Didn't catch anything about the ages of people involved. For our family, with a 4 and 7 year old - no, we weren't thrilled with AK. It wasn't a bust. But like another poster - we too live near major Zoos - the Toronto Zoo and the African Lion Safari in Ontario. AK can't match the animal viewing experiences provided by either of them. We also did Busch Gardens in Tampa, and that was a far more enjoyable Zoo/Theme park experience (actually, we loved that one). Maybe its just us, but we found AK difficult to get around in. Very crowded, and something about the layout just didn't seem to work for the Zoo thing - difficult to map a route that would let you do some animal viewing while still making your way to an attraction - that kind of thing. Maybe the way to do it is to take one day to walk around and see the animals, and another day to catch some attractions. But doing it all at once, at the end of the day we just kind of felt like we'd been neither to a zoo nor a theme park and hadn't seem much of anything.