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Holiday Season Is Prime Opportunity for Season Pass Sales
Gift cards are a central element of the holiday shopping season, so Funworld asks some of the attractions that have been successful in selling their season passes at Christmas to share their strategies for success.
Hersheypark in Hershey, Pennsylvania, sells a remarkable 50 to 60 percent of its annual passes during the Christmas season, according to Gabe Sutcliffe, the park’s director of guest services. “We start selling passes in August for the next season,” she says. “We have three price tiers, and the least expensive tier is Aug. 1 through Sept. 30. Then the second tier pricing is Oct. 1 through Dec. 31.”
This seems to be a key strategy for attractions that have success in selling season passes during the Christmas shopping season—offer buyers some special incentive for buying the next season’s passes early.
That’s what Fun Depot in Asheville, North Carolina, does, according to owner Dave Day. “We’ll run a special, so you’ll get an unlimited pass for $24.99, or a certain pass for just rides, or a ‘build your own package’ where you get a discount,” he says. “We’ve done it seven years now.”
Splash Kingdom Waterpark in Canton, Texas, sells more than 400 season passes during the Christmas season for around $100 each. Park owner Jeremy Blevens, who also early last year purchased Splash Kingdom Watertown in Shreveport, Louisiana, says he offers a discount on season passes to Christmas shoppers, but not a big one. Instead, his park provides a complimentary souvenir cup to those who purchase passes during the Christmas season.
“The season pass sales are a great deal anyway, so we don’t give a big discount,” he says.
For those Christmas season purchasers who are not buying the pass as a gift, Hersheypark also offers them an incentive: If they buy a pass for the following season, the pass will be valid for the remainder of the current season as well, until the park closes after the Christmas holiday.
Unlike Hersheypark and Fun Depot, however, Splash Kingdom is not open during the Christmas shopping season, so getting the word out to prospective pass buyers is more of a challenge. “We have several thousand Facebook fans and put our Christmas specials on Facebook,” says Blevens. “We also do updates in our monthly newsletter where we let them know. With our current season pass holders, we’ll send them letters or an e-mail reminding them that they can get season passes on sale. There are several ways to let them know without blanket radio ads.”
All three attractions say the majority of Christmas season pass buyers are parents and grandparents. “Grandparents buy over half of them,” notes Blevens.
CORRECTION: Peter Ronchetti is general manager of Legoland California; he was incorrectly identified on p. 11 of the April 2011 issue of Funworld. We regret the error.
Alton Towers Holds Free Day for Facebook Fans
As social media websites like Facebook and Twitter exploded onto the scene the past few years and recorded phenomenal growth, attractions scrambled to capitalize on their growing reach and influence.
When Facebook recently announced it was rolling out the Facebook Deals program across five countries in Europe, including the United Kingdom, Alton Towers in Stafford, England (www.altontowers.com), saw an opportunity for the theme park resort to make a connection with its guests who use social media—and make a promotional splash at the same time.
Facebook Deals allows local businesses to offer bargains to Facebook subscribers. Users simply touch “Places” and then “Check In” on their cell phones, and nearby businesses offering deals appear marked with a yellow icon. By touching a business’ name on their phones, they can view a particular deal and claim it. They then show their phones to the business’ cashier to get the gift or discount. Deals was first introduced last November to U.S. Facebook subscribers and is now being introduced in markets outside the country.
Alton Towers decided to take advantage of Facebook Deals by making an eye-popping offer: free admission to the park on Feb. 18 for visitors who showed up, along with up to three friends, and checked in to the park online. If that wasn’t incentive enough, the park said the first 100 to check in would receive a free night at one of Alton Towers’ resort hotels.
“Facebook is a fantastic brand and Deals is such an innovative service, the Alton Towers Resort wanted to do something unique, and opening up the theme park for free is something we have never done before,” says Liz West, Alton’s public relations manager. “We ran the Deal in mid-February [because] it was close to the launch of Facebook Deals in the U.K., and it coincided with the theme park opening up for the February Half-Term Holiday.”
Though any park that offers free entry to guests is initially taking a hit to its bottom line, Alton Towers was intent on creating positive buzz among the rapidly expanding Facebook community, and West says the park got what it wanted: “The day was a great success, and we were delighted with the number of people that turned up. We don’t reveal our visitor numbers, but the response to the offer was fantastic, and we had approximately 1 percent of our Facebook fans turn up on the day.”
Photos of the crowds at the front gate show an audience seemingly dominated by youthful guests, but West says the park isn’t concerned about being able to reach older guest demographics through social media. “The fans of the Alton Towers Resort Facebook page really do vary in age,” she says, “and we’re able to reach a variety of people through this channel.”
With regard to glitches, West says there were none on Alton Towers’ end, and the park heard of no problems from Facebook, either. She adds that guest feedback about the event was “phenomenal.”
As for whether the park was surprised by anything that happened the day of the offer, West responds, “That people were queuing up for entry at 6 a.m.!”
