ZooBoo at Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo

Parking was a chaotic nightmare but after 30 minutes of vultureous lurking we hit pay dirt. Yay, entry was smooth and we were off to explore. The exhibits seem smallish and many critters seemed to have sent in their absentee ballots.
No worries, the point was for my 8 year old twins to have fun and do a little trick or treating. Well… there were roughly 12 candy stations passing out 1 piece of candy per child. They were bored and grumpy. The highlight of our trip was the petting zoo portion.
Thankful for the family time but missing the old format. This event is for preschoolers, and that’s awesome, but not for anyone over 6 really, unless they’re super timid or scare very easily. I suspect they knew that given the prevalence of beer and spiked pumpkin juice for the grown ups.

Yesterday we took my two year old! We had an amazing time. I loved the fact that it wasn’t scary at all, but it was still full of fun things for the kids! I would definitely come back again!

Daytime zoo boo was not for ages 12 and under maybe 6 and under but your change in set up completely took out a viable option for families with kids 7 – 12 to do together in the Tampa area… Please go backup the other set up next year. Or have both.

I’ve been going to zoo boo for the last three years and expect to go again I take my niece and my best friend we go the three of us dressed in their costumes the entertainment is unbelievable into the kids it’s wonderful and the adults as well

This is a great event for kids and for adults who do not like to be scared. The entire time i walked through the houses I was waiting for someone to jump at me and it was nice to find out no one did. Some houses can be scary for little kids but most I think will love. Parking was full but once inside people spread out well so no waiting lines. Most events are well done and animated.

Parking was not bad and ZooBoo was not crowded on the Sunday we went. Picking up my tickets (Thanks, Unilocal!) and using my Living Social voucher were a bit confusing. Only one person was handing out the Will Call tickets so we had to go back in a different line to pick up. Confusion with one of their staff about my Living Social voucher on my phone– she told me it had to be printed out, I showed her on the voucher that it said I could use it from my phone, confusion ensued. Had to wait for help, maybe she was new? Lol).
Haunted houses were wonderful. Very well done. Not scary but visually appealing and fun! Lots of detail went into each one of them and I was pretty impressed. My favorites were London Frightmare and Pharaoh’s Tomb of Revenge. We made our way through all of the houses fairly quickly. My son’s favorite was Tangled Terror. He is 9 and has never been in a haunted house before, so we thought these would kinda introduce him to the «real» ones later. He had a blast and jumped a few times in some of them LOL. London Frightmare really freaked him out because of the mannequins. There was a «zombie» in Wake the Dead that popped out of nowhere and made him jump 10 feet away from her LMAO. Was hilarious.
And then the rest of ZooBoo was geared toward younger kids, in my opinion. We played the games they had set up at the Spooky Fun Fair. They were offering some dinky prizes if you won the games (you get a special hole punch through your ticket if you win). Or you could reuse the ticket to play again. The prizes were ehhh so we just gave our winner tickets to a family we passed by that was about to buy tickets.
Strolled through Wallaroo Station to see the rides. Definitely for smaller children lol. Our son was not interested in any of the rides. We went through Little Beasties Bungalow. Not scary at all but very fun to look at all of the Halloween displays!
Overall, a fun couple of hours spent. Great place to take the kids for Halloween fun!

Great way to get into the Halloween spirit is to visit ZooBoo at Lowry Park Zoo. The decorations, sound effects and creatures with scary features are all really well done.
Maybe see this as a more for fun than a full on fright night experience. But I must admit not having people constantly lunging towards me or screaming loudly at me was actually a welcome change.
There are more than enough surprises — think things that move, jump up and flail around — to keep the entertainment and fun factor on the high side. This is more fun house scary than terrifying scary and that is just fine.
Not every haunted house will be suitable for the younger set but there are plenty of rides, games and fun things to see, like the Little Beasties Bungalow, that children can have a good time without getting too frightened.
There are lots of moving parts to the fun houses and so much to see it may be worthwhile to make a couple of pass throughs. If you dare.
I like the layout of ZooBoo which makes it a much more manageable trek than what awaits at the bigger theme parks. Toss in free parking, a pleasant evening to be outdoors, a well run and well managed event and count me in for Halloween here every year!

I went here for zooboo this year, I’m a 24 year old and thought it was pretty cute and something to do for $ 18. It’s definitely family and kid focused none of the houses have live actors or anything that’s really scary. Tons of black lights which are cool, the houses are adorable and well decorAted. They have alcoholic beverages wuth dry ice (so they bubble!)most of the park is exited off and the animals are sleeping, but you can see the fish, snakes, pet the stingrays. GO INTO THE BAT CAGE. there is a HUGE bat. It’s pretty awesome. Little tip: shine your flashlight app on the manatees tank into the dark glass, they’ll come up to it! very cute! Defintely check it out if you have kids or you’re a bored adult/​teenager lol

you can pay up to 100 dollars for tickets and dinner for a family of 3 but no animals? This is a boo zoo indeed. I wasn’t thrilled about standing behind other sweaty patrons for 30 minutes for one ride on the roller coaster. This is a rinky dink affair in its current state. ps… zoo personnel: you a will want to put away the ladder lying in the space between the line for the roller coaster and the fence. That is a lawsuit waiting to happen.

