My theme-park story starts in a stroller at Phantasialand's fairy-tale lake, and the rides through the legendary “1001 Nights” gondola with my dad turned it into a lifelong love. The other half of me spent 25+ years building software, first leading development at CyberGhost, today in engineering at ExpressVPN: systems millions of people rely on without ever noticing them.
park.fan is where the two halves finally met. Live data from over 200 theme parks and 7,000 attractions, plus an AI that sees crowds coming up to a year ahead, so time in a park goes to magic rather than railings. On the blog I write trip reports, data deep dives and everything the numbers alone can't explain.
Toverland is a small, enchanted park that half of the Rhineland drives past on the way to the Efteling. Yet Sevenum has Troy, a GCI wooden coaster you queue 16 minutes for, while the woodie at the destination costs 34. About a park where I once got to play the haunt myself, backstage, and which to this day sells no fast pass.
Phantasialand is my home park, it's where park.fan first saw the light of day, in a Taron queue. A long, loving guide for 2026: the rides, the food and the small wonders I keep coming back for, and, very practically, how to keep Phantasialand wait times short, find the best day, and see through the new Quick Pass.
From the continent's “biggest” Halloween event at Movie Park, through the uncompromising Traumatica, to the notorious Walibi Experiences, for which people voluntarily pay 20 to 25 euros extra: the overview of the 2026 Halloween season in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and France. Complete with the two top parks that pointedly sit the whole circus out, and the question of when it gets busiest.
Sixty minutes of waiting, and yet the time simply flies by? Behind every good queue lie psychology, storytelling and hard-nosed capacity math. A deep dive from the pre-show to Little's Law, and right in the middle of it, the reason park.fan exists.
A stroller by the Märchensee, a gondola ride through “1001 Nacht”, and thirty years later sixty minutes in the Taron queue wondering whether it was worth it. How a childhood at Phantasialand turned into a platform that can read a park day.
The most-visited theme parks in your region — with real-time wait times and crowd predictions.