Glacier Run Makes Guests Part of the Story
A few decades ago zoos began moving toward natural and open habitats that were more pleasant for both the animals and their human visitors. Recently some zoos have taken the next step by creating elaborately themed habitats designed not only to stimulate the animals, but to provide rich and engaging story lines for guests and give them unique, up-close encounters with the animals they’ve come to see.
A premier example is Glacier Run, a new $26.3 million animal habitat that opened in April at the Louisville Zoo in Kentucky (www.louisvillezoo.org). Glacier Run is patterned on the story line of a mining town surrounded by glaciers and meltwater. As the mining business slowed, the town turned to eco-tourism, so zoo visitors play the role of travelers who have come to visit the town to see its polar bears, seals, and sea lions. The town itself is modeled after Churchill, Manitoba, Canada, which is nicknamed the Polar Bear Capital of the World.
One of the most fascinating features of Glacier Run is “Polar Bear Crossing,” which allows polar bears to move across the exhibit via an overhead transfer chute. “We’ve created the story line that as mining slowed down in the town, the polar bears figured out that they could use the mine’s conveyor to cross over into town to search for food,” says Louisville Zoo Director John Walczak, “and the crossing is just a great architectural theater to get that point across.”
There’s also a loading dock at the town’s general store where a truck has pulled up. Guests can sit in the vehicle’s cab and watch polar bears rummage around the bed of the truck, separated only by a glass barrier. The exhibit also features a 22-foot-tall window through which visitors can watch the bears both above and below the waterline of an 80,000-gallon saltwater pool.
The seal and sea lion habitat, meanwhile, has a 108,000-gallon main pool with both above ground and underwater viewing areas for guests. Daily training and enrichment presentations are carried out in a 200-seat amphitheater.
The zoo wants the four-acre Glacier Run to be a learning center, so it created “The Old School House,” where students can engage in hands-on learning. “We’re real excited about this,” says Walczak. “The schoolhouse has a window 16 feet long by 8 feet high that kids can look out to a prime spot where bears might be.”
To make Glacier Run even more inviting, the zoo built the Calistoga Splash Park for hot summer days, featuring 42 different ways to get sprayed with water, including a 20-foot-long fishing boat with two kid slides off the back and a 50-foot geyser that erupts periodically from the mast.
“We wanted a splash park right in the middle of the zoo for people to get refreshed and kids to have fun,” says Walczak. “We always try to have a story line to everything we do. Glacier Run is a town on the tundra in the glaciers, with the meltwater creating the splash park.”
Walczak says the principal architect of Glacier Run was PGAV, with the elaborate rock work and artwork painting by Cemrock. The Webber Group did much of the indoor ornamental theming.
As for the zoo presenting animals to guests in such a richly themed environment with a fictional story line, Wolczak says, “We often paraphrase Jeff Swanagan, the late director of the Columbus Zoo, who said, ‘In zoos, what we do is touch the heart to teach the mind.’”
EnterTRAINment Junction on Track for Even More Fun
 Despite its name, EnterTRAINment Junction in Cincinnati, Ohio, is about more than just trains. The family entertainment center (FEC) has always offered a variety of entertainment, from model trains to mazes to a railroad museum, and now the center has added a 7,000-square-foot “wild, weird, and wacky” funhouse that opened March 5.
The Junction is still a model train wonderland, housing the largest indoor model train display in the world with 90 locomotives, 1,200 train cars, two miles of track, and a 1,000-foot outdoor children’s train ride. But now its AMaze- N Funhouse adds a new element of entertainment for families.
The funhouse features a circus midway experience containing four sideshow tents that house the region’s only mirror maze, an unnerving spinning vortex tunnel, and the Clown College, which includes a comical tilt room and a heavily distorted Ames room where optical illusions make guests appear to be all different sizes. There’s also a claustrophobia hallway, a deceptive endless corridor, and a perplexing curtain maze.
 “There are a few reasons we did this,” says Bill Mefford, EnterTRAINment Junction’s public relations manager. “When we first opened we had two mazes that changed seasonally, and during the summer we had an old-time amusement park with mirror mazes; they were very popular, so we decided to do a permanent area. Also, our owner, Don Oeters, wants this to be more than just a train center—he wants it to be a place where families can come for all kinds of fun. Finally, we have an 80,000-square-foot building, so we have room to do it!”
One of the most visually dazzling attractions in the funhouse is the “Outer Limits: Journey Through The Black Hole,” which takes visitors through a wild spinning vortex tunnel, then into a black hole filled with an assortment of glowing stars and planets. “The vortex tunnel spins and spins as you walk through, and it’s black-light lit, as many of our attractions are,” explains Mefford. “Then you enter a dark room with glowing planets and stars right above your head that are three dimensions. The room is black lit and the colors really stick out.” Guests can only escape the black hole through a claustrophobia room.
One of the most popular attractions at EnterTRAINment Junction has always been the “Journey to the North Pole” maze, which opens only during the Christmas season. That attraction will remain, though now guests can look through a window and see mechanical elves working in the elves’ workshop year round.
Though EnterTRAINment Junction declines to state how much it invested in the new funhouse, General Manager Bill Balfour says Bruce Robinson designed the Clown College and the optical illusion section, and Oak Island Productions did the mirror maze and the black hole sections.
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