Merlin Annual Passes

 So. We had been toying with the idea of getting Merlin Annual passes for a few years. As we have to have two, and they have to be the most expensive ones so that we can go weekends and school holidays we always decided against it. 

However. That is because we used to get a trip to Alton Towers, Thorpe Park and Legoland once a year almost for free. The Sun Savers offer used to be brilliant. You bought the Sun for a week. Entered the codes, then used the paper for fire lighting. A stressful morning was endured on the app when the ballot opened trying to get tickets on the day you wanted. Very difficult when you work in a school and have to wait until lunchtime. But, in the end you get two tickets for a total outlay of about a tenner including the papers. 

However. Now the Sun have changed the offer. You still have to collect the tokens from the paper. But now, in their words to make it fairer and have more weekend and school holiday tickets available, you now have to pay a fee of £50 for two tickets. So probably £60 for each theme park visit plus all the stress of the ballot and remembering to get a paper every day or driving to 3 or 4 shops finding a paper. I will resist the urge to rant about how much more expensive everything is when you can only do things in the school holidays because you work in a school, and get relatively poorly paid as a CSA. The autistic 'justice' trait runs strong. 

So this year we figured as it would now cost us £180 anyway just to go to 3 theme parks, we would bite the bullet and get the Merlin Annual Passes. 

Top Tips for Merlin Passes:

- get them when they are on a sale (just before Easter, when their theme park season starts around March, and also at Black Friday, November, time). 

- get the right level for you... they are much cheaper if you aren't so restricted as to when you can go. 

- you still have to book tickets on their website. You can't just rock up to places all optimistic like (found this out in Blackpool) This makes ADHD style 'let's just go and see what we feel like' very difficult. 

- places get booked up. Like there don't seem to be any tickets for Cadbury World starting at a decent time left for any of the upcoming weekends/holidays. Kate has heard from somewhere that if things are booked up you can still phone the venue and see if they have spaces. Hopefully that is correct and not just 'the truth as I invented it'. 

- if like us you love the fireworks at Alton Towers, book that early. It only seems to be included on the Platinum passes, but you can book that day on other passes for an additional £25. If you have an autistic brain that gets itself set on one thing... book that thing as early as possible. 

- it is easy to get good value out of the passes when you live either close to one of your fave attractions, or you love fairly centrally. I don't think I would bother if I was still living in Norfolk. 

- plan trips around ticking off several attractions.. our Blackpool trip for example. We went there for a Lego festival, but had a fab time because we did three Merlin attractions. 

- link your passes on the website, so one person can do all the booking 

- set up a What'sApp group for everyone going. Send the tickets or screen shots thereof to this group then they are all in our findable place, plus they are on everyone's phone in case someone has an epic/runs out of juice. My AuDHD brain is superb at forgetting things. It can happily leave printed tickets magnet-ed to the fridge. It can even leave the phone plugged in by the side of the bed. Have backups and multiple copies. 

Things to consider/minor rants:

- we can't believe there isn't an app. It would be so much easier if you could save all your tickets into an app, book from there, show your pass etc. 

- save your pass into your wallet (iPhone) we still haven't had our physical passes so this is easier than finding the bit of paper we printed them out on because we have had phone/app/signing into websites related disasters in the past