Legoland California is a fun place to visit, particularly with toddlers or younger kids. My 4-year-old is really into Lego’s right now, and he was thrilled when I told him we were visiting Legoland during our trip to California. Tickets must be purchased in advance on the Legoland website, but the pricing is not very clear on the website until you start to add tickets to the cart, and then there are a lot of add-ons that are offered. Here’s my take on whether Legoland CA Reserve and Ride is worth it.
Cost of Legoland CA Tickets
We visited on a Monday in April. It was not a holiday, but it was Spring Break for many school districts, so the park was a bit crowded. At that time, tickets were $109 per person for any age over two. This is for Legoland only – there are more expensive tickets that will get you into Legoland and the Sea Life Aquarium and the Sea Like Water Park, but we opted for Legoland only.
Once you place your tickets in the cart then the option for Reserve and Ride will appear. Reserve and Ride will allow you to reserve popular rides at a scheduled time, which reduces the amount of time spent standing in lines. There are three levels of Reserve and Ride: Ultimate ($100 per person), Deluxe ($60 per person), and Express ($40 per person). I chose the Express option, which was the least expensive option. It seemed that the other two options, Ultimate and Deluxe, were unnecessary and needlessly expensive. Additional add-ons are also offered, such as meals, and parking ($34-$54 per car). I did not need the parking because my husband was dropping us off. I did select the $14.99 figurine add-on (not worth it – skip it). Altogether, I paid $314 for two one-day tickets with Reserve and Ride Express, the figurine add-on, and taxes.
Using Reserve and Ride at Legoland
Visitors must download the Legoland app ahead of time, that is the only way to utilize Reserve and Ride. Once you have the app, you can select certain rides to reserve. I was surprised that not every ride is available to reserve. Luckily for us, the rides we were most interested in were available, but others were not. Another note, even if you have Reserve and Ride you will still need to wait in lines because often there were many people who had reserved a spot on the app. There are separate lines for Reserve and Ride guests, and the Reserve and Ride lines are shorter than the regular lines.
I am grateful that I purchased Reserve and Ride and, in my opinion, it is worth the cost. It definitely saved us some time and allowed us to enjoy the park! But even with Reserve and Ride, we did not get to enjoy every ride, there just was not enough time. We might need to plan another road trip and head back to Legoland soon!