This was our first year attending Zoo Boo and we had a blast. Our kids are 7, 8, and 9yo and have been pushing us to go to Busch Gardens Howl-​O-​Scream, and they aren’t ready for that, so we did this instead.
We bought our tickets in advance and that made the entire process so much easier! I highly recommend buying online!
We went on the last Saturday that it was open, so we were prepared for crowds. Parking could have been an issue but I managed to get a sweet spot when my son noticed someone leaving!
Their were 5 haunted houses ranging in scariness and indicated the scariness level by skulls.
We didn’t think the 7 skull house was that scary. In fact none of it was that scary. But it was fun.
I know it’s for families but there were so many strollers that it was hard to walk through! But I get. I ditched the stroller at age 3. I saw a lot of bigger kids in strollers. :/​
Anyway, it was fun. We’ll go back next year.

I have always enjoyed my trips to the zoo, but I was pleasantly surprised how much more I enjoyed it at night during ZooBoo. The houses were amazing and they paid great attention to detail, they even renamed the rides for the event. My daughter is 3 and she could do everything it was really nice to see an event that both myself and her could enjoy. I will definitely make this an annual event for our family!

Great event for the family, the options for little kiddies are a bit limited, however scares, ghouls, and spookiness are aplenty at the ZooBoo. The zoo comes a-​living-​dead with twinkling lights, blow up big props (some of them even move), any where from 1 skull, 2 skull, to 5 skull (scary rating) scare houses. There’s even a 3D, 3 skull house — this one particularly fun to walk through. There’s also part with bounce houses and plenty of sugary drinks to hype up those kiddies and adults.
TIPS — be prompt to the entrance, upon entering, make your way to the far end of the Zoo, then work your way back to the entrance. This way you avoid the crowd who tend to start in the area of the entrance. Go on a Sunday night if you can, far less crowds. If you have little ones, save mucho $ and buy them a glow in a dark stick ¹⁄₁₀ th the price before entering the zoo. If you don’t you might just be forced to shell out for blinky el-​horendous knick-​knacks being sold on premise. Have dinner before you do. The starbucks located on-​premise will always be SLOOOOOOW, so stand in line for coffee knowing you have a lot of time to kill.
A good even to go certainly go at least once. Don’t forget to check out the manatee exhibit during ZooBoo, seeing these creatures swim along at night time, certain puts a different spin on things. They look like gentle ghosts floating through the mercy water.

We are big fans of the Lowry Park Zoo, and have always passed up this event in favor of Howl o Scream, being the kids aren’t big fans of the scary. This year, we saw the Living Social deal for $ 9 tickets per person and figure’d we give it a try. Well, my first impression upon pulling in is that they way oversold the event. The parking lot was way busier than I’d ever seen it during any of my dozen or so visits to the zoo, so we ended up parking down the street in an overflow lot. I was thankful that they hired police officers to direct traffic and allow people to cross the road.
Upon walking up, we were already 30 minutes late to the start, so most of the lines had cleared and we were able to get our tickets from the will call table without a problem. We grabbed a map after the bottleneck to get through the turnstile (only one person working this?) and noticed that many of the larger areas of the park were closed. This is understandable, as the animals aren’t staying up late for ZooBoo, but it immediately made me think… more people than usual with less space than usual. And that’s exactly what occurred. I get that it’s a family friendly event, but anything geared towards young children had a really long wait. Like 45 minutes to get on the bumper boats, and 30 minutes to ride the bananas. Not worth the wait, IMHO.
The haunted houses had hardly any wait, but don’t go in them expecting anything on the level of Busch Gardens or Universal. They are a little creepy, definitely disjointed and thrown together, but fun. There weren’t really any actors jumping out at you or anything, but the darkness and outside nature through the old dinosaur exhibits was pretty cool. They also did a good job with the New Orleans house front. Lots of decorations all around the park, but just too many people. It took away from the fun for us. The game area with the bounce houses was super packed, so much that I wasn’t able to take my little one on the jungle gym/​maze looking bounce house, so she was disappointed. And Lowry Park Zoo, what is it with that gravel over in that area?! Could you put down mulch or pave it or something?
All in all, it was an okay time, but I don’t see myself going back or recommending to friends. I do appreciate that they sell beer, to make it slightly more bearable, but if I’m going to drag my little ones through a throng of people for some rides I’ll make the trip to Disney!

I was so impressed with this event. To be completely honest I wasn’t expecting much from it and I was so surprised at how much I ended up loving it. ZooBoo is something I never would have thought of going to because I thought that it was geared towards very small children. While it is a family event, adults can absolutely have a great time at ZooBoo. I wasn’t even going to bother with the haunted houses but as I was getting ready to leave the zoo I figured it would be silly to leave without trying one of them. I thought that I would go in, roll my eyes at it, and then leave. Boy was I wrong. I randomly picked the «Wake the Dead» house first. When you make it past the line you’re ushered into a room where a video of a face is projected onto a statue (kind of like at the Haunted Mansion at Disney). It looked really good and was my first hint that things weren’t going to work out like I expected. I loved the extra mile the design team went with the construction of this attraction. For example, some walls were completely lined with skulls. There were some great animatronic zombies that were swinging from the ceiling, rising from a graveyard, and jumping out at you from dark corners. The best part was the enormous animatronic creature at the end. He had to be at least two stories tall. As I walked out I remember thinking that I was dumbfounded that the haunted house I just exited was a thousand times better than any of the ones I went in at Howl-​O-​Scream at Busch Gardens. HOS had some cool design elements in their haunted houses, but they also had some vastly inferior parts as well. A college kid slamming a stick on a trash can lid is good for a cheap scare, but that’s not going to impress me. The design and implementation of all parts of the haunted houses at ZooBoo impressed me. They spent a LOT of time, effort, and money to create them and it really showed.
I did three other haunted houses and gave them all the thumbs up. It was also fun seeing all of the lights and decorations that had been put up around the zoo for this event. ZooBoo was such a great surprise and I will definitely be bringing people back here.