Christy L.
Yelp
Let us begin at the beginning.....
As a previous commenter posted...the online ticket/membership buying process is a fiasco. "Best Value" button takes you to 25% off...great....mmmm....not so much. As previously stated....you purchase one at 25% off and can't get past the higher price for the rest after. Ah hah.....simply add one to the cart, go out to the home page, hit "Best Value" and start the process again...and again...and again, until you buy ALL of your memberships. There you go...now....as previously stated, they hit you with the....convenience fee????? What was convenient???? It was a clunky fiasco...*I* entered the data (instead of their workers entering it, so WHO was this convenient too???)......i had to wrestle with their system to get it to do what it was supposed to...and wow....the initial fee is charging 25% of my annual fee????....oh but its only adding a 12.5% fee to the rest of my memberships....my grandpa used to say "it's a percent off of what??".....25% off to bump it up 25% in fees...please don't insult our intelligence....just charge what you're going to charge...we understand.....all of the new "upgrades" are expensive....you sure don't seem to be spending it on the animals that aren't there (more on that in a minute!)....anyhow, i chose to look at it as an extra donation...fun for the kiddies right???...moving on...
As was mentioned...you get excited on seeing the cool statue of the gorilla out front, and wow!!! The lemur run...loved it, the rest...not so much.
Going to the bear area...where on earth are the bears?!?! There were all these empty areas...there was the specktacled bear...not a lot else....there were ginormous speakers BLARING "Roar" from Katie Perry...Katie Perry "Roaring" does NOT replace animals roaring...maybe the animals were fortunate enough to find a reprive from the loudness...good for them because, to my human ears, this was LOUD (and i am young but it was out of place for nature and a zoo)....even my young son commented how it must have hurt their ears!!!
Moving on....the area like a cave by the reptile house....missing, missing, and more missing animals...
The jaguar enclosure...oh cool...they have a walk way to the enclosure overhead...except...you can't see them...they are too high...a zoo worker pointed out where they were... i quickly looked...the tip of a tail..briefly...we stayed a while..nope, thats all we got...
Next...the hippo area....WHERE are the hippos?!?!?! I saw no explanation...just...GONE!!!!....keep moving to the connected outside...the monkeys...GONE...the okappi???? GONE...keep moving to the area the elephants used to be...a MASSIVE building...no elephants...are they there...are they not there...if there was a sign at this point, I don't know...i didn't care anymore...was just ready to go...(again, partially thanks to loud and annoying music and the disappointment of that many missing animals)
...moving on...more missing animals...yada yada yada....now my young son comments on how everything is so commercialized...this is a kid...but he's right....i realize they are trying to pay for all the "improvements" ( give me back my OLD zoo!)....but the focus (as I see it and him too) doesn't seem to have gone back to the animal exhibits very much and a lot of it is a fail.
And the turtle exhibit...this broke my heart...there were all these massive turtles...two had made it to the "watering hole"....but...NO WATER...not a drop...they all looked...depressed...i realize, they are turtles...they are not going to run a marathon but...no movement...at all..for forever...i have never seen turtles like this at all. Sad.
And one other poster said they CHARGE to see the kangaroo...as they said...experiences you pay for but to just SEE the kangaroo...are you KIDDING me...have these people gotten financially in over their heads with the "improvements" that they can't display animals and then charge extra for what should be automatic????...thankfully, i didn't see that part for myself...i would have blown a gasket!!!
I'm disgusted, disappointed, but..."no refunds"...plainly stated people...beware!!!!