At first glance, Calaway Park’s location outside Calgary, Alberta—Canada’s fastest-growing city—would seem ideal. The city and the park both sit in the foothills of the stunning Canadian Rocky Mountains, gateway to the Canadian West, and both are within a 90-minute drive of Banff National Park and beautiful Lake Louise.

The aura of the not-so-long-ago Canadian Wild West is still vibrant in the region, with the historical coal-mining village of Canmore open to the public and the Calgary Stampede, a world-famous extravaganza that draws a million visitors each summer, also nearby. For those with sporting interests, Calgary is the hot-air-ballooning capital of Canada, and it is home to an NHL hockey team, a CFL football team, and a AAA baseball team. But while all this activity certainly entices visitors to the area, it also presents challenges for an attraction like Calaway Park. Factor into the equation that as the park was competing for business it was also struggling to carve a niche in a country without an amusement park tradition, and Calaway’s success story becomes even more remarkable.

Calaway Park opened in 1982 in the unique position of being the only theme park in Western Canada. Taking its cue from American parks, Calaway licensed cartoon characters from Hanna-Barbera and installed Flinstones-style architecture. The park featured 14 attractions, including the Corkscrew looping roller coaster, a petting zoo, and a Cinema 180. “People here didn’t know anything about theme parks except Disneyland and Disney World, so we were of the mind-set that if we were going to be successful, we needed to imitate what the big parks did,” says Calaway General Manager Bev Berenson. “But that’s not what we were, or ever will be.” What Berenson and the Calaway team learned was that the Canadian market simply couldn’t be handled as if it were a typical midsized American market. “There’s a different kind of thinking here,” she says. “For example, people didn’t like the pay-one-price format, whereas in America that really wasn’t an issue.”

After a difficult first year, Calgary lawyer and entrepreneur Gordon Dixon bought Calaway Park, and management decided to rethink how best to attract a core market of families with children aged three to 12. They decided to position Calaway as an amusement park rather than a theme park, and the Hanna-Barbera characters were dropped. The money used to pay for theme royalties was reinvested into the new plan for the park.

Along with competing attractions and the cultural expectations, Calaway Park also had come to terms with the limitations of the Canadian climate. “We only have 104 days, which is not a long season. We need everybody thinking about how best to capture revenue in those 104 days,” says Bob Williams, director of marketing.

The climate also presents practical and sometimes unexpected challenges. For example, the park first hired a landscaper from Ontario, where the prevailing humidity is very different from the dry air of Alberta’s high prairies. “We lost a third of our original landscaping,” Berenson remembers.

But although the park can’t escape its environment, it does embrace the elements of its surroundings that make it unique. Calaway’s entertainment program offers original stage shows that often reflect the culture and heritage of the region. The park hires a troupe of 18 to 20 performers for the season, known as Calaway Live, and Chris Thompson, the park’s entertainment director, writes and produces every show. “We run the shows seven days a week,” says Thompson. “Every part is double cast; at least two or three people know any given part. So while the entertainment isn’t revenue producing, it is a real added value for the guests.”

Management had expected that Calaway Park’s first decade would be all about survival, and as that hurdle was successfully cleared, they decided to refocus their efforts for the future. “We’d spent a great deal of energy educating the Canadian public and overcoming our status as an oddity. The next 10 years needed clear strategic planning. We did that, and we really stabilized our place in the market,” says Berenson. The resulting mission statement—“Your Smile is Our Mission”– and motto—“Just For Fun”—became their operating principles, and they expanded a coupon program that became the foundation of their marketing approach. Williams, who soon became known as “The Coupon King” by the marketing staffs for other Calgary attractions, took the strategy and ran with it. “We flood the market with more than 3 million coupons a year,” he says. “We send direct mail discounts to over 800,000 households, we distribute more coupons through a partnership we have with 300 gas stations in Alberta and Saskatchewan, and each of our 65,000 season-pass holders receives six coupons for friends to get in at one-third the regular price.”

The program has been a resounding success. Williams says 70,000 of the mailed coupons are redeemed at the park, and the season-pass holders end up acting as sales representatives for the park. “If they can stimulate other people to come and bring friends and family, then we have a chance to capture them as season-pass holders or return guests,” he explains.

Calaway is equally aggressive in offering half-price season passes through both direct promotions and a partnership with a local chain of grocery stores. In all, Williams estimates, about 85 percent of all admissions are discounted. “But that’s okay,” he says. “Our focus has been to grow revenue on park, and you can only do this by increasing visitation.”

