Funworld June 2011

When Ocean Park installed the “Abyss Turbo Drop” free-fall tower in 2001, park officials went out on opening day to gauge guest reaction. Chief Executive Tom Mehrmann says people got off the ride “beaming” with joy over how fun the ride was. When one rider was asked if she’d go again, however, she said: “No, I’ve done it already.”

“That’s a typical thing for Hong Kong people,” Mehrmann says. “You’ve seen it, you’ve done it, great. … What’s new? What’s next? So we have to make sure the park is able to cater to that desire to see new and fresh things.”

This year’s opening of Aqua City is the latest phase of a six-year expansion and redevelopment at Ocean Park that definitely leaves the local population with more than enough to do for a while. In this wide-ranging interview, Mehrmann discusses the goals for the redevelopment and how those coalesce with the growth of the Asian attractions market.

How has the Asia-Pacific market changed over the past decade?
Back in 2004, there were about 15 world-class attractions in the region, including us. Just six years later, there’s more than 35 that would qualify. OCT has made massive investments. Five different world-class aquariums opened. Hong Kong Disneyland, Universal Studios Singapore … the list goes on. It’s been everything south and west of Japan.

When you began investigating this redevelopment plan, had you foreseen this market growth? Did that play a role in your decision-making process?
Certainly Disney was the most compelling of the influences, because we knew what they were bringing: a world-class standard of entertainment and service we weren’t able to match at that time. We weren’t going to compete with them head to head; they’re a massive entertainment company with an incredible distribution arm and marketing reach. We recognized they were going to add value to the market and create critical mass, and we’d benefit from that.

We focused on our differential values: our animals, our location, and our “generational value.” We have people in Hong Kong who came as kids who are bringing their kids, and there’s something so powerful about that. Disney has that in [other places], but they didn’t have it yet in Hong Kong. We focused on the collective community memory and being “the local park.” That became the focal point in our development.

So now that you’ve had more than five years to examine the impact of Hong Kong Disneyland, what have you learned?
The goal was to be No. 2; we just assumed Disney would take the No. 1 position—they do it in every market. The biggest surprise was how we came out so strong. Our plan was to give them their day in the sun, but we’d come back immediately with our differential programming.

I was there on Disneyland’s opening day, Sept. 12, 2005. We’d already been seeing deferred business in preparation for the Disney opening, and we were prepared for that. But that was our best Sept. 12 weekday in our history. It was rather phenomenal. Two good products in a market create critical mass and give you more reason to make that a destination. That was the moral of the story.

Have you seen your reach grow as your new projects have come online?
We were a local park in the early days. Today Hong Kong is about 7 million people, so it’s not going to be the dynamic growth point for us; it’s going to be the outer markets. Mainland China is the No. 1 source of guests for us—even more so than local, now. The No. 2 market for foreign attendance is Korea; No. 3 is the Philippines; and No. 4 is India. India is 1.1 billion people, so if we could just penetrate a fragment of that market, that will be a big chunk of visitation.

How did you decide what attractions made the cut for the various stages of redevelopment?
We wanted 65 percent of the experiences to be walkthrough/ animal attractions, not rides. That’s what our guests wanted. Rides were not a driving component because we’re for the whole family, and families will come for the zoological aspects even more so than for the rides. So we knew we needed a complementary mix of both elements.

What drove us was infrastructure, transportation links and the ability to move people, and to make sure we had something unique to Ocean Park. We wanted to ensure two entertainment experiences per guest, per hour during peak operation times. We began to work the metrics back from that to determine what we needed, how we would integrate them all, and how we would space them around the park.

The park has to be culturally relevant to the markets it serves. We want to make sure we never lose the heritage value of our park, so we didn’t pick any of the heritage attractions to remove. There’s always a link to the memories while we’re renovating and improving the park. We wanted a specifically Hong Kong theme park experience: intimate walkways, immersive attractions, and great opportunities to connect with nature.

How important was innovation in these decisions?
Very important. We’re dealing with a sophisticated market and a world-class entrant into that market, with Disney. So whatever we invested in had to be one of a kind or best in class. We don’t have the land to be the “biggest” anything, but we can always be the best. We’ve always said don’t worry about quantity, just worry about quality; we never lost sight of our vision—connecting people with nature—and we want to make sure we’re doing that in the most innovative ways possible.

Our team works very hard to stay on the bleeding edge of technology, to find that thing that’s going to make us different. Last year, for example, we introduced Augmented Reality during our Halloween event. Hong Kong drives us to find those different technologies; the difference is my counterparts can spend $60 million, and I can only spend $6 million, so our soft costs will typically run between 10 to 15 percent of a project.

How are you able to work with these new technologies and techniques on such a relatively small budget?
A lot of research, a lot of time, and a lot of good people. It’s about putting the right team and talents together, and then finding the right challenges. We’re not limited by our budget; we’re made more creative by it.

What does Aqua City bring to Ocean Park?
We had a limited retail and food operation at Ocean Park up to this point. We brought food in-house in 2005, but retail never had great spaces in the park. [With Aqua City] we had an opportunity to create a true retail experience in the park. We introduced more than 15,000 square feet of retail and put in a sit-down restaurant that offers the best food experience of any park in the world. We are sold out for lunch every day, based on advance registrations alone.

The lagoon, meanwhile, becomes an ideal place for gathering, with static water shows throughout the day, capped off in the evening by “Symbio!” It sends the guests out of the park happy and applauding.

The overall goal, though, is to maintain our position as an education- and conservation-minded company that gives back to the community. Aqua City represents all of that in one, and it allows us to extend our operating hours. We have increased our length of stay by an hour and a half and bumped up our per-cap spending by 20 Hong Kong dollars. So Aqua City has allowed us to see all the benefits we’ve planned for and forecast initially—in spades. We’re seeing attendance growth we didn’t anticipate this early and exceeding expectations for the numbers we projected for the end of our redevelopment. What I’m hoping to see is not just higher peaks, but growth that spreads out over the entire year.

When all the master redevelopment is complete next year, what do you hope Ocean Park looks and feels like?
We want to be the world’s best marine-based theme park that connects people to nature. If we can stay culturally relevant and timeless in our appeal, focusing on what sets us apart, then the hardware will always be the complement to the park. No matter what you do with hardware, there’s always going to be someone who builds something new, bigger, different, or more innovative. What defines the park is the people who are there, the service you offer. We’re very proud of the fact that we’re a Hong Kong-based park—built by Hong Kong people for Hong Kong people. We want a park that’s never lost sight of its origins but has become an international player.

For more on activities and programs in Asia Pacific, contact IAAPA Asia Pacific Executive Director Andrew Lee at alee@IAAPA.org.

Contact Senior Editor Jeremy Schoolfield at jschoolfield@IAAPA.org.