What it was like visiting Soft Play – Safari Adventure Play

Soft play, I have such a love hate relationship and I could spend the entire post sharing the reasons why. However my sister Tasha has already done this and you can read that here. My views are pretty much the same. So when my sister mentioned she wanted to spend her son’s birthday, my nephew at Safari Play, I hesitantly said yes. Hesitantly, because just like you, I had no idea what to expect.

The CEO of Safari Adventure Play, Gordon, filmed a live video on Facebook on Saturday. He shared all the procedures that they had put in place to ensure they are Covid safe. I must admit that after watching the video I was put at ease a lot and actually I couldn’t wait to take the boys.

Visiting Safari Adventure Play

Safari are now operating a fully pre-book system, this can be done, as they say, up to 5 seconds before visiting. However you may want to book sooner rather than later to ensure you can actually get a space. Sessions start at 9.15am and and run throughout the day until the last session at 3.30pm. Each session lasts 2.5 hours so at some point they will overlap with another one. I don’t think the entrance prices haven’t changed, Children aged 4-12 are £8.95, adults £2.50, children aged 1-3 £7.25. There are a couple of other prices for under 1’s and between 13-17 too.

Entering Safari Adventure Play

We were told to arrive no earlier than 10 minutes before our session time and everyone over the age of 11 had to wear masks. If you are exempt, that is fine, no one asks you to wear them and there were a lot of adults wearing them. There were markers on the ground in the car park and it did get rather busy. However, there wasn’t long to wait and the whole entry process was actually rather smooth. I was expecting it to last a lot longer. When, we walked through the doors our temperatures were taken using a thermal imaging camera. It’s a snazzy piece of kit and helped to break up the queuing process too.

Inside Safari Play

Once inside Safari Play it was a case of finding a table and getting comfortable. We were given a list of the new implemented changes happening and what was available. Just a little bit of feedback to Safari, it maybe worth changing the colour of the titles from yellow to black and making the text a bit bigger. It was so difficult to try and read what they were so totally not an inclusive way of communicating these to your customers.

Masks have to be worn when walking around the soft play. Majority of people were compliant with this and only took their masks off when sitting at their table.

One of the points that Gordon had mentioned in his video was that you could order food and drink from your table via an app. However we were told when we arrived that wasn’t available today so we would have to walk to The Watering Hole (cafe) to order. This wasn’t an issue, it wasn’t that busy and the staff were really friendly.

All the staff we came across were really friendly and happy. They were either cleaning the soft play, or at reception, manning the role play area or with the Go Karts. The video Gordon mentioned that the big Volcano was manned too, however that wasn’t the case during our session. The area got busy and no one at any point came to control it either.

Cleaning at Safari Play

The whole soft play was clean and was being cleaned throughout our session which was reassuring. All the staff (except those working behind the screens at the cafe) were wearing a full face visor too. Tables were cleaned and staff were walking around with trolleys. Everything just seemed to flow really well.

As well as hand sanitiser stations beside the soft play frame and on entrance there are 4 hand washing sinks too. This is pretty genius as it prevented a build up in the toilets and it meant we could encourage hand washing throughout the session! It was also cleaned during our session.

Our thoughts

We felt really safe, well as safe as you can be, at soft play. The children all had a wonderful time being together and playing and it felt, dare I say it all a bit normal. I did film a Facebook live whilst we were there which is linked below.