July 2009
Doug Waterbury has established Empire Attraction LLC, an umbrella company to manage his numerous entertainment venues and events in New York, including Santa’s Workshop, the Historic Sylvan Beach Amusement Park, Yesterday’s Royal, the Sylvan Beach Screamer Speedboat Thrill Ride, the Sterling Renaissance Festival, the Sterling Celtic Rock Festival and Screamers’ Hollow. “New Yorkers no longer have to travel thousands of miles to find exciting and worthwhile family entertainment,” says Waterbury, “it is all right here in their own backyard.”
Canada’s largest publicly owned and newest aquatic centre has opened in Kelowna, British Columbia. H2O Adventure offers waterslides, a family wave pool, river run and the country’s first ever FlowRider indoor surfing attraction. The aquatic centre can cater for up to 500 swimmers at a time with attractions, which also include an AquaPlay multi-level play structure.
Great City Attractions (GCA), formerly World Tourist Attractions, has chosen RefTech Services to supply a ticketing system for its Wheel of Windsor observation wheel just outside London. The ride, which spent the Christmas period in the city’s Hyde Park, opened for another season’s business at Windsor on April 2. The RefTech system delivers walk up sales and demographic analysis without the requirement for lengthy staff training. Online sales are handled through a dedicated website developed for GCA by RefTech. Any tickets sold or scanned for entry will be reported upon via a secure internet connection within 10 seconds of the transaction.