Each coupon carries a unit code that allows Williams to studiously track admission information. “It’s like stocks. I can see what is working for us and what isn’t. And when it’s not working, we go back and figure out why not.”

The strategy is getting results. Throughout the past decade, in-park revenue has doubled and attendance has grown from 210,000 in 1991 to almost 500,000 in 2003.


Also integral to Calaway’s strategy is making the workplace environment an empowering experience for employees. “This business can only run effectively if each member of the team is able to be the best they can possibly be,” says Berenson. “We can disagree and move forward on things. We’ve minimized the politics within the organization and that has helped a lot. We can disagree and people feel safe and know it won’t come back to haunt them.”

One effective strategy they’ve developed has been to let all the managers and supervisors run their operation as separate businesses. “We want them to think outside the box,” Williams explains. “We want them to think like entrepreneurs.”

As a result, Calaway has kept its core team intact for years. Berenson has been at the park since it opened. Williams has worked there 13 years. Thompson, who began as a teenaged entertainer, has 11 years on the job. And Dawn Rappel, the human resources and food service manager, has worked at Calaway for 16 years.

The Calaway team is also committed to staying current with industry trends. “We go down to IAAPA every year and learn what we can,” says Berenson. “We always walk away with at least a dozen new ideas. And that’s helped us stay ahead of the pack.” Berenson encourages active participation in the association. She is a member of the IAAPA Board of Directors and serves on the Education Committee and the Strategic Planning Committee. Williams recently chaired IAAPA’s Marketing Committee and now serves on the Small Amusement Parks & Attractions Committee, and Thompson is on the Entertainment Committee. “There’s no one outside Toronto or Montreal who does what I do, and I can feel pretty isolated,” Thompson says. “Working with IAAPA is educational for me and gives me a chance to connect with the industry.”

Today Calaway Park boasts 27 rides, about double its original offering, 25 food locations, three live shows, 24 games, and an on-site campground and RV park. It uses 95 of the 160 acres it owns, and an expansion is in the works. “We have a plan to increase our attendance significantly, and the only way to do that is through expansion,” says Berenson. “We have one large section we want to add in the next six years, and we want to add another significant ride in the next 10.”

Calaway Park has survived one decade and prospered in the next. Its third decade looks like a sure thing.

Calgary Stampede

Images of the Wild West, with its cowboys, rodeos, and wide-open spaces, are accepted around the world as uniquely American, but in fact that way of life didn’t stop at the Canadian border. The western tradition thrived in the Great White North, and it continues to be celebrated annually in Alberta, Canada, at the Calgary Stampede, which bills itself as “The Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth.” The extravaganza is so vast and varied that it dominates the region during its 10-day run each July.

The city of Calgary turns back the clock to the mid-1800s, with residents wearing cowboy hats and boots to work in place of business attire, and local saloons and western stores offering specials and special events for the visiting public. The Stampede begins with a two-hour parade that is broadcast to more than 2 million viewers, then the bull-riding, barrel-racing, and chuckwagon derbies begin in earnest. Livestock barns are open to the public, and free musical events abound throughout the fairgrounds. Two-step dancing lessons are a must for visitors, and, adding an unusual spin to typical notions of life in the old West, pancake breakfasts—standard fare for the pioneers—are offered at tables throughout the streets of Calgary. Five tons of batter (and 5000 bottles of syrup) are consumed in those 10 days.

The variety of entertainment on offer runs the gamut. A huge midway with games and contests engages young visitors, and the Stampede Casino offers old west entertainment for the adults. Hundreds of musical acts perform on main stages and throughout the grounds, there is an annual Stampede Queen and Princess pageant in which locals compete, and showing on the Grandstand is a multimedia spectacular. In 2003, the show was called “Navigator of the Prairies” and included hundreds of singers, dancers, acrobats, and musicians in a billing that claims to “turn the universe upside down.”

The first official Stampede began somewhat more modestly in 1912, calling itself simply a “Wild West Extravaganza.” Founder Guy Weadick was ambitious, however; in the 1920s the Stampede had merged with several traditional area exhibitions. Expansion continued unabated. Additional fairground land was purchased in the 1960s, an $8.2 permanent infield with deluxe corporate boxes was completed in the 1990s, and in 2000 the Stampede set its all-time attendance record, with more than 1.2 million visitors.