Vaughan attractions unfazed by potential new theme park

Vaughan Citizen
March 27, 2014
By Adam Martin-Robbins

A proposed new $60-million theme park is a “welcome addition” to the GTA tourism market, a Canada’s Wonderland spokesperson says.

“I totally understand the desire to come into our market and add another attraction, based on our population,” said Dave Phillips, vice-president of marketing and sales at Canada’s Wonderland, in response to last week’s announcement. “It sounds like a water park. Whether it’s small, big or medium, to us everything is a type of competition. But for the diverse population we have in Toronto, I think it’s a welcome addition.”

MarbleLive last week announced it anticipates that its new theme park, designed to offer summer 365 days a year, will be up and running by fall 2016.

The 9,300-square-metre (2.3 acre) attraction, equipped with a retractable roof, will offer sandy beaches, wave pools, cabanas, restaurants, lazy rivers, vendors and live entertainment, according to a news release.

The site of the massive complex is still undetermined, but has been narrowed to three locations within the cities of Mississauga and Toronto, and developers of the MarbleLive project say they’re in talks with officials.

Once fully operational, the theme park is expected to employ 230 full-time personnel and attract more than 500,000 visitors within its first year of operation.

Lara Hannaford, marketing manager for Legoland Discovery Centre at Vaughan Mills, said her employer stands to benefit from any large attractions that come to the area.

“We have a really great relationship with a lot of the attractions in Toronto, so anything else that brings people to this side of the world is going to benefit everybody,” she said. “Especially with the cross promotion that we have with attractions, and that will start to increase. The more that they come to us, the visitors will learn about attractions downtown and vice versa.”

For example, she pointed out, there is a 16-foot CN Tower built out of Lego blocks at the base of the real CN Tower in Toronto that drives people north to Legoland in Vaughan, while the 16-foot Lego block CN Tower in its Toronto “miniland” encourages tourists to visit the real thing downtown.

“And we’re a completely different attraction than, say, a water park, Ripley’s Aquarium and Canada’s Wonderland,” Ms Hannaford added. “Those are massive, really big theme parks. So, we partner with them, we don’t compete with anyone. We’re a bit of a niche because we’re aimed at kids three to 10 with a specific toy.”

Mr. Phillips isn’t too concerned about a new attraction cutting into Wonderland’s tourist traffic.

“At our park, we do approximately three million visitors a year. We’re one of North America’s leading attractions, “ he said. “My understanding, with this attraction, it’s about two acres. ... Our water park, inside of our amusement park, is 20 acres. So the two acres is the approximate size of our wave pool and plaza area.”

Canada’s Wonderland recognizes there are new attractions coming into the GTA all the time and that’s why it constantly adds new rides and shows to its lineup, Mr. Phillips added.

For 2014, the massive amusement park is launching a 4-D interactive ride dubbed Wonder Mountain’s Guardian.

The same goes for Legoland, which opened its doors just more than a year ago, Ms Hannaford said.

“There’s always something new for the annual passholders,” she said. “We are launching a new attraction inside our centre (later) in the spring - Ninjago. It is one of the hottest brands for Lego right now. The Ninjago laser maze will be sort of a laser training camp for kids where they will be able to immerse themselves in the mindframe of a ninja and be part of the Ninjago experience.”

Vaughan’s Legoland Discovery Centre is the only one of its kind in Canada and it outperformed all of the targets set for its first year of operation, Ms Hannaford said.

“We have had some phenomenal achievements,” she said. “We had the highest annual pass member database out of all the other locations in North America. We had hundreds of thousands of families come through the doors.”

And, Ms Hannaford said, there’s still plenty of room for growth.

“What’s really exciting to us is we’re going into year two, but we’re still very new to a large population in the GTA,” she said. “The families that we saw come through this year were only the families that know about us and because the population is so large there’s obviously going to be a large number that are still within our reach.”