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Vacation Resorts “Dive” into Wet Play
by Steve Brinkel
Vice President of Sales and Marketing
Playtime LLC
It is called water-play. The addition of water-play attractions is quickly emerging as an established, bona fide strategy among timeshare resorts eager to enhance market appeal, increase sales, longer stays and enhance revenue.
The timeshare resort industry isn’t unique. Colorful water-play venues incorporating multi-level structures, twisting waterslides, chutes, water “canons,” buckets and floating soft-foam play platforms are popping up at hotels, resorts, retail properties and city parks all over the country, as well as internationally.
All of these industries and markets have begun to look at so-called “wet-play” – as well as “dry-play” – attractions as a tremendous opportunity to enhance the family appeal of their business or property. The rewards for these investments can be substantial. A timely study by Howell Research Group revealed that half of the nation’s parents tend to return repeatedly to and spend more time at a commercial location specifically because of its “family-friendly” features and amenities.
Even more importantly, more than a quarter of those parents acknowledged that they spend more money at businesses that make the effort to cater to their entire family. Specifically as it pertains to the hospitality industry, the addition of well-designed water-play attractions especially make sense.
A recent Amusements Business magazine study reiterates this bottom-line logic in favor of wet play: average nightly room rates in hotels with water parks was $114, compared to $45 in hotels without water attractions.
Summer Bay Resort in Clearwater, Florida jumped into the water-play attractions pool only last year by installing a modular, four-section WaterColors™ unit from KoalaPlay Group, Englewood, Colo.
Water-play attractions make any property considerably more appealing to existing and prospective owners who want to engage in active, family-friendly forms of recreation during their extended stays.
With more than 360 timeshare resorts in Florida alone, water-play attractions could eventually become a must-have amenity for any property wanting to keep pace with the competitive marketplace.
Property owners and operators should avoid the urge to rush into design and construction without first considering critical, far-reaching strategic issues that balance the competitive desire to have the best-drawing water attraction with bottom-line demands for sustained returns on the capital investment.
First of all, property owners must decide what specific financial, operational and marketing outcomes the new or enhanced water-play attraction will produce – and how quickly these results must become apparent. Are you hoping for more closings? Longer visits? A new revenue stream? How about generating new drive-by appeal as potential guests and owners pass your property on the way to your competitors? Add to those bottom-line factors the most compelling aspect to consider — whether or not to build a “themed” water-play attraction.
In their seminal 1999 book, The Experience Economy, marketing gurus B. Joseph Pine and James Gilmore point to theming as the most important element in creating what guests and vacation-goers want. Consumers around the world are spending more and more of their disposable incomes on entertainment – all forms of it. And as they spend, they are becoming equally more demanding, more ambivalent and immune to anything that doesn’t have a unique entertainment aspect.
What customers and guests now want from their entertainment time and money, as Pine and Gilmore so appropriately labeled it, is an experience. They want to spend their time interacting with a serious of events and situations that have been theatrically staged, time that pulls them out of their present to a place where their imagination can run wild. They want a memorable and engaging experience that stays with them long after they’ve left.
Theming for a water-play attraction can take on many forms. It cannot, however, be treated as some sort of after-thought using cheap, one-dimensional shortcuts like slap-on decals or plywood facades. The difference between decorated attractions and holistically themed entertainment experiences is like night and day. Guest know the difference.
There are many ways to incorporate a theme into an interactive water-play attraction to create a unique and memorable experience for guests and prospective owners. At the very least, color, noise and motion are made more resonating when kids and families are in the midst of it all, spraying water from bright-red canons or rushing to stand under a huge bucket when the bell announces that it is about to dump 300 gallons of water on the crowd below.
Many water attractions being built in the resort industry – including those at the increasing number of water-park resorts — incorporate a thematic “flavor” using physical space and features to create the look and feel of a jungle, outer space, a shipwreck, a tree house or other playful scene.
The next several years will determine if family-friendly water-play attractions will become popular for vacation ownership resorts and their guests in the same way lagoon pools did when they were introduced in the early 1980s.
But if the laughter from kids whose families return again and again to their favorite properties is any indication – we might all want to consider having a lot more towels ready.
Steve Brinkel wrote this while he was at Koala Corporation. www.koala-corporation.com