Family Review of Discovery Cove Florida

Welcome to a safe and peaceful paradise where all your needs are taken care of all day long! Welcome to Discovery Cove in Florida!

I stumbled onto Discovery Cove when pricing out dolphin experiences in Florida. DC is by far the best value for a dolphin package. Your money will go a long way.

I am not going to list ALL that the packages include, so check out Discovery Cove’s website for those details. But I do want to share a few highlights from our family’s experience that we think sets DC apart!

We spent a full 10 hour day enjoying all that DC has to offer. Our morning started out with a painless check-in process. Right away you feel like you have entered another world. I don’t know what Hawaii feels like but I imagine it’s something like what you feel in DC.

I don’t have too many pictures, because, honestly, I was so overwhelmed and enthralled that I forgot to take them!

We made our way over to a locker and unloaded some of our stuff, which wasn’t much since DC provides most of what you will need for the day including sunscreen and towels. The breakfast was phenomenal! We almost skipped it to get a little more sleep and I am so glad we didn’t.

We decided to feed the birds after breakfast and before we got too wet and tired. I could not get my daughter to stop feeding them. Cups of feed are included in the day package price and are unlimited.

Discovery Cove is all about relaxation but they also put a lot of attention into education. The children had many animal encounters throughout the day with knowledgeable staff sharing fun information.

Reusable Bird Identification cards at Discovery Cove Florida

The staff are clearly happy and love being there. Everyone was so helpful and made us feel like royalty. They even helped us save the rental car keys by putting them in rice after we dropped them in the water. Eek! I wasn’t looking forward to that bill.

We started off learning to snorkel in the Grand Reef. We really did get to swim among these fish and large stingrays.

Everything at DC is made for the whole family to enjoy. The Grand Reef starts off very shallow for the littlest ones and drops to very deep levels for the adults.

Everyone in our family was always happy and accommodated. All ages can truly enjoy Discovery Cove.

DC is large, but not so big that you get tired of walking and get lost from your family members. We had no problem crisscrossing back and forth throughout the day which we did several times. We did wear our own water shoes which I would recommend.

One reason for always wandering around was water temperatures. The Grand Reef is kept around 76 degrees for the fish and our kids would get cold. So then we would grab a treat from the snack cabana and head back to one of the warmer pools or Wind-away River which was one of our favorites.

And yep, you read that correctly, free snacks. In fact, amazing food all day long is included in the day package. I lost count of the cookies and drinks the kids had. The daily resort fee is a very reasonable value when you consider all we did and ate!

Ok, so all this review so far, and what about the dolphins? That was the point of going, right? Of course, but I just had to highlight that DC is way more than dolphins and could stand on its own without the dolphin encounter. But who would want that?

Our dolphin encounter lasted around 50 minutes including the initial introduction and educational class; we were there on a less busy day. The picture above is where our son was getting a dolphin tow in shallow water. Our daughter chose to do the deep water tow and both had a great time.

The dolphin trainer was very knowledgeable and shared so much information with us. We learned about all the different parts of the dolphin, the training process, the personalities, and more. We were able to feed, pet, and touch the dolphin several times. Safety is a high priority with the staff and they were very vigilant.