24 Dec
Bracelets a welcome addition as per caps up at 2 waterparks
Both Hawaiian Waters Adventure Park in Kapolei, Hawaii, and Wild Waters Adventures in Clovis, Calif., saw 150% increases in per caps when the parks tested a new wristband– based virtual money application this summer.
After a month of offering patrons the VirtualTrak system to guests in the 25-acre Kapolei waterpark, results cufflinks showed an increase in spending by patrons using a system that allows them to use cashless bracelets to make purchases over patrons who did not use the system.
Jason Reardon, director of finance and accounting for Hawaiian Waters, said he thinks the per caps may have increased even more than the 150% estimated by VirtualTrak. “It’s awesome. We’re very happy with it,” he said. “We’re very much locally driven, but with the locals you have to keep cutting ticket prices. So the best way to recoup that is on the in-park spending. There are not a lot of ways to do a per cap increase.”
Reardon plans to add the child locating capability next season.
The beta system was installed in Kapolei in March, and became fully operational in July.
The 52-acre Clovis waterpark mirrored those results.
This is the wave of the future, especially in waterparks, said Kent Lemasters, president and CEO of tiffany AmusementAquatic Management Group, based in Tustin, Calif., which manages Wild Water Adventures. “Long– term I think it’s a valuable asset. Short-term it’s a revenue generator,” Lemasters said.
Lemasters recently helped Wild Water Adventures in Clovis, Calif., out of bankruptcy reorganization using an aggressive revenue-generation strategy.
While the bracelet is the attractive aspect of the system for waterparks, whose patrons often have no pockets, other “bells and whistles” like group locator systems and line timing abilities will be valuable for amusement parks, Lemasters said.
Other companies have been coming out with similar cashless midway systems and child locator systems recently, bracelets but VirtualTrak is the only company that has combined all of these things into one computer chip in a bracelet, said Tom Land, VirtualTrak co-founder.
Wet’n Wild Waterworld in El Paso, Texas, is the third park to test the system this summer, and they also saw per cap increases in users, but there were fewer users overall than the other two parks, Land said. The chips were also installed in employee ID cards and will be installed in season passes in El Paso.
