Visiting the controversial adults-only swim-up bar at Carowinds’ water park
A swim-up bar at Carowinds’ water park is the first adults-only area of the park and serves drinks to swimmers. Here’s how our visit went.
Carolina Shore Club, Carowinds’ new swim-up bar
Carolina Shore Club is new for 2025 at Carolina Harbor, the water park attached to Carowinds in Charlotte, N.C.
Guests must be at least 21 years old to enter Carolina Shore Club, which consists of a pool, lounge chairs, a swim-up bar named Paul Metto’s (a play on words with palmettos, the state tree of South Carolina), and cabanas for rental.
When Carowinds first announced this new swim-up bar, over 2,000 comments flooded local Charlotte news station WBTV’s Facebook post, with another 2,700 on a Facebook Reel and 400 on Axios Charlotte’s Instagram post. All of these accounts don’t typically foster this level of engagement. Clearly the topic struck a nerve in the local community.
Remarks ranged from excited parkgoers tagging their friends to plan future visits, to skeptics anticipating expensive drinks, to all-out vitriolic comments condemning the swim-up bar and hypothesizing rambunctious behavior throughout Carowinds of intoxicated guests.
My friends and I decided to see what all the fuss was about ourselves. As newly minted season passholders — we’d hopped on the bandwagon with Six Flags parks’ 2026 season pass sale, granting entry to 56 parks for the price of one, and with free entry for the remainder of 2025 — we visited Carowinds’ swim-up bar on a recent Sunday.
The atmosphere
All guests must show their I.D. when they first arrive at Carolina Shore Club. An employee places a bracelet on your right wrist, just like at any other club. After this first entry, you can come and go from the gated Carolina Shore Club area to the rest of the water park as much as you like.
The area has 58 lounge chairs, some of which are under umbrellas. Three lifeguards monitor the area, and there are two bartenders at the bar.
As for the pool, it’s shallow and a long bench and high-top tables built into the pool itself. There’s music playing, and the bar has two TVs on sports channels.
Carowinds’ website advertises a grassy area with giant Jenga, but I didn’t see that during my visit. I did see one adult escort a young child through the area at one point, but this was an isolated instance.
During our Sunday visit, the Shore Club never felt crowded and there were always lounge chairs available. However, the day did begin cloudy with drizzling rain before the sun showed up, so maybe some would-be parkgoers were deterred from visiting that day.
I enjoyed the relaxed pool atmosphere. More than anything, I realized it was nice to have a regular pool in a water park that wasn’t a wave pool. It was pleasant to hang out with my friends in the water without the chaos of a wave machine every few minutes.
The drinks
Any guests concerned about inebriated patrons at Carowinds’ swim-up bar can cast their worries aside. Truth be told, this is the most difficult bar to get a drink in the entire park. (That’s the other thing; this isn’t the first bar in the park, so the outrage upon its announcement is a bit misguided to begin with.) Not only do you need to show your I.D. to enter the Carolina Shore Club area, but you have to show it to the bartender every time you order a drink at the swim-up bar, Paul Metto’s.
The drink-ordering process itself is a bit cumbersome. If you order from the pool, you need your credit card and your I.D. with you, which are awkward to have in the water. You can alternatively walk up to the counter prior to entering the pool and order your drinks that way, but there’s no menu there. You also can’t keep a tab going; each drink is its own transaction.
The collective consensus among my four friends and I visiting was that the drinks were expensive (even the mocktails were $11) and nothing to write home about. For what it’s worth, the drinks seemed to have very little alcohol in them.
The bigger picture of Carowinds’ swim-up bar
Even with somewhat clunky operations, we enjoyed our time at Carowinds’ swim-up bar and would visit again. The inclusion of a space like this in a water park speaks to a broader trend happening in theme parks nationwide.
Theme parks’ concentration on food & beverage locations and events has risen in recent years to become nearly just as ubiquitous with the theme park experience as roller coasters.
Photo by Blake Taylor
Carowinds knows this — and it has for some time now, evidenced by our 2023 interview with the park’s executive chef at the time, who showed off the park’s new cotton candy turkey leg with pride. In May 2025, Six Flags, Carowinds’ parent company, committed to renovating 50 food locations across its parks in the coming years.
Notably, Carowinds’ new swim-up bar replaced two water slides. In this case, a monetizable beverage venue was valued more than additional thrills, and that seems to be the same elsewhere.
Earlier this summer, the first adults-only space in a Disney theme park opened with GEO-82, a lounge inside Spaceship Earth at Epcot. Later this month, a lounge themed to Pirates of the Caribbean will open at Magic Kingdom; it’s not adults-only, but it’s basically a bar.
Photo by Matt Roseboom
Carowinds’ Charlotte home is the global headquarters of Six Flags. The company made news recently with news of its CEO resigning and a new business model for its Halloween events this year.
Stay tuned to Attractions Magazine for daily coverage of theme park news, trip reports from parks around the world, and exclusive interviews.
More Attractions Magazine stories:
Follow us:
No matter where you want to go, our trusted partner MEI-Travel will handle the planning so you can focus on the memories. They offer free vacation-planning services and have nearly 20 years of experience creating memorable vacations. Visit MEI-Travel for a fee-free, no-obligation quote today.
Carowinds’ Waterpark is gross in general (like all other waterparks in America). I just hope this doesn’t lead to even more of an epidemic of people not watching their kids, which we know has been a problem in the past.