Great Wolf Lodge Minneapolis / Bloomington

If you plan to take a trip to GWL, I HIGHLY recommend it during the week. We stayed Monday to Saturday. Monday to Thursday was “busy” but not really crowded and had plenty of time to do all activities. Once Friday hit, it was PACKED. You will have to wait to do any activities, including the arcade. The pool also went from being able to find seats no problem to having a hard time finding a place come Friday. Thankfully, on our main day in the pool area, we rented a stocked cabana. It came with plenty of water, pops, and 4 alcoholic beverages! Plus 2 stainless steel tumbler cups!

Our room was perfect for our family of 5. The food can get fairly pricey quickly. The room key is a wrist band that can also be used to make charges to your room, which is paid at check out. It is super handy!

Even with the location being very close to the airport, the noise level of the flights was very minimal. It didn’t disturb sleeping for our family.

We got reservations with mixed feelings. We had some friends with good experiences here and other with not so good ones.
Let me tell you, I’m so happy that we decided to go and have the Great Wolf Lodge experience for ourselves!!. Great place, everything about it screamed Family friendly which is exactly what we were looking for. The room was clean, and had bunk beds for my boys, the hotel had restaurants, bowling, arcade, ice cream shop, zipline course, and of course, the waterpark!. It was cool, the kids loved it!
It’s like 4 minutes from Mall of America, so there’s tons to do outside of the hotel.
We had a fabulous family time. We are definitely visiting again.

We like this because it’s close to home. I don’t get how they can only have one set of stairs and it is only accessible from level two. That’s always made me wonder about fire safety and evacuating….

The kids play area is fun and lots of fun. They have the hoops and obstacle course that’s away from river. The river connects to wave pool and that’s fun.

Few major slides, we haven’t really used those a lot yet.
Very busy on weekends less busy during the week.
Cleanly enough for a water park.

They have arcade and hanging course and a few other things to do like bowling. So fun things all around.

Having read other reviews about sketchy charges we proceeded to this place with caution and I wanted to share what we learned from using the waterpark.
We got a day pass we purchased online from their site prior to arriving. I believe hotel guests can check in at 1 and unfortunately that’s when we arrived so the wait time was over 30 minutes to get our wristbands to go to the waterpark because it’s the same check in for everyone. Everyone at check in is being sold a million gimmicks so every check in takes 5-15 minutes per person. Despite what the website says everyone is now charged $15 per day parking (16.35 after tax) so if you can park off site that would be cheaper. A charge is placed on your card for incidentals at the waterpark even though you’re not staying at the hotel, what incidentals those would be, I have no idea. Towels are available inside the waterpark with a swipe of your wristband but the $15 fee for “stealing” them kept us from even bothering. I recommend bringing your own towels if you don’t want to worry about erroneously being charged. Next there’s the lockers, locker rental starts at $15 for the day for a locker you can open and close endlessly (thankfully) outside the locker rooms in the pool area. This felt unavoidable since we had car keys at a minimum to lock up and keep dry. We knew food was a extremely overpriced and didn’t partake in food on site. I was pleasantly surprised that water in a jug with cups was available at the towels window. On this day the largest raft water slide was not working, not sure how long it’s been that way or will be that way. Otherwise overall the place is loud and busy as expected, there’s about one tube per 4 people for the wave pool or lazy river. We saw a lifeguard jump in to rescue someone at the wave pool which was reassuring that they take their job seriously. The lazy river is fast but fun, the other slides we tried were good. The bathrooms were constantly being mopped and cleaned which was surprising and awesome so bathrooms weren’t a swamp by the pool. The changing station in the women’s locker room does need replacement, it sags so low your baby slides off but the counter by the sinks could also be used instead. There were some chairs to be found on this weekday so we had a home base for sandals and towels. Weekends I imagine they’re pretty full. Overall we had a pretty good time, not sure if we’ll ever come back. The hotel stay situation would definitely be too gimmicky for us, we’ll try Wisconsin Dells instead. Look for discount codes online and give it a go at your own risk. I checked my credit card and the charges are fine currently, we’ll keep an eye on it for the next few weeks and update if anything wild happens.