Raging Waters Ticket Buyers Paid About $1.5 Million in Processing Fees, by Our Math. The $850,000 Settlement Would Leave $483,200 to Share If the Court Grants Every Request — Roughly $3 Back per $1 of Fees If One Buyer in Ten Files. Claims Close November 24.

The short version. If you bought tickets on ragingwaters.com in the class period and paid the fee — whether or not an email or postcard reached you — you can file at RagingWatersSettlement.com by November 24, 2026, or print the claim form and mail it, postmarked by that date, to Velazquez v. Festival Fun Parks, Attn: Claim Forms, 1650 Arch Street, Suite 2210, Philadelphia, PA 19103. “Settlement Class Members who made more than one purchase during the Class Period only need to submit one Claim Form to receive their Settlement Payment.” There is nothing to upload: your share is calculated from Festival Fun Parks’ records of the fees you paid. You choose how to be paid — prepaid Mastercard, PayPal, Venmo, Zelle or a paper check. If you do nothing, you get nothing and are still bound by the release. The notice calls opting out the only option that keeps your right to sue on your own; that letter must be postmarked by Monday, September 28.

The lawsuit was filed on August 15, 2024 by Andrea Velazquez, a Los Angeles resident represented by Dovel & Luner, LLP. According to the complaint, on June 17, 2024 she bought two general-admission tickets on ragingwaters.com; checkout first showed $79.98, then added a “Processing Fee” of $4.00 per ticket, for $87.98. The complaint’s screenshots of Raging Waters LA, captured June 28, 2024, show the same pattern: a $47.99 adult ticket on the date calendar and, a few screens later, a $4.00 Processing Fee and a $51.99 total — a fee that, the complaint says, “was disclosed for the first time in the checkout process in small font.” The claims were California’s Unfair Competition Law and quasi-contract (unjust enrichment); the money sought was restitution of the fees.

The timing is what made the case uncertain. SB 478 made drip pricing an express violation of California’s Consumers Legal Remedies Act on July 1, 2024. Under the settlement agreement, “Festival Fun Parks changed its Raging Waters processing fee disclosures for California consumers in June 2024” — before that law took effect — so the claims rest on the older conduct, and whether drip pricing already violated the Unfair Competition Law before then is, in the plaintiff’s final-approval motion, “an issue of first impression”. Festival Fun Parks denies wrongdoing and maintains its disclosures were lawful. It moved to send the case to arbitration on December 4, 2024 and lost on January 17, 2025. A July 22, 2025 mediation before Bruce Friedman of JAMS ended without a deal, but both sides accepted his mediator’s proposal two days later. The signed agreement is dated May 13, 2026, and Judge Berle signed the preliminary approval order on July 6, 2026.

The class, as the July 6 order defines it, is “all persons residing in the United States who purchased admission tickets from www.ragingwaters.com between June 1, 2020, and June 22, 2026, and paid a ‘Processing Fee.’” Two things stand out. It is national — the complaint had proposed only purchases made in California before June 28, 2024. And it turns on having paid the fee, not on the fee having been shown late on your particular order. Excluded are people who opt out, government entities, the lawyers, the company and its affiliates’ employees, officers and directors, the judge and court staff, and anyone who already signed a release with Festival Fun Parks over the same fee.

The papers never list parks; the test is the website and the fee. The only park named in the posted court papers is Raging Waters LA (in San Dimas), on the complaint’s screenshots. Palace Entertainment — the name Festival Fun Parks does business under — also ran Raging Waters Sacramento until it ended that lease after the 2022 season, and Raging Waters San Jose through 2023, according to CBS News; whether those parks’ tickets ran through ragingwaters.com is not addressed. Ownership has moved on, too. Lucky Strike Entertainment told the SEC it completed its purchase of Raging Waters Los Angeles in January 2026, and the plaintiff’s August 28 motion says Festival Fun Parks “no longer operates the Raging Waters park, or any other park, in California”. The payout formula counts processing fees “paid to Defendant”; the papers do not say how orders placed after the handover are treated.

Is the email real? Yes, if it matches the court-approved templates. The first notice came from “Raging Waters Settlement Administrator” under the subject line “LEGAL NOTICE OF CLASS ACTION SETTLEMENT – Velazquez v. Festival Fun Parks, LLC” and carries your name, a Notice ID, a Confirmation Code and this sentence: “You are receiving this notice because Festival Fun Parks’s records indicate that you were charged a processing fee when purchasing admissions tickets on www.ragingwaters.com during the class period.” The motion says that email reached 149,452 class members; where it bounced, Angeion mailed more than 6,000 postcards headed “COURT ORDERED LEGAL NOTICE,” about 5,000 of them delivered, each with a tear-off claim form. Two reminders are built in: one due by September 25, subject “REMINDER: WILL YOU SUBMIT A CLAIM IN THE RAGING WATERS SETTLEMENT?”, and a final one by October 25. The genuine contacts are (888) 558-4218, info@ragingwaterssettlement.com, and class counsel at RagingWatersSettlement@dovel.com. The court-approved claim form asks for your name, address, email, phone, the Notice ID “(if you received a Notice)”, a payment choice and a signature — no Social Security number, no card number, no fee.

