I have been to many theme parks in my life as part of my professional career as a theme park writer, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there’s no such thing as the “best theme park.” There are simply too many variables to take into account, and of course, there are individual preference for different things, making such a designation impossible. That doesn’t stop some people from trying, however. A new list of the “best-rated theme parks in the U.S." was recently revealed, which calls Universal’s Islands of Adventure at Universal Orlando Resort the top park. It's a perfectly acceptable choice, but some of the other decisions on this list are baffling.
The research was conducted by the Westgate Palace Hotel at Universal, and it analyzed each park based on three factors: Instagram hashtags, Google search volume and reviews on TripAdvisor. These numbers were indexed, with extra weight given to customer reviews, to give each park a score. The top 10 looks like this.
- 1. Universal’s Islands of Adventure
- 2. Magic Kingdom
- 3. Disney California Adventure
- 4. Cedar Point
- 5. Silver Dollar City
- 6. Disney’s Animal Kingdom
- 7. Universal Studios Hollywood
- 8. Disneyland
- 9. Dollywood
- 10. Disney’s Typhoon Lagoon
Seeing Islands of Adventure edge out Magic Kingdom might be somewhat surprising since the Disney World flagship park is, after all, the single most popular theme park in the world based on attendance. But there’s no argument that Islands of Adventure has a lot to offer. It has the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, including ,the amazing Hagrid’s Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure roller coaster, as well as the Jurassic World Velocicoaster, which many coaster fans love even more.
Some of these other rankings, however, are a bit harder to explain. I will always sing the praises of Disney California Adventure, which I think is better than Disneyland in many ways and doesn’t get nearly the credit it deserves. But it still shocks me to see it ranked number three with Disneyland down at eight. DCA is great, but it’s not Disneyland.
It’s nice to see some of these parks on the list. I visited Silver Dollar City for the first time last year and also got to check out Dollywood for the first time in 2023. Both parks are worthy of this list. It’s also wonderful to see Universal Studios Hollywood get some recognition, as it’s another park that tends to get overshadowed by the bigger ones.
But then I look at number 10 on this list and I get confused again. I’m not a water park person in general, but I’m utterly perplexed about how Typhoon Lagoon is the 10th best park in the country. It’s the only water park on the list, indicating it is, by these metrics, the best water park in the U.S. While it's not a bad water park, I’m not sure anybody would agree with that. Not only that, it beat out several major traditional parks that aren’t in the top 10, including Epcot, Universal Studios Florida, all the Legoland parks and other high-profile regional locations, like Magic Mountain.
It's also a problem because Typhoon Lagoon is one of the attractions closed at Disney World right now, so you can't go anyway. Disney World hasn't had both water parks on property open at the same time since before the pandemic. It's unclear exactly when this research was done. Epcot has probably seen a lot more hashtag use in recent months as several of the new Disney World attractions can be found there.
As I said at the outset, there is no “best theme park.” Everybody’s preferences are different, and the parks themselves change over time. There are a million different ways one can try to rank them that are just as valid as any other. It turns out there are some ways of doing it that get some strange results.
