Park Profile
www.parkworld-online.com
In a short space of time, Allou! has become the number one amusement park in Greece, attracting as many as two million annual guests. Key to its success is the lack of local competition, long opening hours and an innovative approach to marketing. Here Hellenic Entertainment Parks
owner Dimitri
Kontoyiannis, who 10 years ago hadn’t even ridden a log flume, shares his story
Allou! Fun Park
Athens’ ultimate amusement destination
W
e opened Allou! Fun Park in the Agios Ioannis Rentis area of Athens on October 7, 2002. The whole thing was done at
flashlight speed in just 10 months, and required a €42 million ($55m) investment. We have since spent a further €18 million on improvements. My family’s background is in duty free; then I moved into real estate and development, which has become my main business. I formed Hellenic Entertainment Parks (HEP) with my partners Alexis Aidonpoulous and Lorenzo Freris. As well as the park, we also run a 3,200-seat theatre in Athens, originally used as the Olympic badminton stadium. A few years later, Lorenzo’s food business started exploding and in 2004 he was replaced by a new partner, Audiovisual, which is listed on the stock market here in Greece. That is how we are to this day.
My real estate background helped when we built the park. Athens is a very dense city and it is hard to find big plots of land. There are a few, but they are so expensive that you would never make money operating a park on them. I had already developed a mixed use development in this part of town, including a multiplex cinema, so I knew the potential. We bought the land for a tenth of what you would pay now. When we came in there was no ring road outside the park like there is today, but I felt that it would happen, and by the end of 2011 we will have a Metro station next door to the park too. We took care of everything around the park, and started planting lots of trees. As a child, I grew up Johannesburg, so we imported real Jacarada trees. They are kind of quirky, and unique in Athens. Alexis brought in an Italian designer and gave him a brief to design a good luna park, and together they chose all the rides. If you asked me before we opened what a Crazy Mouse or Drop Tower was, I couldn’t have told you. I hadn’t even been on a Log Flume. But I did know what a Ferris Wheel was!
There are four guys I treat as mentors, and who were very helpful when we set up the park. Recently we lost our fiend Mauro Ferrari (Preston & Barbieri), he encouraged me to travel and see other parks. Bob Masterson is a good friend, and Mats Wedin (Liseberg) and Nick Thompson (Blackpool Pleasure Beach) gave me the truth about this industry. The truth is everyone is passionate about this business. People like Sascha Czibulka at Intamin and Henk
One of the main gates to the park, which features free entry
26
at Vekoma have been great too, even though we’ve never bought a ride from them. If someone wants to sell you a ride, obviously he wants to spend time with you, but we are talking about so much time it simply doesn’t make sense. We’ve spent many dinners going through things with Roger Houben; what he is doing with 3DBA is totally different, it is fresh.
MAY 2010
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