When the Internet began gaining momentum in the mid-1990s, it was still unclear exactly how beneficial web sites would become to businesses and, ultimately, how essential. Today’s web sites are often the central nervous system of businesses and corporations as they allow potential customers, manufacturers, business partners, and suppliers access to the facility and make it easier to plan a visit. For amusement parks, zoos, museums, aquariums, and other attractions, a web site with the right structure and features can be an extension of the marketing department, the personnel department, the ticket office, and the group sales department. The site can be a reservations center for parks with on-site accommodations and an outlet for park merchandise. It can include a media center with news releases and park photos or an online kid’s club with games and trivia. Software improvements are making it possible to add even more features to web sites to help guests plan their trips and help the park bring in revenue. Determining whether or not all the web site possibilities are beneficial to the venue can be the difficult question. It’s not necessarily always the right move to go for the works, says Marg Lipton, vice president of marketing and sales for the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk in Santa Cruz, Calif. “Web sites are like any other art. It’s either effective or it’s not. It doesn’t matter how beautiful the graphics are or how cutting edge or how wonderful your shopping cart works. If it doesn’t sell, it doesn’t work.” The site should be relatively simple, easy to navigate, and load quickly. Inside Information Legoland California (www.lego.com/eng/ legoland/california) gives customers what they want by equipping the park’s web site with everything needed “to convert lookers into buyers,” says Courtney Simmons, a spokesperson for the park. “Our number one goal is to make it as easy as possible to find information and become a Legoland guest. When you have those two objectives, it’s very easy to decide what content to put on the web site.” In Legoland California’s case, this includes extensive information about local accommodations. Not only can you book a room at any of 192 hotels, you can search for a hotel by location or by availability. For each property, you can also pull up detailed information and view photos of typical rooms. There’s even a “hot deals” link to take you to a list of properties offering special promotions. The park portion of the Legoland California web site includes multiple videos of attractions and virtual tours via still photos taken inside the park that the viewer can scroll 360 degrees. Similarly, Efteling, an amusement park in the Netherlands, (www.efteling.nl) offers scrolling photos of suites at the park’s hotel, to give users a chance to see what is available. Paramount Canada’s Wonderland (www.canadas-wonderland.com), like all Paramount Parks, offers a visit planner that helps new guests plan their day, says Jane Taylor, the marketing supervisor for Paramount Parks, Inc. “If you are a mom with two kids, you can read the outline of an ideal day at the park for you—what rides are appropriate.” This does not mean that every park has to have a visit planner or links to every hotel in the 100-mile radius. Web sites best serve a park when they are tailored to that park’s needs—its market, demographics, and its guests’ expectations. At Liseberg in Göthenburg, Sweden, many guests come to dine at the park’s restaurants, says Robert Olsson, the project director for the park’s web site (www.liseberg.se). So the web site is set up to allow guests to not only reserve a table at their favorite park restaurant, but to place their orders in advance. “You can select from a standard menu and when you are finished, you send in a document via fax,” Olsson says. “But in a couple of months you will be able to just press a button and it will be downloaded directly into our database.” And Jolly Roger Park in Ocean City, Md. (www.jollyrogerpark.com), offers Internet discount coupons that visitors can print at home and bring to the park, says Steve Pastusak, the park’s assistant general manager. “We’re in a resort area and when people get down here they are going through different books and seeing coupons for this and that,” Pastusak says. “We give them the opportunity to get their coupons in advance and bring them when they come, which we think gives us a better chance of getting them here when they get to the area.” Online ticket sales are another way to win guests in advance. Depending on the pricing, ticket sales can be difficult over the Internet, especially at a non-gated, pay-to-ride park such as the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. When the park rebuilt its web site (www.beachboardwalk.com) two years ago, it added online ticket sales. “We bit the bullet and spent much more than we thought we would spend,” Lipton says. “But we understood that we were building something and the payback would be over the next few years. . . . We had full payback in four to six weeks. We launched it preseason and we had payback on it before Memorial Day. It was a welcome surprise that the business was out there.” Paramount Parks added online ticket sales in April 2000. “Sales have more than doubled every year since they went online,” Taylor says. “We were really surprised by that, and we’re anxious to see how 2003 weighs in on that curve.” Online sales not only snare guests in the comfort of their home, but they make for a better guest experience, Taylor says. “It cuts down on lines, and the guests get in the park quicker.” As a further incentive, all Paramount Parks price their online tickets to be one of the best buys the public can get for the park. Like any other service, parks can hire companies to give their web site the features they want and save themselves the trouble of trying to do it themselves. The accommodations page at Legoland California may look like the