Linda Hays, Cliff’s Amusement Park, USA: We’ve have had a great season. We are up a little over 10% this year. April was not a good month so being able to pull out from that plus an additional 10% is better than expected. We added three new rides this season including two kiddie rides, Baja Buggies by Zamperla and an SBF/Visa Doggie-Go-Round, and one thrill ride, the Sidewinder from Moser.
Soren Kragelund, Faarup Sommerland, Denmark: Generally it has been a very wet summer here in Denmark, but nevertheless we are quite satisfied. More than 525,000 guests visited the park, which makes this season the fourth best during our 32 years of operation. It hasn’t been easy to run a summer park due to the weather conditions but we made a big effort to make sure that our guests had some nice days. We are now focusing our efforts on the 2008 season, where we have some exciting plans, and hope for some sunny and warm weather.
Marshall Hill, Funland (Hayling Island), UK: We had some of our best and worst weeks ever in 2007. Over Easter we had two record weeks, and another at the end of August. This stopped the season ending up a disaster as we lost four weeks completely in June and July thanks to appalling weather – our worst summer ever. The smoking ban and Gambling Act haven’t helped either. It’s been a challenging year all round.
Alain Baldacci, São Paulo Wet´n Wild Waterpark, Brazil: Although the seasons in the southern hemisphere are reversed, all the Brazilian parks have experimented a firm growth in 2007 compared to 2006. For the park I run, this has been an exceptional year. We introduced a new attraction, the Crazy Drop (Side Winder), which is the first new addition since opening in 1998. We also went back to using TV advertising. The result of both actions, plus very good weather, improved our attendance by about 18% over last year and revenues went up over 20%.
John Frantzis, Quassy Amusement Park, USA: It was a great year, no doubt. Of course the weather was really with us and that’s a big part of this business. We got in just about all of our special events without rain, and that was not the case in 2006. Gasoline prices probably helped us this year as some people decided to stay closer to home.
