Where Did All The Family Days Out Go? The Quiet Post-Covid Decline of Jersey's Tourist Attractions

If you grew up in Jersey in the 2000s, your summer was Tamba Park, the Maze, and an ice cream at St Brelade. A few years on from Covid, half that list is gone — and it's not just nostalgia. I still remember the first time I took my kids to Tamba Park. It was one of those muggy August days where St Lawrence smells of cut grass and sun cream, the dinosaurs were roaring (well, creaking slightly) on the hill, and the place was heaving with local families with annual passes and UK holidaymakers with paper maps. You could spend three hours there without trying, have lunch without remortgaging the house, and be home in time for tea. That felt like normal Jersey.

That Jersey is getting harder to find. Tamba Park shut its gates back in 2019 after what was billed as a short refurbishment, then never really came back. The owners talked about reopening in a different format after a planning wrangle over a bigger, Center Parcs-style vision, but the dinosaurs never roared again and TripAdvisor still sits frozen with families turning up to locked gates. Then last summer we lost the big one — aMaizin! Adventure Park at La Hougue Farm in St Peter closed for good on 31st August 2025 after almost 25 years.

aMaizin wasn't some tired side-show. Opened in 2001 by Carlton and Kristina Le Feuvre, it was pulling up to 90,000 visitors a year, the second largest paying attraction in the island at the time it closed, with the maze, go-karts, indoor playbarn, farm animals and all the chaotic birthday-party energy that implies. Membership was actually at an all-time high when they announced the closure. They didn't close because no one came — they closed because after more than two decades they wanted to retire and live on the farm, and no one was in a position to take it on. That, to me, says almost more about the state of things than a bankruptcy would.

Because Covid didn't just pause tourism here for a year, it broke the model underneath it. In 2019 Jersey was still pushing towards 800,000 visits a year. Then the borders shut, the planes stopped, and for two summers local attractions survived on staycations and government support while fixed costs — insurance, minimum wage, electricity, maintenance on ageing play equipment — kept climbing. When visitors did come back in 2022 and 2023, they came back differently: shorter stays, booking later, spending more carefully, and expecting a lot more for their money.

The numbers since have been sobering. Visit Jersey figures showed visits to the end of June 2025 down 16% year-on-year, with 54,300 fewer sea visitors and 47,700 fewer air visitors in that period alone. For the year to October 2025 visits were down 18%, leisure visits down 24%, and total visitor spend for the year ended at £262.6m, down 10% on 2024 and £37m below target. Jersey Heritage, Durrell and La Mare Wine Estate all reported the same story — La Mare down around 20% on 2024, Durrell recording its lowest visitor year since the pandemic in 2024, down 16%. When the big, well-funded trusts are feeling it, you can imagine what it was like for a family-run maze in St Peter.

Ask operators why and you get the same handful of answers, and they're all true at once. First, getting here got harder and dearer. The end of the 60-year Condor era in March 2025 and the messy switch to DFDS, with timetables published late, a court challenge, and technical faults on the Tarifa Jet and Levante Jet last spring, killed forward bookings. Only 10% of islanders in a January 2026 survey said they were satisfied with the cost and reliability of sea travel. A family of four pricing up Poole at £220 one-way with a car in peak season, plus a hotel or self-catering let at Jersey prices, can do a week in Majorca or the Algarve with guaranteed sun for less.

Second, running a family attraction in Jersey in 2026 is brutally expensive. Minimum wage rises, the move towards a living wage, post-Brexit staffing headaches for seasonal café and play staff, electricity and insurance, and the sheer cost of maintaining outdoor equipment in salty island wind — it all adds up. Tamba learned that before Covid, and Covid made it worse. Unlike a restaurant in town that can put prices up 50p on a coffee, a family park can't suddenly charge £25 a head without parents doing the maths and just going to the beach instead, which here, thankfully for us but not for them, is free and magnificent.

Third, and this is the uncomfortable one, family holidays have changed. Kids who spent lockdown on iPads didn't come out of it desperate for a maize maze and pedal go-karts in quite the same way. UK parents now want soft play with good coffee, splash parks, immersive experiences, Instagrammable farm shops — and they check reviews before they drive to St Peter. Ministers have started saying it out loud: Jersey is a high-price destination where the product doesn't always live up to expectation. Matt Seymour of Seymour Hotels called last summer a "perfect storm" and said the island has to invest in facilities and infrastructure to support the visitor experience. He's right.

You feel the loss most in the parishes. Places like Tamba and aMaizin weren't just for tourists — they were wet-Sunday lifelines for local parents, after-school clubs, school trip staples, somewhere for grandparents to bring the grandchildren without driving into town. When aMaizin closed, its giant swing went to the orangutans at Jersey Zoo, which is a lovely story, and the old Playbarn is now earmarked to become an artists' hub called Under One Roof. I like that idea, but it isn't somewhere you can take a wired seven-year-old on a rainy October half-term. The gap hasn't been filled.

It's not all doom, and I don't want this to read as an obituary. Durrell, Jersey Heritage sites at Mont Orgueil and La Hougue Bie, the Maritime Museum, La Mare, and the new Bergerac bounce — Visit Jersey says the reboot influenced 9% of visitors, about 42,000 people — show there is still appetite if the offer is strong. Air links in summer 2026 are actually better than they've been in years, with easyJet from eight UK airports, Loganair basing here with links to Southampton, Bristol and Exeter plus Paris and Bordeaux, and KLM daily to Amsterdam in peak. People still want to come to Jersey; average stay even rose to 4.6-4.7 nights in 2025.

But if we want family attractions to survive here, something has to shift. It probably isn't going back to big outdoor dinosaur parks with high upkeep and weather dependency. The future is more likely smaller, year-round, undercover, locally-rooted — farm shops with play attached, nature trails, refurbished Fort Regent-style indoor leisure if it ever happens, evening experiences that stretch the season past August. And it needs planning and tourism policy to treat a kids' attraction in Trinity or St Lawrence as infrastructure, not just another business, with help on rates, staff housing, and ferry-inclusive family tickets that make Jersey competitive with France.

I drove past La Hougue Farm a few weeks after aMaizin shut, and the car park was empty in a way that felt wrong. My kids are that bit older now, they won't miss the ball pools like they would have three years ago, but someone else's kids will. Jersey has always sold itself as a safe, gentle, family island — rockpools, castles, ice cream, back for tea. If we keep losing the places that make that real on a wet Tuesday, we won't just lose tourists. We'll lose a bit of what it feels like to grow up here. And that's worth investing to get back.