Monday Top 10: The Theme Parks You Dream of Visiting Someday

By Robert Niles: For much of the past year, we've been featuring weekly Top 10 lists drawn from the attraction, restaurant, and hotel ratings submitted by Theme Park Insider readers. This week, we are taking the Top 10 in a more personal direction, with a list of the Top 10 theme parks around the world that our editor (me!) has not visited but most wants to, someday. And we would like to invite you to respond in the comments your own Top 10 list of parks you most would like to visit.

Next week, we will follow up with my list of the Top 10 theme parks I have visited and most want to visit again, with an opportunity for you to submit your own personal Top 10 theme parks list. And since that will be our Christmas week Top 10, we will offer a year-end thank you to one lucky respondent, so be sure to register now if you haven't yet, to be eligible for that giveaway.

So let's get to this week's list: The Top 10 theme park I haven't yet visited, but want to, someday.

10. Six Flags Great Adventure

Home to some of the world's most notable roller coasters, including our Theme Park Insider Award-winning El Toro, Six Flags Great Adventure is the only theme park in the TEA/AECOM annual attendance report's Top 20 North American theme parks that I haven't yet visited. With all my roadtrips and other travel over the years, I have visited 45 of the 50 U.S. states, missing at this point only Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and... New Jersey. I have no idea how I managed that.

9. Tivoli Gardens

Denmark's Tivoli Gardens isn't known for individual world-class attractions, but its legacy shaped the theme park industry, proving a model for a themed entertainment space that influenced Walt Disney's development of Disneyland, among many other designers and visionaries over the decades.

8. Port Aventura

Once aligned with Universal Studios (though no longer), this Spanish theme park lures Europeans with top-quality roller coasters and abundant sunshine.

7. Ferrari World

Home to the world's fastest roller coaster, Formula Rossa, Abu Dhabi's Ferrari World is one of the world's largest indoor theme parks, appealing both to the worldwide Tifosi of Ferrari faithful as well as to theme park fans.



6. Ocean Park

The world's most popular theme park not branded to either Disney or Universal, Hong Kong's Ocean Park offers a mix of thrill rides and marine mammal exhibits. Like Universal Studios Hollywood, the park is separated into two sections, one atop a mountain and one below. However, the separation at Ocean Park is much larger, and the two sections are connected by a funicular railway instead of a series of escalators.

5. Alton Towers

Featuring one of the world's best theme park castles (by virtue of actually being a castle!), Alton Towers blends theme with thrills to draw theme park fans into the English countryside. It's also located in my ancestral home of Staffordshire, so I probably ought to be ranking Alton higher than this!

4. Europa Park

Europe's most popular non-Disney theme park is a showcase for attractions designed and built by its owner, Mack Rides. With a centerpiece geodesic dome that evokes Epcot's Spaceship Earth, surrounded by roller coasters and other thrill rides, Europa Park offers a blend of themes and thrills should put this park on many fans' wish lists.

3. Hong Kong Disneyland

Mystic Manor. I really, really want to see Mystic Manor for myself. Plus, visiting Hong Kong Disneyland would allow me to say that I've visited every Disney theme park on Earth, as it's the only one I'm now missing.

2. Universal Studios Japan

The Osaka park is the only Universal theme park I've not yet visited, and offers the world's only opportunity to ride Back to the Future one more time, as well as to experience Jaws, The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man, and the Wizarding World of Harry Potter all in one theme park. And the park's Hollywood Dream: The Ride from all reports seems to be the delightful high-speed thrill that Universal Studios Florida's rough Rip, Ride, Rockit should have been.

1. Efteling

Anton Pieck's masterpiece is home to several of the world's best dark rides not found in a Disney theme park, including Theme Park Insider reader favorites Fata Morgana and Droomvlucht. And I would love to experience its themed dive coaster, Baron 1898, which opens next year.

What are the Top 10 theme parks you haven't yet visited, but wish you could?

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