-season (summer months, especially late July, August, January, and February), there are few people and the queues are short. During peak season, people stand in queues for the slides for hours, and without Aquxpress (queue-free access through a separate corridor), there is nothing to do here.
I took the words ‘few people’ too literally. The queues for the slides were indeed short, but this did not apply to the ticket offices. People with paid reservations and without reservations stand in the same queue. We stood there for about half an hour, and there is no air conditioning in this area (which is a shame).
Tickets at the ticket office are significantly more expensive than when purchased online on the Aquaventure website. Aquaxpress can be purchased for approximately 15$.
After waiting in line, each of us received a bracelet like this. They forgot to give us tickets to the Aquarium, and we didn’t know about them – then we had to sort this out.
On some websites, tourists wrote that it was possible to bring food and drinks into the water park, and one girl wrote that there was even a sign about this at the entrance. Such a sign does indeed exist, but food and water are crossed out (I didn’t take a photo — look how the security guard is looking at me 🙂 — I still wonder what that was about. Did they take the girl’s food and she decided to get revenge this way?
Just to give you an idea, a bottle of water in the park costs about 600-700 roubles, and a hamburger costs 1,200 roubles each. So it’s a pressing issue.
At the ticket office, you can buy a single visit to the café for 900 roubles per person – we were told that it would be much cheaper (I don’t know what’s included, we bought a ticket without food).
Anticipating questions, the security guards inspect bags carefully but not meticulously and do not put their hands inside.
The Aquaventure water park is located at the Atlantis Hotel, one of the most expensive and prestigious hotels in Dubai. For guests of this hotel, admission to the water park is free.
We enter the park and immediately find ourselves in the changing room and locker area. The cost of renting a small locker is 1,000 roubles (it is quite large and can hold a large backpack). Towels can be rented for about 1,000 roubles, but you can bring your own, which is what most people do (except for Atlantis guests).
Here are the lockers, they are located in the changing rooms and throughout the premises, and you can rent a safe anywhere. When you rent a locker, you are given a separate bracelet with a barcode.
I read a lot of reviews and knew that my son, who is 112-115 cm tall, would not be allowed on most of the slides, so I was prepared to hang out with him at the Splashers playground, but I was not prepared for the fact that adults are not allowed on most of the slides here:(The structure is huge, I had to send my son in and run after him so he wouldn’t get lost, and he got lost many times that day.
Adults are only allowed on the open slides (there are only two of them).
Buckets of water that tip over every 5-10 minutes are a classic feature of all water parks. Here they are huge, and there is a queue of people waiting to cool off. At first, my son was afraid of such a contrasting shower, but soon we were also lying down waiting for the coolness.
Throughout the children’s area, right next to the slides, there is an area with sun loungers under umbrellas. In a bag lying in the sun, the contents quickly turn into a hot mess, but in the shade, everything is fine.
The children’s area is quite large and consists of three connected areas, with entertainment for very young children.
There is a children’s funnel, similar to an adult slide, where children slide down on rings.
There are several straight, non-scary slides for toddlers. This area has a rubberised floor to prevent injuries from falls:
There are a few more slides for older children:
Near the swimming areas, there are buckets like these (they don’t tip over, there is a shower head at the bottom) with really cold water. In the summer, this is a real lifesaver, as the air in Dubai can reach 40°C and above.
There are not many slides for adults at Aquaventure, about seven. There are several themed buildings on the territory, such as the Tower of Neptune, each with two or three slides. This building houses the famous slide similar to our ‘Kamikaze’ and the one with a tube that passes through an aquarium with sharks. The passage to the slides is closed, so you can take a break from the heat and cool off.
Clear rules for visiting the slides. I saw a man in swimming trunks being refused entry. My son was also not allowed in because of his height. The park has a strange height restriction system, as we rode two slides, one of which was, in my opinion, very scary, but my son was allowed to ride it. The slide with sharks seemed childish to me, but my son was not allowed on it.
You have to find the rings yourself and lift them up, and they are quite heavy (especially the double ones). It is possible to swim alone or in pairs on a double ring.
In general, I got the impression that there were fewer rings than visitors, because there were never enough of them, and some of them were deflated.
The shark slide is a long but not scary descent on a ring in complete darkness, then you enter the transparent part of the slide, but visibility is poor and I didn’t find the slide interesting.
And then there was the ‘Kamikaze’, where the floor opens up under the visitors’ feet, followed by a transparent section of the tube where you could see the sharks if the ride wasn’t so fast. To my surprise, there were plenty of people who wanted to ride this attraction. Some of them rode it and screamed.
Next is the Poseidon tower, where you can ride on large circles that can hold 5-6 people. One slide was shaped like a funnel and turned out to be very scary, as there were a few seconds of free fall (I will remember my son’s face for a long time). A small life hack: if possible, do not sit with your back to the slide, as it is scarier and more unpleasant.
The second attraction on the same circle (they are lifted up by a lift) is also quite cool, but not scary at all and very fun. We rode it all together about six times. The queues for both attractions were short, about 5-10 minutes.Next is another slide, which is not allowed for children under 1.20 cm. It is different in that, in addition to sliding down, in some places a jet of water throws you up. I saw several times how the circles turned over and people fell.This is where the climb up the slide begins, with the option of riding the tubes singly or in pairs.
And this part of the territory has artificial waves. Here you can just swim or take a circle and ride the waves along the ‘lazy river’. The waves are quite big and it’s fun to ride them. There are signs everywhere saying that children must be at least 1.20 cm tall, but children as young as one year old are riding (which I personally did not find very safe).
And this is a branch of the ‘lazy river’ where you fall into artificial waterfalls several times. It’s great fun to ride, and we rode it countless times. There are a huge number of lifeguards throughout the river.
There are also little houses in the water park where you can book various water activities, of which there are many at Aquaventure: swimming with sharks and dolphins, feeding stingrays, diving in the lagoon.
The water park is very clean, there are rubbish bins everywhere, and smoking is not prohibited.
In the summer, visiting the water park is certainly not for everyone: from 12 noon to 3 p.m., being in the sun is exhausting. I think I even got heatstroke (but I didn’t get sunburned, thanks to sunscreen), even though I periodically went indoors to the air-conditioned rooms, drank water and splashed myself with cold water. The time from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. and from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. was comfortable. The water park is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the summer. I couldn’t have imagined that we would spend the whole day here and that it wouldn’t be enough time. After all, visiting such parks with children adds extra fun and energy.
By the way, my husband’s favourite Crocs were ‘stolen’ on one of the attractions. We found them a couple of hours later by chance near the slide at the other end of the park, but all that time my husband had to walk barefoot on the hot asphalt.
To sum up, here are a few tips for future visitors to Aquaventure: bring towels with you, one locker is enough for all your things, look for drinking fountains near restaurants and fill your bottles with them, if you don’t tolerate the sun well, it’s better to choose another activity, as spending 8 hours in the heat (even under a canopy) is difficult even for sun lovers like us.
We all really liked Aquaventure (my son asked to go back the next day), but I repeat, there is nothing extraordinary here. I consider the price to be significantly inflated for Russian standards, but incomes are quite different in the UAE, and the park will always be very popular. Especially since there was a queue for ice cream outside the park, costing 1,000 roubles! That’s how it is.
