Welcome to Rolling Coasters

Theme parks are brilliant. Planning a theme park trip can be considerably less brilliant.

There are ride lists, park maps, opening hours, restaurant menus and approximately seven million videos telling you which snack you absolutely must buy.

But when you’re trying to work out what an attraction is actually going to be like, particularly if accessibility matters to you, the useful details can be surprisingly difficult to find.

That’s why I built Rolling Coasters.

Why Rolling Coasters exists

I wanted to create the sort of theme park resource I kept wishing existed.

Not somewhere that just tells you a ride has a 48-inch height requirement or that you need to transfer from a wheelchair, but somewhere that explains what that actually means as well.

What is the queue like? Are there steps? Is it indoors or outside? What does the ride vehicle look like? Is there an accessible vehicle? If you need to transfer, what are you actually transferring into?

Because “Must transfer from wheelchair” might technically answer the question, but there’s quite a difference between sliding sideways onto a similar-height seat and lowering yourself into the bottom of a boat.

Those details matter.

And sometimes the useful information has nothing to do with accessibility at all. Maybe there’s an unusual boarding process, a bit of the queue worth looking out for, or something you really should know before spending 45 minutes waiting for it.

That’s the stuff I want Rolling Coasters to help with.

Accessibility without the vague bits

Accessibility is a big part of Rolling Coasters, but this isn’t a website only for disabled visitors. The aim is to give you enough practical information to decide what works for you.

Two people with the same disability can have completely different requirements. Someone might need to know about steps or transfers, somebody else may be concerned about darkness or movement, and another person may simply want to know how physically awkward the ride vehicle is to get in and out of.

So I don’t want Rolling Coasters deciding whether an attraction is “suitable” for somebody. I’d much rather explain what you’re likely to encounter and let you make that decision.

Official park information is an important starting point, but where possible I also want to dig into the bits that aren’t always obvious from an accessibility guide: queues, loading areas, ride vehicles, transfer arrangements and the practical details you often only discover once you’re standing there.

And when something isn’t certain, I’ll say so.

Theme parks change. Queue routes change. Procedures change. Sometimes experiences vary depending on the situation.

Rolling Coasters will never pretend otherwise.

More than a ride directory

The attraction guides are a big part of the site, but there’s more to Rolling Coasters than that.

There are park guides, attraction closures and upcoming changes, planning tools and News & Murmurings, where we can talk about everything from confirmed announcements to rumours and whatever the theme-park internet has collectively decided to obsess over this week.

And I really don’t want that section to become another conveyor belt of rewritten press releases.

There’ll be opinions. There’ll be speculation. There’ll be things I’m excited about and probably things I think sound terrible.

Most importantly, there’ll be comments.

I want Rolling Coasters to become somewhere people talk about theme parks, not just somewhere they arrive from Google, read three paragraphs and disappear.

This is just the beginning

Rolling Coasters isn’t finished.

I’m not entirely convinced a theme park website ever can be finished when Disney and Universal seem determined to change something five minutes after you update it.

There are more attractions to add, more photos to take, more accessibility details to investigate and a fairly dangerous list of ideas for things I’d still like to build.

But the basic goal is pretty simple:

Help you understand what your theme park day might actually be like before you get there.

And hopefully make planning it a bit more fun along the way.

Help shape Rolling Coasters

I’d really like visitors to help shape where Rolling Coasters goes next.

So if there’s a piece of information you always struggle to find when planning a theme park trip, tell me in the comments.

It could be accessibility related, something about rides and queues, planning, food, hotels, transport, anything.

If it’s useful to you, there’s a good chance it would be useful to somebody else too.