Kids Pass explained: is it worth it for your family?
What a Kids Pass membership gets you, where the savings tend to land, and how to judge it against the way your family spends its weekends. From The Online Shopping Expert (TOSE).
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Anyone who has queued at a cinema kiosk with three children, a grandparent and a list of snack requests knows the feeling. The cinema tickets are one cost; drinks, snacks and everything that comes afterwards are another. By the end of it, a simple afternoon out can cost far more than expected.
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Discover Kids Pass for just £1 for your first 30 days and unlock savings across family days out, attractions, cinema, dining, shopping and more. After the trial, membership continues at £4.99 a month unless cancelled, and you can cancel at any time.
Get the dealFamily days out have a way of growing. A trip to the zoo becomes lunch in the café and a stop at the gift shop on the way out. A rainy-day bowling session somehow takes in chips, a round of air hockey and the drive home. Each piece is reasonable on its own. Together they add up quickly, especially during the school holidays, when the plans come thick and fast.
Kids Pass sets out to take the edge off those costs. It is a family savings membership that brings together discounts on days out, cinema trips, family dining, attractions and travel across the UK.
Whether Kids Pass is worth paying for comes down to one thing: how well its offers match the way your family spends its time. Here is how to find out.
What discount do you get with Kids Pass?
Kids Pass is a family savings club that has been running since 2014. Its discounts cover theme parks, cinemas, zoos and safari parks, aquariums, indoor and outdoor activities, trampoline parks, bowling and mini golf, museums and tours, family dining, hotels, family holidays, and shopping and gift cards.
It currently advertises savings of up to 56%.
Treat that number as the top of the range. Each venue sets its own discount, ticket options and terms, so the saving on any given trip will vary. The useful figures are the ones attached to the places you go.
What it costs
New members can try Kids Pass for £1 for 30 days. After that, the membership moves on to a paid plan unless you cancel, and there is an annual option too. Prices change from time to time, so check the current monthly and annual rates on the Kids Pass website before you join.
One membership covers the whole family. The Kids Pass app lets you browse new and popular offers, find what is near you and keep a running total of what you have saved.
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Join freeBegin with the days your family loves
The quickest way to judge Kids Pass is to set the headline discounts aside for a moment and look at your own calendar.
Perhaps half-term is coming and you have promised the children a trip to the aquarium. There may be a film everyone is waiting for, a birthday bowling party, or a Sunday lunch out with the grandparents. Search for those first.
A discount on the cinema you visit every month is a saving you will notice. An offer that tempts you somewhere new can make for a lovely day too, but it is a treat, and it belongs in a different column of the household sums.
Look up the cinemas you use, the attractions within an easy drive and the places on the list for the next school holidays. Ten minutes spent this way will tell you more than any amount of scrolling through the biggest percentages.
When the whole family comes along
Because one membership covers the family, the savings can become more noticeable when several people are coming along. A cinema trip with cousins, a day out with grandparents or a birthday lunch can mean several tickets or meals in one booking, so even a modest discount may add up.
Before booking, check each offer for how many tickets it applies to and who it covers.
Reading the small print
Every offer comes with its own details, and a quick look before you set off spares you a disappointing moment at the ticket desk.
Check four things: where the offer can be used, when it can be used, which tickets it applies to and how it is claimed. For attractions, look too at whether you need to book a date in advance. Weekends and school holidays are when families most want to go, and when the details matter most.
The cinema test
Theme parks attract the attention, but for many families the cinema is where a membership like this proves itself.
A big attraction might be an annual outing. The cinema can appear in the diary several times a term: on wet Saturdays, during half-term, on the afternoon a grandparent offers to take the children out. Small savings that recur through the year often add up to more than one large discount on a single day.
It helps to think of Kids Pass in exactly that way, as a set of modest savings spread across the year.
Dining, hotels and holidays
The membership reaches past attraction tickets. Kids Pass also lists discounts on family dining, hotels and family holidays.
These are less eye-catching than theme park or cinema discounts, but for a family that eats out regularly or books a few UK breaks each year, they may end up being the ones used most. If a regular family meal or a short break fits the way you live, it belongs in your sums alongside the days out.
Put the trial to work
The 30-day trial removes the guesswork. For one month, open Kids Pass whenever you are about to book a day out, a cinema trip or a meal, and note any saving you make. A running total on your phone is plenty.
At the end of the month, add up what you saved and set it against what the membership will cost from the second month.
Be strict about what goes in that total. A discount at an attraction you never visited stays out, as does an offer you liked but did not book, and the advertised maximum when your ticket earned a smaller saving. Count only the money that stayed in your pocket. That figure is your answer.
Start your Kids Pass trial through TOSE
Mind the renewal date
The £1 trial rolls on to a paid membership after 30 days unless you cancel. If you decide it is not for you, check the Kids Pass website for how to cancel before the trial ends.
Set a calendar reminder for a few days before the trial ends, look back over the month and decide with the numbers in front of you. If the membership earned its keep, carry on. If it sat unused, you have your answer just as clearly.
Monthly or annual?
Kids Pass also offers an annual membership. Compare its price with twelve monthly payments at the rates shown when you join.
A lower yearly cost suits families who use Kids Pass steadily through the year. If your outings cluster around the summer and the school holidays, a monthly plan may give you more room to manoeuvre.
The trial will show you which pattern you fall into. If you found several useful offers in the first month and can see plenty more occasions ahead, the annual plan may make more sense. If one good offer was hard to find, twelve months up front would be hard to justify, however tempting the yearly price.
Find Kids Pass on TOSE
Before you join, look in on the Kids Pass page at TOSE. It brings together the current Kids Pass cashback and any offers available through TOSE, so you can see whether there is an extra saving to collect when you sign up.
Cashback and offers change, so the live page is the place to check, just before you join.
See Kids Pass cashback and offers on TOSE
So, is Kids Pass worth it?
For families who regularly spend on cinema trips, attractions, soft play, meals out or UK breaks, Kids Pass can be easy to justify, and it needs no spectacular discount to get there. Modest savings, used often, will do.
If a cinema trip here, a family day out there and a saving during the school holidays regularly add up to more than the membership costs, it is earning its place.
For other families the answer will be different. If your weekends are spent in the park, on long walks, in free museums or round at the grandparents’ house, there may be fewer chances to use it, and that is a perfectly good way to live.
The trial settles it either way, with your own month and your own numbers.
And the days themselves are the point. The wet Saturday that became a cinema trip, the first warm afternoon at the zoo, the bowling game a grandparent still claims to have won. When a saving makes one of those days a little easier to afford, Kids Pass has done its job.
