December 2012: Christmastown at Busch Gardens Tampa was a disaster. We headed to Busch Gardens' Christmastown event in Tampa last evening at 5pm. We live relative close to the location and, since the event started at 6:30pm, we thought we had plenty of time to arrive.
Issue #1: Busch Blvd was a complete standstill, from the moment we exited i275 until we made the left onto McKinley which is where the park entrance is. By the time we got into a spot in the parking lot, nearly 2 grueling hours passed. There was an unmarked police or similar person manually working the traffic light at Busch and McKinley but this proved to be the main source of the traffic jam, since people were arriving from every direction to the main entrance.
Issue #2: We had intended to use the valet parking, since it was advertised to be $30 versus the standard parking fee of $20. After sitting through all of the traffic, we pull into the valet area only to be greeted by a parking attendant who stated the valet lot was FULL. We had to then turn around and fight our way into the main traffic on McKinley, in order to reach the main lot. Despite being Christmastime, travelers were equally as pissed off as I and therefore made it difficult for us to enter the line of cars already waiting to access the main lot. Again, no police, etc, at the main entrance to handle the insane amount of cars heading to Busch Gardens' Christmastown event.
Issue #3: Every single "special" event (throwing man-made snowballs, playing in a snow-covered area, sitting in Santa's sleigh for a photo op, was a minimum of 90 minutes wait. For any family with small children, in tandem with the late hour of the day, it was impractical to wait for any such event. This was the single most disappointing fact of this entire post. While the tickets were moderately priced for a standard family size, the park was WAY overcrowded in comparison to the small-scale, small-numbered specialized events.
Issue #4: While the event lighting and displays were nice, they were nothing compared to our prior year's visit to Disney's Osborne Family Spectacle of Dancing Lights event. At least there's plenty of room at that event to handle the large number of visitors (parking as well as inside the event), in comparison to Busch Gardens.
In summary, I would highly recommend NOT going to the Busch Gardens' Christmastown event, unless you have a ton of patience and arrive 2-3 hours before the event's start time.
