First off my two year old had a great time when we went this summer. She turned 3 near the end of the summer so we had to determine if our daughter would enjoy it next year or not, as she was free as a two year old so we figured it was a good year to try it out. I also bought our summer only season passes for 2017 on black Friday 2016.
I have been watching the prices for Idlewild season passes and ticket in general since the summer of 2016 as we considered making a trip last summer but the timing did not work out. We also has season passes several years ago when our oldest daughter was about 14. So I almost bought season passes last September when I knew I want passes for the summer of 2017 and thought we might be able to make a trip in September since they generally have a special if you buy our pass at the end of summer its good for the rest of the current season. We decided we would not be able to make a trip in 2016 so we passed on the passes at that time.
I decided to purchase passes on black Friday 2016 for 2017. I highly recommend saving the current year pricing and list of perks for a reference when you are evaluating the pricing offered for black Friday as they don't have a good info-graphic available then like they do other times. Also take a look at the discount page under the plan a visit page on their page. The discounts page is updated a couple times a month so I check it at least at the beginning of the month and also when I am thinking about planning a trip. The extra "bring a buddy days" are generally a great day to go because crowd levels are pretty low.
I have inserted the price and benefits from the 2017 and 2018 years and a sample of the discounts available for season pass holders and the buddy discount days. These are unavailable during black Friday shopping. They also don't have any way to get feedback about black Friday offerings so you need know be as aware as you can ahead of time or accept a bit of risk when you make your purchase.
They also have a meal deal season pass. It was 69.99 last black Friday and 79.99 during the summer. It was good for 2 meals a day (4 hours apart) and a snack of popcorn or cotton candy. It had to be purchased with a platinum pass so you also had a refillable drink cup to use with it. If you were to purchase food at rack rate it was about $8-10 a meal so you need to be planning on visiting at least 4 times to make it a good value. The first time we went I will admit I was not prepared for the food to be so pricey. If you plan to go often and will be purchasing some food at the park it would be a good value, they have a large flyer of what the choices are but that flyer has already been removed off the website. Without that flyer its hard to remember what was covered but it seemed that there was a decent amount of variety. Next year I will have to save that as well.
So long story short if you have a toddler or young child or a child that likes water parks and are less than a couple hours away you can probably get your moneys worth out of the pass. They also have a payment plan option during the off season. Last year when I got 2 summer passes I just made $14 monthly payments (0% interest) it was paid for by April so when I went to the park for the first time it had already been paid in full. Also you can upgrade your pass at anytime so if you buy the basic pass and decide you want to take someone with you later you can upgrade to the next level of pass (then use your 3 free passes and upgrade again). They use the going rate of the pass you have to determine what you have to pay to upgrade so we got the summer pass on black Friday for about $53 but they used the $58 dollar price to to determine the cost to upgrade to the $74 dollar pass.
