I am a massive Merlin fan, I regularly use my Annual Pass to visit Legoland, Thorpe Park, Chessington and Alton Towers. Having an Annual Pass is pretty handy because you can visit all the main UK Them Parks and Attractions as many times as you like throughout the year (with a few exclusions on the Standard Passes). It’s nice to wake up and think ‘Let’s go to Chessington’ one day and have an impromptu and fairly cheap day out. Annual Passes cost a lot of money for the average family. The Individual Passes are £140 each, ultimately, though, spread out over a year – it’s good value, BUT stumping up a large amount of money in one hit is difficult.
To make purchasing of a Merlin Annual Pass that little bit easier to swallow I’ve usually used Tesco Clubcard Vouchers to exchange for an Annual Pass. it use to be that your Clubcard Vouchers were worth 4x their value when buying Annual Passes, so it was quite easy to ‘afford’ them from the vouchers over the year. The thing is now, Tesco have stopped multiplying the value of vouchers for buying passes as much, and also are pushing up the prices of the Passes. Meaning now that each Pass will cost you £50 worth of Tesco Vouchers – or 5000 points – remember that you get one point per pound spent (bonus points aside!). So it’s £5000 of shopping per Pass. Or £15000 to get Passes for me, Loz, and G.
That’s a LOT of shopping.
Obviously, you do get the cheeky ‘Bonus Clubcard Points’ Voucher and Deal here and there, but it’s still a massive amount of money spent!
Not really sure what to do, my Pass has now expired and I’ve got 8 weeks to renew it at the renewal price – which is £113. I *think* that’s the renewal price – Merlin are buggers for showing prices EXCLUDING VAT. Don’t think many families are VAT registered.
Do you have any tips on saving money on a Merlin Annual Pass – or indeed clocking up Tesco Vouchers?
The last couple of years there’s been a sale on merlin passes in January, with up to 50% off. Don’t know if you can still buy with club card vouchers at that point, but it might be worth hanging on until January before renewing…
There is a 50% off sale – but sadly it’s still the same price with Clubcard Vouchers as it’s done via Tesco and not Merlin :/
We’ve got a Tesco credit card. We easily get enough points for all six of us to have annual passes every year just by using it as our main credit card. x
That’s pretty good!
I was really annoyed that they put the prices for Legoland passes up just before it started to get busy last year. I haven’t yet done the merlin passes as it is so expensive
Funny they’d put the prices up just it time for it to be busy eh? :/
This is an interesting post for me to see – we were at an event at Warwick Castle and when I was talking to someone about it being too expensive to visit regularly they suggested the Merlin Pass being a bargain with clubcard vouchers, but when we looked online recently it didn’t seem like such a great deal – this explains why!
I will be keeping an eye on the comments to see if there are any good tips as we really would like to shell out for some next year if possible!
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