Jurassic Park: what is actually worth skipping the line for?
The short answer
Jurassic Park at Islands of Adventure has 4 attractions we track, and 2 of them offer Universal Express Pass. Home to the best coaster in Orlando and to the one attraction on property with a maximum height as well as a minimum. On our honest reading only one — Jurassic World VelociCoaster — is a clear case for paying to skip the line. 3 of the 4 have a height requirement, the tallest being 51".
What to expect in Jurassic Park
Four tracked attractions covering the widest spread in any Universal land. Jurassic World VelociCoaster is a 51-inch headliner, Express-eligible, and the strongest case for Express anywhere at Islands of Adventure. Jurassic Park River Adventure is a 42-inch water ride with a moderate wait. Pteranodon Flyers is excluded from Express and has a 36-inch minimum and a 56-inch maximum, and Camp Jurassic is a free-form play area with no height rule and no pass.
Is Universal Express Pass worth it here?
VelociCoaster is the single best use of Express at Islands of Adventure. River Adventure is worth it only on a busy day. Pteranodon Flyers cannot be skipped with Express at all — it is excluded, and its queue moves slowly for a two-minute ride, so it is only worth doing if your child is inside the height window and keen. Camp Jurassic needs nothing.
Worth the money in this land
- ·Jurassic World VelociCoaster — Express Pass earns its money here, 90+ min at peak
No paid line-skip offered at all
These 2 attractions are outside Universal Express Pass, so the only levers are time of day and patience.
- ·Pteranodon Flyers — 30–60 min at peak
- ·Camp Jurassic — under 30 min
The order we would walk it
VelociCoaster first, before anything else in the park, or on Express. River Adventure whenever — it is high capacity and its posted wait overstates the real one, though you will get wet enough to matter in January. Camp Jurassic is the land's hidden asset: a large climbing structure that will absorb an hour of a child's energy at no cost in queue time, which is exactly what a family needs in the middle of a Universal day.
Jurassic Park with young children
This land holds Universal's only height ceiling: Pteranodon Flyers requires 36 inches and will not take a rider over 56 inches, and an adult cannot ride alone to accompany a child. So it is the rare attraction a family ages out of rather than into. Above that, the ladder is steep — 42 inches for River Adventure and 51 for VelociCoaster, which is one of the two highest bars in Orlando.
Height is checked at each attraction entrance rather than once at the gate, so a borderline measurement is worth planning around. Our ride height guide works the other way round from this page — it starts from your child's height and lists what opens up — and the crowd calendar covers the other half of the problem: which weeks make these queues worth paying for in the first place.
Every attraction in Jurassic Park, ride by ride
VelociCoaster is the ride most people book the trip for, and its standby line behaves accordingly — 90 minutes and up through the middle of any busy day, in a queue with long stretches of Florida sun. It is also a ride thrill-seekers want to do twice, which is exactly the case Express Unlimited is built for.
If you buy Express for one reason at Islands of Adventure, buy it for this. Use your first Express tap here in the late morning once the rope-drop crowd has settled, and if you are on the Unlimited tier come back at dusk — the last hour of the day is the best ride of the day. Note the 51-inch bar before you spend anything: it is the tallest requirement on this list and it splits a lot of families.
River Adventure is a long, slow boat tour that ends in an 85-foot plunge in the dark, and that structure is what makes its wait behave oddly: it loads large boats continuously, so throughput is respectable, but the ride is popular on exactly the hot afternoons when everyone else also wants to get wet. At 42 inches it sits below VelociCoaster and Hulk, so it is often the biggest ride a mid-sized child in your party can do at Islands of Adventure.
Take the single-rider line rather than an Express tap if your group is willing to split up — it is usually the faster of the two here, and it costs nothing. Save Express for VelociCoaster and Forbidden Journey, where the loading is genuinely slow. If you do ride, go in the afternoon and accept that you will be soaked rather than splashed; the drop is the wettest on the property and the ponchos sold at the exit do not really solve it. Children under 48 inches need a supervising companion, and the final drop is steep enough that clearing 42 inches is not on its own a reason to think a nervous child will be fine.
Express Pass does not cover Pteranodon Flyers, and even if it did, most of your party is not allowed on. This is the one attraction at Universal Orlando with a height ceiling as well as a floor: riders must be between 36 and 56 inches tall, and a guest over 56 inches may only board while accompanying someone inside that range. In practice that means an adult cannot ride alone, an older sibling above the cap cannot ride at all, and a family with no child in the window simply walks past. Layer on a suspended two-seat vehicle that dispatches a handful of guests at a time and you get the worst throughput on the island, which is why a modest-looking queue posts a wait that feels absurd for a ninety-second flight.
Because there is no pass to buy, your only levers are timing and honesty about who qualifies. Universal has run this one on a virtual-line style return window rather than a standing queue at times, so check the app before you walk over — if a return time is offered, take it and go do Jurassic Park River Adventure or Camp Jurassic in the gap rather than standing in Florida sun on an exposed path. If it is a standing line, do it in the first hour after opening; by mid-morning the wait outruns the ride by a factor most families regret. Measure your child before you commit, because the 56-inch ceiling is enforced at the entrance and a nine-year-old who has just outgrown it will take the news badly in front of the queue. Worth being clear about the payoff: it is a slow, gentle glide over Jurassic Park with a genuinely good view, not a coaster — a great first big-kid ride, and not something to reorganize your day around. Spend your Express taps on Jurassic World VelociCoaster and The Incredible Hulk Coaster instead.
Universal Express does not cover Camp Jurassic and never could, because there is no line and no ride vehicle — it is a large multi-level play structure built into the rockwork between the Jurassic Park River Adventure and the Pteranodon Flyers, with rope bridges, lava-tube tunnels, net climbs, a slide and a set of amber mines that make noises when you touch them. Nobody is checking a height at the entrance and nobody is dispatching anything. The reason it belongs in a planning conversation anyway is that it is the highest-value forty minutes in Islands of Adventure for a family with a six-to-ten-year-old, and the easiest thing on the map to lose one in: it is genuinely three-dimensional, it has several exits at different levels, and sightlines from the ground into the upper structure are poor.
Use it deliberately rather than stumbling into it. The strongest play is to park the younger half of the group here while the taller half rides VelociCoaster or the River Adventure with Express — one adult at the base, the other in the queue — which turns the single-rider problem that wrecks most Jurassic Park visits into a non-issue. Before anyone climbs, agree on one exit as the meeting point and make the children repeat it back; the number-one way this goes wrong is a child leaving by a different level than the one they went up. Go in the heat of the afternoon rather than the morning: most of the structure is shaded, it costs you nothing in Express value, and it is the cheapest possible way to buy an hour when standby waits across the park are at their worst. Bring water, take the hats off before the slide, and do not let a tired group attempt it at the end of a long day.
Have someone sequence Jurassic Park for you
A real guide works your party's heights, nap windows and the day's actual wait times into the order you walk each land — and tells you which passes to skip buying. From $75/hour on your first trip.