Great Wolf Lodge Concord

“Disappointing check in”

We enjoyed our stay and would have given 5 starts except the disappointing check in. We arrived at 4:20 (check in is 4) Room was not ready. I was told it would only be 15 minutes or so. The staff checked a test text to make sure it worked. We had brought tons of bags in so we had no choice but to… more

We enjoyed our stay and would have given 5 starts except the disappointing check in. We arrived at 4:20 (check in is 4) Room was not ready. I was told it would only be 15 minutes or so. The staff checked a test text to make sure it worked. We had brought tons of bags in so we had no choice but to wait it out in the lobby. 5pm rolls around (40min later) No text. So I go to ask the front desk and she said “oh yea your room is ready did you not get a text?” Nope. If texting is going to be your process, please use it as designed. My kids were so antsy to get to the water park and lost almost an hour of their first night since it closes at 8pm. If you cheat me out of an hour of a delux kid cabin suite, you should also extend my check out by an hour. After that disappointment, we truly did have a nice stay. Resort was clean and staff were friendly. Life guards at the pool are top notch.

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“Accessible suite: Lotta fun! Lotta problems. LOTTA $$$”

The most important thing, of course, is that the kids had a blast!!!! LOTS of fun, cool things to do. The indoor water park, while incredibly crowded, was huge and had a wide variety of pools and slides. (The outdoor part was closed for the season). FYI: For those in a wheelchair, there is a … more

