Quick Unsponsored Review of Great Wolf Lodge
This is an unsponsored post about our stay at Great Wolf Lodge in Colorado Springs. I only feature products or ideas on Peaceable Mom with which I have personally had a reliable and positive experience. This post includes affiliate links.
We went to Great Wolf Lodge to celebrate my daughter’s 10th birthday. Overall, we had a good time. Sophia particularly loved the water park and the MagiQuest game. The staff was friendly and accommodating. I recommend booking during the week and off-season to avoid overcrowding and premium pricing.
Below are a few points which we appreciated and/or made our stay extra special.
After Hours MagiQuest Help and a Free Stuffie
Sophia had been running around the entire afternoon playing the MagiQuest game, and got stuck while looking for the Green Lantern. So, around 9:30 p.m. we asked for help from the front desk. We were leaving in the morning, and it was important to Sophia to finish her Quest. It turns out the Green Lantern was located in the MagiQuest shop itself which had already closed for the night. Not only did the security team reopen the Magi Store so Sophia could get the Green Lantern, they gave her a FREE Charlock the Dragon stuffie. The kindness the staff showed to Sophia was so meaningful to both of us.
Food!
There were a few more details that added up to a more pleasant stay for us overall like having a microwave and refrigerator in our room. (We also LOVED that the room had a balcony which gave us fresh air every single morning). That saved us money and made it easier to follow my special diet. We’ve stayed in a couple of resorts over the past year and Great Wolf was the first to offer a microwave. If you have kids, being able to heat up a can of soup or a bag of popcorn can go a long way toward staying within budget.
Sophia also really appreciated that the pizza was cooked in a wood-fired oven. Again, at a more expensive resort, she was served a frozen pizza heated in a microwave for lunch one day for the same price. So, Great Wolf exceeded our expectations here as well.
Great Wolf staff also didn’t give me a hard time about bringing fresh produce into the water park so I would have something to eat. One might argue that there isn’t anything special about this as they HAVE to let me bring in food as an accommodation. However, I never got the sense that anyone was put out, inconvenienced or annoyed which has sometimes been the case in restaurants or hotels in the past. (For example, I paid an obscene amount of money for a tiny plate of green salad at Disney’s Cinderella’s Castle so Sophia could enjoy a meal there.)
We did eat breakfast one morning in the restaurant. Sophia had pancakes and I ordered a fruit plate. I would describe this meal as mediocre, but the families around us did seem to enjoy their food. It was really nice that there was something on the menu I could order and actually eat though. Had the fruit been fresher, I would have been ecstatic about the whole thing.
Coffee
The best coffee Great Wolf Lodge in Colorado Springs currently has to offer is Dunkin Donuts. It’s okay. Not great.
Kind People Make a Difference
I cannot stress enough what a breath of fresh air genuinely kind people are. It made our whole getaway exponentially better, and left us wanting to return. Overall it didn’t feel like Great Wolf Lodge was trying to offer the bare minimum for the most possible money they could bleed us for. It was refreshing.
We Weren’t Special Customers – We Were Just Customers
I feel it’s really important to mention that we were just regular customers who paid the basic room rate. (If you’re curious I paid about $350 for two nights including all fees and taxes). Spring break is coming up, and I didn’t want to have to pay those premium prices. So, I booked two nights in the middle of the week during a school week so we could go and have a little vacation.
As a single mom, booking vacations in the off-season and during the week may mean the difference between us having a vacation and not having a vacation. In essence, we were treated well despite making a standard reservation, paying the lowest rate for our room, and not really indulging in a lot of fancy extras.
