InsideScoop

All amusement parks engage in a little demolition work before retrofitting a new ride into the existing footprint of their park. But the operators of Fantasy Fair, a one-acre park inside Toronto’s Woodbine Centre shopping mall, went to an extreme: When the time came to install their new Samba Tower ride, they cut a hole in the roof and dropped it down into place.

It was the only practical solution, says Tammy Stapleton, the park’s manager. “Trying to bring a 32-foot tower into the second floor of the mall, with the corridors and turns—it got complicated,” she says. “This was the only way to bring it in, and it was feasible.”

The owners of the shopping center were a little apprehensive, to say the least. But she reassured them: “I said, ‘Don’t be nervous. This is great. This is a wow.”’

As Stapleton can attest, indoor parks share some things in common with their larger, outdoor counterparts. But they also bring challenges, both in areas that they share in common with outdoor parks, such as staffing, and with issues that outdoor parks never have to deal with, such as competition from the mall’s food court. Perhaps the only clear-cut advantage indoor parks have is that they never have to worry about the weather.

Identity Crisis
When it comes to indoor parks, it seems nothing is easy—not even deciding what constitutes an indoor park. To the West Edmonton Mall, which houses Galaxyland and its Mindbender looping roller coaster, indoor parks are defined by having a thrill ride. To Wild Zone Adventures in Chatham, Ontario, which has a kiddie coaster, the defining factor is whether the park has a roller coaster of any sort. And to Fantasy Fair in Toronto, which offers no coaster but has high ceilings and extensive theming, it’s all about atmosphere.

But while the genre may be ill defined, most indoor parks—with a few exceptions—seem to serve the same purpose: to drive attendance to some larger facility, typically a hotel or a shopping mall.

The reason is simple. “They’re very, very expensive, and I don’t think frankly that they are viable as stand-alones,” says Gordon Phillips of the Economic Planning Group of Canada, the group’s managing partner. “They can’t charge the admission price that outdoor parks do, and they’re expensive to build and expensive to heat and cool.

“We do see them as something that contributes to demand and market share for hotels or shopping malls. They allow packaging and help manage demand a lot more effectively,” he says.

This is certainly the case with Wild Zone Adventures, an indoor park inside the Wheels Inn in Chatham, Ontario. The park’s marketing efforts focus almost exclusively on families within a five-hour driving radius of the park. “During this time of year (winter) it’s a great weekend get-away,” says Neil Johnson, the general manager of Wheels Inn. “Once you arrive, you never have to step foot outside the hotel. In a traditional hotel they would be in the swimming pool. Here, there’s a ton of things to do.”

Marketing Adventures
Wild Zone Adventures is 55,000 square feet and features 12 rides and attractions, a redemption game room, miniature golf, laser tag, water slides, and a large soft-play system. In addition to the park, the hotel has two pools, a health spa, a weight room, racquetball courts, and a 24-lane bowling center.

When Wild Zone Adventures first opened, local residents frequented it much more than they do now, which is why the hotel focuses on the drive-in market, says Dean Bradley, the owner of the hotel and amusement park.

The problem, Bradley says, is that the local residents have all been to the park and there is nothing new to attract them. Of course, this problem is not unique to indoor parks, Phillips says. “They lose their novelty value, but this is generic, whether it’s an indoor or an outdoor park. They lose their home market over time because [they’ve] ‘been there, done that.’”

To combat this, outdoor parks routinely add new rides. But this is not as easily accomplished with an indoor park. Unlike outdoor parks, which often have vacant land, indoor parks are usually dealing with a fixed amount of space. And the space they have is usually packed in pretty tight, making a retrofit more complex, says Gary Hanson, the general manager for the West Edmonton Mall and its Galaxyland indoor amusement park.

“You have to be innovative with an indoor park,” he says. “Outdoors, you clear the field and build.” At Galaxyland, he says, “We go up or we go down. It’s very difficult to go out. For example, we’re looking at putting in a dark ride in the place of an old Intamin drop ride. That ride had a track that went out to slow the car down after it dropped. That whole area is freed up for the dark ride, but it isn’t enough. In order to have a fairly lengthy dark ride, we’ll have to have some sort of conveyor to get the cars up and work their way down.”

And yet, compared to most indoor parks, Galaxyland is enormous: It covers seven acres and has 25 rides and attractions, allowing it to claim the status as the world’s largest indoor park. But then it’s also in the West Edmonton Mall, a 5.3 million-square-foot-complex in Edmonton, Alberta, that is the older (and bigger) brother of Minnesota’s Mall of America and its Camp Snoopy indoor amusement park, which total at 4.7 million square feet.