The most important thing, of course, is that the kids had a blast!!!! LOTS of fun, cool things to do. The indoor water park, while incredibly crowded, was huge and had a wide variety of pools and slides. (The outdoor part was closed for the season). FYI: For those in a wheelchair, there is a pool lift into the “basketball” pool and a sloping entrance into the wave pool. And we were told there is a special water wheelchair that we could’ve borrowed from the lodge to roll her into the wave pool. (We did not use that.) The decor of the hotel is cute, the room was spacious (love the high ceilings!) and the accessible toilet had room beside it for the wheelchair so the adult could easily slide across, which many “accessible” hotel bathrooms don’t have. The rest of the “accessibility” was hit or miss due to the strange design of the suite. The accessible bathroom itself was large enough for the wheelchair, but the sink/mirror wasn’t lowered to wheelchair height. The doors were ADA width. There were ramps over the door sills (but they were too tall and therefore jolting so they were actually worse than if they just left regular flat door sills. ) There was a very deep “accessible bathtub”, which she couldn’t use. (Nor could she use the shower in the other non-accessible bathroom) And the unusual depth of the “accessible” tub/shower made it difficult for any of us to safely use. There were LOTS of hand rails though, if you could bend over far enough to reach them to step into the extra -deep tub without losing your balance. The toilet in the private “parent” bedroom was child-height (very low). ?? Both bathrooms took a very time for the water to get hot, , so I’d recommend starting it ahead of time before you undress the kids. On the plus side: shout out to Miss Clara at the front desk who worked very hard to help us resolve some of our issues at check in . Despite long lines, and the fact that she was the only one actually working at the front desk, she was kind, patient and helped as much as she was able. Note to great wolf: a real pre-check in would be terrific! The current pre-check is only to Get your ID but you still have to wait a long time to use a kiosk to pre-check your credit card info, etc. and then still go to the front desk for any assistance . I’ve found other hotels have a much smoother check in process. Also when I went back to the front desk later to add on our “adventure” package, there was a dance party going on in the lobby. It was impossible for us to hear each other. so if you need to go to the front desk for any reason avoid dance party time if at all possible. another heads up. The first kiosk had a loose credit card reader that slides forward, leaving a gap you can’t see, so it “swallowed” my whole card into the machine and I couldn’t get it back. Had to leave my card there to go find someone who could open the machine to retrieve it. He said that “happens all the time.” So avoid the first machine!!! I’m sure other reviews will tell you all about the many great things you’ll find here. But this review is mostly to give the reader a heads-up about some not-so-great things. (I definitely should’ve read more reviews and done more research before booking!!! ). Here are some of the things I wish I had known ahead of time: 1. You might not get what you reserved. They reserve the right to move you wherever. We were in a group of 3 different families, one of whom is an adult in a wheelchair. We booked the largest accessible suite. Although I booked months in advance, 20 minutes before we were leaving for Concord, I got a text saying they no longer had the accessible Grizzly suite available and asked if would we be Ok staying in a non-accessible room. No! Not possible for us . The adult in the wheelchair needs to be able to use the bathroom. (On a related note, the ultra low-Flo toilets sometimes required multiple flushing.) After a lot of texting back and forth, they finally offered us a much smaller suite (one less bed/bedroom, no king sized bed.) And although it did have an accessible toilet, it did not have an accessible roll-in shower. This meant the people who had wanted their own private bedroom had to share a bed with someone else, (awkward) and the person in the wheelchair was unable to take a shower the whole trip. And of course, everyone had less privacy. Also, while one bedroom actually is a separate room, the other queen bed shares a semi-open space with the living room/sofa bed with only a half-wall separating the two sleeping areas. So no privacy at all for the people in that bed. Also in a kinda weird thing, the bedroom that had room for a wheelchair beside the bed, did not have the accessible bathroom. The sleeping area by the accessible bathroom wasn’t large enough for us to fit her wheelchair beside the bed. So everyone was in and out of everyone else’s space due to this strange design. The kitchenette wasn’t lowered for accessibility either. Maybe they assumed most guests in wheelchairs would children??? A very Small detail, but the safe was high up on the wall-so a person in a wheelchair can’t reach it. And it’s installed vertically (like a medicine cabinet without shelves) so really wasn’t useful to any of us. I was told the reason we couldn’t have the suite I booked was due to a “maintainence” issue but someone else told me they often overbook like the airlines do, counting on a certain number of people to cancel. Not sure which is true. And I do understand things happen, but this was definitely not an ideal substitution for our group, and we were notified too late to re-schedule the child’s birthday celebration somewhere else. 2. Check your bill carefully, because they still charged me for the larger, more expensive suite with the extra bedroom that I had originally reserved. They then “compensated” me with a voucher for the breakfast buffet. Except we didn’t want the buffet. None of us are big breakfast eaters. One kid eats a scoop of eggs for breakfast, one eats two pancakes and I don’t usually eat breakfast all. So although the voucher was worth $16.99 per person, I never would’ve paid that or used it. In my opinion, it wasn’t a fair “compensation” in our situation. Definitely would’ve preferred to get my money refunded for the difference in the room prices instead!!!! 3. The lodge is HUGE! Long, long hallways, and very long walks to get to anything. There were so many people staying there that all of the limited number of handicapped parking spaces were already taken. In fact, very few parking spaces available anywhere. I had to leave the person in the wheelchair by the entrance to go drive around trying to find a parking space. My phone says it was took over 2,000 steps from the remote parking space I finally found to get to our room. As an elderly grandma with severe arthritis, was not expecting to hike over half a mile to get to our room from the parking lot. I Should’ve rented a scooter to bring with me. I did not anticipate the enormous amount of walking in hallways that we did this weekend. 