other pages on the web site, but it’s really operated by an outside vendor that has partnered with the park. Likewise, guests visiting the web site for SeaWorld San Antonio (www.adventureisland.com/seaworld/tx) can book a complete vacation package, accommodations, and park admission for one price, but when they do so, they are really using a service provided by Travelements, a company based in Hampton, Va. Travelements designed the service specifically for attractions that do not own hotels but want to offer ticket and hotel packages on their web sites. And when Knoebels Amusement Park (www.knoebels.com) redesigned its web site, it added a Kids Club that includes games and a daily jigsaw puzzle. Both are provided by other web sites for free, says Joe Muscato, the park’s advertising and public relations director. “It is really a link to their sites,” Muscato says. “They are hosted elsewhere and they are happy if some people make a jump from your site to their site.” Easy Does It One of the strengths of the Internet, of course, is the sheer volume of information that a park can put online. As a practical matter, it is almost impossible to put too much information on a web site, as long as it is properly organized. Conversely, if it is not well-organized, if it’s too hard for guests to find the information they are looking for, they won’t stay. The Beach Boardwalk made ease of navigation a priority when it hired a web designer to rebuild its web site. But even then it did not take the designer’s word for it, Lipton says. “We spent a lot of time testing it with people who were not amusement park people, to make sure that it was intuitive.” Paramout Parks’ web sites, which share a common look and architecture, have a multitude of rollovers and drop-down menus to make it easy to get where you want to go. “The first page is more or less an overview,” Taylor says. “Then, if you are really interested in something you can drill down and find that information.” To aid navigation, good web sites put multiple navigation bars on their page. Knoebels Park has identical navigation bars across the top of the page and on the left side, “so whatever someone is used to, that’s where they are,” says Muscato. “Either way they can click to where they want to go.” And Jolly Roger Park puts a duplicate set of links at the bottom of each page. “You would not want somebody to get to the bottom of the page and not see anything there and just leave,” Pastusak says. When the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk put up its first web site in the early 1990s, it was a novelty. “We did it as a vehicle to get traditional media coverage of our park,” Lipton says. “Area and regional media would do stories that said, ‘Gee, this company is on this thing called the World Wide Web, whatever that is.’” Now, she says, they have become a service that guests expect. From a guest perspective, she says, “With the information on the Web, I don’t need to talk to anyone on the phone. The information is there. When I call up I may talk to a clerk who might or might not have the right information. But if it’s in print, I trust it.” And online, all parks, big and small, meet the consumer on a level playing field. “Big parks will still have all the sophistication and the big budgets. But hopefully, when you build your web site you are not trying to be something you are not. You are trying to be what you are, which is different than your competitors. A small waterpark can build just as effective a site as a large park.” Ten Tips for a Web Site That Works 1. Know your limitations. Knoebels created its first generation of web sites in-house. But as web sites matured and became more sophisticated, it brought in outside help to build its new web site. 2. Hire a web designer who knows marketing. “You want a web designer who is a marketing person, not a technician,” says Marg Lipton, the vice president of marketing and sales for the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. “The purpose of the web site is to sell and if someone doesn’t understand selling, the rest doesn’t matter.” 3.Find the right host for your site. Is the data center secure? Is it monitored 24/7? Does it have backup generators and back-up tapes? How is it protected from hackers and computer viruses? 4.Write for the Web. “It’s a different style of communication,” Lipton says. There are plenty of tutorials—some on the Web—that can help. 5.Keep page lengths under control. A good rule of thumb: No page should be more than twice the depth of one screen. If a guest has to scroll down and down and down to find information about a specific ride that’s at the bottom of your rides page, it’s time to reorganize. 6.Remember that the Web is a visual medium. “Spend money on good photography,” says Jane Taylor, the marketing manager for Paramount Parks. “That’s the first impression.” 7.Make it easy to get around. A simple design that is easy to navigate is better than a flashy design that is overly clever with its links. 8.Test your web site on all the different browsers that your guest may use— including Internet Explorer, Netscape, AOL, and Web TV. 9.Make sure your site loads quickly. Many guests still use dial-up modems, so keep to a minimum the complicated graphics and animations that take a long time to load. “When you test,” says Lipton, “you better not be using a T-3 or a DSL line. Test it on a 28.8 kps modem. See what it looks like.” 10.Know how guests are using your site. Your web site host can give you reports that help you understand what pages guests are going to and how long they are staying. “Look for error reports and problems with graphics and things loading,” Lipton says. “Do people go to the site and then leave right away? It’s the same as if you looked in a park and one area was always empty, or if everyone who went to one store in the park left right after visiting that store. You would want to find out why.”
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