Yeah that’s probably the biggest issue, getting footfall over to that side of the Resort. You’d have to perform some serious market research to ascertain whether there’s a big market/demand for additional activities after the park closes. I’m sure there’s probably demand there, but perhaps that demand could just be fixed easily by opening the park later rather than investing in new attractions around the hotel complex. I guess they’ve already explored the option of upgrading the offering over at the hotels through the zip-wire course and mini golf, but I’m not sure how successful either has been to be honest because the cut backs didn’t exactly end up just targeting the weaker elements of the line-up.
There was a mention in an article from a Merlin executive a while ago explaining Extraordinary Golf paid for itself in a pretty impressive timeframe, I forget how long it took but it seemed pretty quick to me. It's very accessible, kills an hour or so, it's a pretty good course as far as I am concerned. Tree Top Quest is a little harder to make work, but I think it's ok if you have the volume of visitors in the hotels.
I put most of it down to weak marketing techniques. If I told most people that the park had a zip wire course or anything other than the theme park and main hotels they’d probably be surprised.
Tree Top Quest has been closed for not insignificant periods, but I think if it does reopen this year there will be additional prominence - they were getting better at presenting it as an upsell.
The Dungeons had real potential, it’s a shame that perhaps it wasn’t executed to reflect that. Perhaps though if they’d of properly invested and built it in a stand alone building closer to the hotels/park entrance they may not of reaped a big enough additional benefit to warrant spending additional CAPEX compared to just putting it where it currently is.
I think The Dungeons are enough for what they are - I think there was only so much potential and spending three times as much wouldn't have tripled the opportunity or potential financial outcomes. Plus, larger capital expenditure on something like a Dungeon means you almost always increase revenue spend through additional actors, etc.
You can limit the number of slots available to meet the capacity of an attraction - that's relatively easy, what is difficult is where you create such high fixed costs (whether it be staff, utilities, etc) and can't generate enough revenue to meet them - like Geauga Lake, or even something like Valhalla, closer to home.