4. Be prepared to schlepp luggage a long way. Only three very small luggage racks available when we arrived. None available when we left. Carrying lots of heavy bags a long distance while also managing a wheelchair was not a fun experience. (The luggage racks they did have were an odd design so it was difficult to balance our bags and smaller bags kept falling out the bottom or off the sides). in the future, when traveling with this group, I’ll need to look for hotels that offer valet parking or bellhop service. 5. Budget for a lot more than the room!!!! I ended up spending almost twice what I thought we would. In my opinion, the rooms are outrageously expensive to begin with, but I figured it was worth it for the kids to have fun doing so many cool things . Did not read about all the extra charges: For example, $15 per car per night to park. Also, Except for the water park, pretty much everything else was an additional (expensive) charge. Food was ok, not great but prices were high. Service was good though. They do offer some packages with supposedly “unlimited” play. Although that is technically true, it’s not true in reality. Some of the activities have limited hours (such as closed until 5:00 pm ) and Most of them are so crowded, they required reservations. So many people were staying at the lodge, but very limited slots so that realistically it wasn’t possible to play something more than once, if you could even get a reservation at all!! Very limited number of bowling lanes, small numbers of people who could do laser tags or virtual reality at one time but hundreds of people wanting to play them. So not really “unlimited” play. Our kids were Lucky to play some things once. So “unlimited” is very misleading!! In one instance, the only reservation we could get was for 9:30 pm. But the activity was apparently running behind so the kids waited over 40 minutes for their turn only to be told it was closing so they couldn’t play after all. They were so disappointed!! In the plus side, we did discover that we could stay and play after we checked out and took our luggage to the car. It was a less crowded, which helped. Wish I had found that out ahead of time, because we already had plans back home and had to leave. (You Can also play/swim before check-in.). 6. I should’ve brought some things from home such a night light. The room is pitch dark and the kids couldn’t find the bathroom during the night, but turning on the bathroom light also turns on VERY LOUD fan, so we couldn’t leave that on. Ended up having to leave the TV on to have some light which was not great for the adults sharing the open space. Also should’ve brought our own Towels aren’t provided at the pool as they are at most hotels. Instead, you have to go into a shop in the pool area to rent towels. Should’ve also brought noise cancelling headphones. One child did have a pair, which was a life saver. As you would expect at a hotel catering to kids, it was very very crowded and incredibly noisy. The other child was often overwhelmed. But there really aren’t any quiet places to take a break except for making the long trek back to the room. 7. I bought the in-room birthday package for $89+. Should’ve asked more questions. It includes pizza, a birthday cake and a litter of soda plus some decorations. I assumed since it said they would set it up in our room, they meant all of it. Nope. They left us vouchers for those three things which came from different places, which meant another long walk back and standing in two very long lines. I understand why they do it that way but if I had known ahead of time, I wouldn’t have bought the package. I would’ve just brought out own decorations from home. also, we ended up needing more paper plates/!: plastic ware that they provided. (There is no room service). 8. They told me at check in that everything can be charged to the room using your armband. But that’s not entirely true. you can’t charge the arcade cards to the room. I understand why they do that, but that was yet another long walk back to the room to get a debit card. 9. Wi-fi reception is TERRIBLE! . We were on the first floor so had to go out to the parking lot to use the internet or get/send email. Great wolf Lodge’s own app rarely worked downstairs. So we couldn’t pre-order meals on the app. Had to go wait in long lines instead. 10. Despite the poor WiFi reception downstairs, If possible try to get a room on the bottom two floors. Because The Magic quest game is on the third and fourth floors resulting lots and lots of loud kids running up and down those halls. On the fourth floor, you could actually feel the floor shaking from all the running kids. I should have brought ear plugs. Although quiet time is supposed to start at 11:00 pm, there were teens running up and down our floor shouting several times during the night. 11. I also should have brought a little portable seat. A lot of time was spent waiting the kids to play. Because of my severe arthritis, I have trouble joining them in some activities, and it’s very painful to walk or stand a long time. But there were virtually no seats or benches anywhere for grandparents/parents to sit while waiting—especially none on the first floor where many of the activities were. Again—the kids had so much fun. It would’ve been more enjoyable for the adults too if we had been aware of some of these issues. Next time I’ll check Trip Advisor BEFORE I book!

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“Not sure I recommend”

Place is fun but paid for the family adventure pass which includes unlimited ropes course and it was closed due to seasonal. It is 68 degrees outside and if you can have the miniature golf open beside the ropes course then why not open the ropes course. It's about the kids not the adult. Don't take… more

Place is fun but paid for the family adventure pass which includes unlimited ropes course and it was closed due to seasonal. It is 68 degrees outside and if you can have the miniature golf open beside the ropes course then why not open the ropes course. It's about the kids not the adult. Don't take my money and offer me an option that isn't available. The supervisor and director was contacted and within 3 hours still no communication with customer service. I asked for extra game credits but no resolution on my visit. In my opinion, not worth the extra $150 for family pass when you can't offer everything you advertise for.

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