Playing With The Big Guys
Lessons From Orlando Water Parks
Welcome to summer. It’s hot out there. So I thought we would devote the next few articles to cooling off at the water park. Grab a towel and some sunscreen, and let’s hit the beach.
Catch a Wave.
My original adventures in Orlando did not start with Walt Disney World. They actually started with a small water park known as Water Mania. I was hired to be the Director of Operations for the park. That made me a very big fish in a very small pond. I got the job by impressing the Vice President of Operations, Bob Keene. Bob started his career at Wet ‘n Wild, and then had gone on to help open Typhoon Lagoon at Disney. Later, he went on to run Water Mania. In that position, I served a couple of years as his right hand man.
If you don’t know much about Water Mania, don’t worry. I didn’t either when I came down from living in the Florida panhandle to interview. In fact, I had to stop at the old Disney reservation center in Ocala on the way there to pick up a pamphlet and get directions. Water Mania was 36 acres on Highway 192 across from where Celebration was to be built. The owner, Gary Larsen, was part of a family that owned a number of properties in the Kissimmee area. His brother built two hotels/motels titled Larson Lodge; Gary decided he wanted to build a water park. What possessed him to do so I’m still not sure, and on more than one occasion I’m sure he regretted it. But at that time, he had big dreams—even to build a chain of Water Mania parks. And during my tenure there, it was one of the more successful parks in the country attendance-wise, especially given that it was outside the gates of the Mouse and was often able to stay open throughout the entire year.
The Berzerker at Water Mania.
I had never been part of a water park. I had never been part of a theme park of any kind at that time. But during the interview I picked up trash along the way and said hi to the guests as I passed by. I must have impressed Bob that I knew something about customer service. He needed someone with a sense of training and developing others, and that was very much my background.
This wasn’t my only association with a water park. Later I would move on to The Disney Institute. While I was there I utilized Typhoon Lagoon as one of the locations for our guest experiences. There was a great operations team in place at that time, and we utilized the location in a variety of ways.
The Grand Daddy of Water Parks.
And of course there is Blizzard Beach. These two parks are amazing and are undoubtedly some of the finest in the world. Curiously, despite the competition at the senior management level, Bob was on good relations with the other water park operators and we were given a hard hat tour to the top of the mountain long before it was completed. As you will understand later, Water Mania’s owner, Gary, would choose not to come.
High up on top of Blizzard Beach.
Since then I have visited water parks throughout the country. There are over 1,000 water parks in North America. I’ve been from Wet ‘n Wild on the East coast to Raging Waters on the West coast. More unusually, I spent time Valley of the Waves in Sun City, South Africa that was built on the order of the Disney Theme parks. But make no mistake-there is nothing like Typhoon and Blizzard when it comes to paying attention to detail and for all around service.
Valley of the Waves in the amazing Sun City, South Africa
With all of those experiences in tow, allow me to share some of those lessons from Water Mania that have application to our own day-to-day work experiences:
The master may not want to give the dog the left-over scraps. In the mid 1980s Gary thought that it was doable to do a water park in Orlando. Wet ‘n Wild and River Country were overflowing and turning guests away on many a busy day. Why not build another park to take in the Highway 192 area? He gathered loans to build the park and was a day or so from signing with the banks when Disney stepped forward and announced Typhoon Lagoon. The banks became anxious and it was all Gary could do to gather enough money to open. In hindsight he should have considered throwing in the towel at that point. But he did manage to open.
Typhoon premieres in 1989.
Make the weenie seen
You’ve probably heard Walt or Marty Sklar refer to the castle at the end of Main Street as a weenie at the end of the stick. At Water Mania it was a different story. You couldn’t see the weenie at the end of the stick. Gary built the park inland away from the bustling traffic of 192. No one could see anything other than a sign, a sand volleyball court, and a slide tower in the distance. The result was that the first few years he could barely get anyone to turn off the street and turn in to the park. Those were painful, “in-the-red” years all because no one could tell there was a water park present.
The Anaconda turned Water Mania around when it was finally built in front of 192.
Keep persisting
Once built, Gary was forced to make the park succeed. He tried a summer concert series in the wave pool with a number of popular artists. He focused on the local market doing corporate picnics, capitalizing on a beautiful grove of trees, which made up part of his property. When he finally scraped up more money, he was able to build a family raft ride, billed as the Anaconda, which was visible from 192. Then the crowds started turning up. Gary then turned to a more ambitious plan. He decided to build a major lazy river and a new state-of-the-art ride that would allow people to surf continuously. Known later as The Wipe Out, Gary got close to locking down the financing, when Disney again stepped forward in an act of amazing timing and announced Blizzard Beach.
Do you see a pattern here? Gary was still able to make the financing work, and it would open. But these were the years of the water park wars. Wet ‘n Wild would work to build a new attraction each year. Even with Blizzard Beach opened, Disney was regularly closing at least two parks to the amount of traffic coming in, and would often close River Country as well. So Gary persisted in building new attractions as well. He hired a foreman named Randy who had previously laid out all the cement troughs on Splash Mountain to come and create his river and Wipe Out.
Wipe Out.
Beat your competition at their own game
Gary did pull off one clever feat. The Wipe Out was based on technology created by the Schlitterbahn park/organization in Texas. Why Disney’s water park operations didn’t embrace this technology first remains to be seen. Perhaps they were more focused on building another park than adding rides per se. But that said and done, Gary not only got the technology first, which included a 10-year license keeping any other parks in the Central Florida area from being able to use it. It would be at least another 10 years before Typhoon Lagoon would build the Crush ‘n’ Gusher rides, a water roller coaster that would utilize the same “master blaster” technology that made The Wipe Out succeed. The little park that could actually beat Disney at its own game. But that would only be for a while.
Crush ‘n’ Gusher at Typhoon Lagoon.
So what became of Water Mania? Blizzard Beach was an amazing park when it opened, but it along with the All-Star Resorts and the Coronado Springs Resort would signal a slow death for many properties along 192. Nothing was unintentional about this. When the All-Star Resorts came around, there were 1920 rooms built. Take away a zero and you get the inference. Coronado Springs would provide significant competition to hotels like the 192 Hyatt that provided business meeting space and accommodations at a reasonable price. The Hyatt in time would close as well.
And Water Mania? Well, Gary eventually got lucky and found someone who wanted to buy the property at a decent price. The investor didn’t care to be in the water park business. But it did apparently want to flip the property and sell it to someone who would build new hotels or condos. The park and the adjacent Larson Lodge has since been demolished, and as of the time of this article, the investor is still trying to get someone to repurchase the property.
As for myself, I only stayed two seasons (1993-1994) before I moved on. I loved the business of water parks, but I hated working weekends, and I really needed to return to focusing on my career. A year later I found myself in a wonderful leadership position at Walt Disney World. I would be a small fish in a big pond. But it was where I really wanted to be all along.
It was perhaps a different era, where one would get the Mania for Water, Water Mania. (their most popular commercial jingle). For the rest of us, it offers some lessons to be learned. Even a “David” like Water Mania can stay in the game with a corporate “Goliath” like Disney. But you have to know the rules:
- Know the cost before you get in the arena. Are you willing to pay the price?
- Know your competition and what it can do to you. Before it does it to you.
- Identify what is going to set you apart from others and play against those differences.
- Be persistent. If you’re going to play with the big boys, be prepared to hang in there.
There were other lessons I learned from my experiences with the water parks. We’ll learn about those next time. Until then, hang 10!