There is a single benefit, a cash Settlement Payment, and a single formula. From the $850,000 the court first deducts whatever it approves for attorneys’ fees, costs, the class representative’s award and administration; what remains is the Net Settlement Fund. Each valid claimant’s slice is their “Out-of-Pocket Percentage” — the processing fees they paid, divided by the processing fees paid by all valid claimants together — multiplied by that net fund, which is to be paid out “so that the Net Settlement Fund is exhausted.” The agreement sets no per-person cap and no minimum. Someone whose orders carried $24 in fees receives three times what someone with $8 in fees receives, and both amounts rise or fall with the number of people who file.

You do not have to prove your purchases: “The Out-of-Pocket Percentage shall be determined by the Settlement Administrator using Defendant’s records.” What you do have to do is sign. The notice says each claimant “must attest under penalty of perjury that they were a United States resident who purchased admission tickets from www.ragingwaters.com between June 1, 2020, and June 22, 2026, and paid a processing fee.” The administrator may ask for more information if a claim looks fraudulent. You can file from a new home: “The current address you provide here does not need to be the same address you used for your purchase(s) from www.ragingwaters.com.” The Notice ID from your email or postcard is the most direct link between your claim and your orders; the form lets you file without one, and the agreement says the administrator may validate claims against the company’s records.

The price of staying in is the release. Class members give up “all claims and causes of action that were alleged in the operative complaint, or which arise from the same facts alleged in the operative complaint” against Festival Fun Parks and a list of related companies that includes Palace Entertainment Holdings, Herschend Family Entertainment Corporation and Parques Reunidos. The agreement adds that the release does not reach “any personal injury claims or claims for bodily injury or property damage” — worth knowing at a water park. There is also a promise to disclose processing fees to California buyers in line with state drip-pricing law going forward; Festival Fun Parks no longer runs a California park, and the final-approval motion says the plaintiff does “not ascribe any independent monetary value” to that promise. Payment comes by prepaid Mastercard, PayPal, Venmo, Zelle or paper check. Nobody involved gives tax advice; the notice tells class members to ask their own adviser.

Start with the deductions requested in the final-approval motion filed August 28: $283,333.33 in attorneys’ fees, one-third of the fund; $13,965.86 in costs ($2,980.86 in filing fees, $485 for service, $10,500 for mediation); $67,000 for Angeion, a not-to-exceed price the agreement says was the lowest of three bids; and a $2,500 award for Ms. Velazquez. Together that is $366,799.19, or 43.2 percent of the fund by our count, leaving $483,200.81. The motion puts class counsel’s time at $181,612.50, so the fee request is 1.56 times their lodestar. The court can award less, and anything it trims stays in the class’s pool.

What is that pool divided against? The motion says the $850,000 “represents approximately 57% of the Class’s maximum expected recovery”, and describes that maximum as a full refund of all the processing fees class members paid. Here is our arithmetic: $850,000 divided by 0.57 is about $1.49 million in fees. Spread over the 157,737 class members the administration price was based on, that is about $9.45 per person — a little over two tickets at the $4.00 rate in the complaint, although the papers do not say the fee was $4.00 in every year. If every class member filed, the net fund would return about 32 cents per dollar of fees. They will not all file. The motion reported that “over 5% of Settlement Class Members have already submitted a claim” one month into a four-month claim period, and cited a federal decision observing that “consumer class actions tend to result in claims rates in the low single digits”.

The table assumes that the people who file paid the class-average fee, that the court approves every deduction, and it leaves out the small interest the escrow account earns. Because more than 5 percent had already filed by late August and two reminder emails were still to come, the top row is an upper bound, not a forecast. Where the rate lands is unknowable until November 24. What the formula does guarantee is proportionality: whatever the final rate, a claimant who paid twice the fees receives twice the money. The notice itself names no per-person dollar figure.

As of September 25, 2026, the opt-out window closes first, in three days.

Payment does not come on November 9. The agreement makes the Effective Date the day of final approval if there are no objections; if anyone objects, it is the latest of the end of the appeal period, the end of any appeal, or the withdrawal of the last objection. The administrator must “begin paying timely, valid, and approved Claims no later than thirty (30) days after the Effective Date.” Claims stay open until November 24, 15 days after the hearing, and each share can only be computed once they are in, so with no objections and no postponement of the hearing, our estimate is December 2026 to early 2027. If an objector appeals, the notice warns that resolving appeals “can take time, perhaps more than a year.” Checks expire after 180 days; money from uncashed checks goes to the National Consumer Law Center, and nothing returns to Festival Fun Parks. The agreement schedules class counsel’s fees for payment within seven days after class members are paid.

Not the same case: Festival Fun Parks, under its Palace Entertainment name, settled a separate processing-fee suit over another water park. Rodriguez v. Festival Fun Parks LLC d/b/a Palace Entertainment, No. 2:24-cv-01245 (E.D.N.Y.), covered Splish Splash tickets bought on splishsplash.com from August 29, 2022 through March 5, 2024, with a $1,000,000 fund; Magistrate Judge Arlene R. Lindsay granted preliminary approval on March 18, 2026, and the docket shows a ruling on the fee motion and the case closed on August 7, 2026. A Splish Splash claim does not count here, and a Raging Waters claim does not count there. The refunds Palace Entertainment offered in 2022 to holders of 2023 season passes when it gave up Raging Waters Sacramento are unrelated as well. For questions about this settlement, the administrator is Angeion Group: (888) 558-4218, info@ragingwaterssettlement.com, or Velazquez v. Festival Fun Parks, 1650 Arch Street, Suite 2210, Philadelphia, PA 19103. The notice asks people not to call the court.