Labor Woes
As difficult as retrofits can be, Hanson says, “What kills you with a 365-day park versus a seasonal park is labor. On a Monday in January, there is nobody going into the park, but you still have to staff it.”

To minimize staffing needs, Wild Zone Adventures is only open in the afternoons and evenings on school days, says Michelle Turato, the park’s team leader. This allows her to staff the park with high school and college students, much like any outdoor park. Fantasy Fair uses a core of full-time staff to keep the attraction open during school hours and supplements them with school kids for evening and weekends.

Slow weekdays during the school year are endemic to all indoor parks, but Fantasy Fair tries to make up for it by working group sales to preschools and daycare centers. It also “sells out” the park to corporate groups as much as it can. This is especially popular before Christmas, Stapleton says. “Our bookings for corporate Christmas parties are huge. This year our first party started November 2, and we have booked every open spot, morning and evening.”

But weekday doldrums aren’t the only challenge that most indoor parks face in trying to turn a profit. They also are denied two revenue streams that are important to outdoor parks: parking and food. At Galaxyland, the mall’s food court is next door, so the park is not in a position to charge “park pricing” for food, Hanson says. Likewise, Fantasy Fair does not sell food and drinks. “We don’t want to be in conflict with other tenants,” Stapleton says.

Keeping track of attendance is yet another challenge that many indoor parks face. Typically, indoor parks that are part of a mall or a hotel allow guests to walk through the park for free. Guests can either buy tickets for a single ride or get an all-day pass. These sales allow park operators to estimate their attendance, but firm numbers are hard to come by.

The IX Amusement Park in Cleveland gets around all these limitations by opening only during the month of April, says Eric German, the show director. “The weather is not so great between November through April,” German says. “By springtime people have cabin fever and want to get out, but the weather is still 55 degrees and rainy. What a great time to launch an indoor amusement park.”

And the IX Center, with 900,000 square feet and ceilings as high as 75 feet, is well equipped to handle the park, which will celebrate its fourteenth season this year. “Any ride you see on a midway, we can accommodate,” German says. “We put in a coaster and a log flume, 58 rides in all. The idea is to create all the sights and sounds and smells of an outdoor park when the weather is inclement.”

German has found that families will come to the IX Amusement Park because it is affordable family fun. In addition to the rides, there are a petting zoo, an animal-entertainment stage, a general entertainment stage, an “extreme canines” show, and several roaming entertainment acts. All this is offered for the $16 admission fee; kids shorter than four feet tall pay $14.

For teens, however, German faces the same challenge as other parks in needing to offer something new. “In prior years we brought in TV stars or movie stars or teen bands, but about five years ago they started getting terribly expensive. So now we’re trying to attract them other ways. This year we’re launching a huge teen dance club on weekends.

“We also put in extreme sports—a climbing wall, a bungee bounce, a trampoline, a jousting game. Normally those are separate tickets (at an outdoor park). Here they are all free.”

But, he says, they own and operate their own food and control the parking, so every penny that is spent here is revenue for the park.

The IX Amusement Park markets out to a 100-mile radius around Cleveland. This covers two major outdoor parks that serve the Cleveland area: Six Flags Worlds of Adventure and Cedar Point. However, the consensus is that indoor parks do not compete with their larger outdoor counterparts.

Michelle West, the director of research for Leisure and Recreation Concepts Inc., says, “It’s a separate niche, really, because the mentality of the guests is not that they are going to a theme park. Most people consider it like an FEC and would most likely go on a day when they can’t do something outside.”

German agrees. “It’s a different product. People have kids and teenagers and they have to do things each weekend, so instead of a movie or roller skating, we’re another option.”

Janice Witherow, the public relations manager for Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, says her park is glad to see the IX Amusement Park open every year. “It comes at a great time, before Cedar Point is open but as we are starting to advertise our opening, so it gets people thinking about amusement parks.” In fact, Cedar Point took a booth at the IX Amusement Park last year to sell season passes, she says.

Bob Williams, the director of marketing for Calaway Park in Calgary, agrees that indoor parks can be a positive influence—not just for outdoor parks in the same market, but for all parks in general, indoor or outdoor.

“Indoor parks are limited in size—but they have rides and they stimulate the thought process of amusement parks. They stimulate the crowd that wants to be in a park. So we see it as a positive thing. It stimulates people to try our experience. Let’s face it, they are all going to try the other person’s product. The key is to keep them moving in the product category.”