Park Profile
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The world’s largest aquarium brand has traditionally offered its guests an indoor experience, but since the start of the season visitors to Sea Life in one German city have been treated to a new outdoor extension
Pinguiine! Abenteuer Antarktis
SEA LIFE ABENTEUER PARK
So much
to Sea! The new outlet in
Oberhausen is not actually Merlin’s first Sea Life Adventure Park as its aquarium in Weymouth, England (not far from the company’s HQ in Poole), also features an outdoor section with rides, while a Sea Life- branded observation tower operates elsewhere in the seaside resort. Sea Life also lends its names to integral Atlantis-themed attractions within Legoland Billund and Windsor near London and Sharkbait Reef exhibit at Alton Towers, England. Yet it is the aquarium format that remains key to the Sea Life experience and today there are over 40 outlets around the world, either as standalone facilities, clustered with other Merlin “Midway” attractions or as second gates to the group’s resort theme parks including Legoland California or Gardaland in Italy.
visitsealife.com
S
ea Life Abenteuer (Adventure) Park in Oberhausen is part of the leisure offering at the giant CentrO Mall in North Rhine-Westphalia. A Sea Life aquarium has been operated for by Merlin Entertainments here for some time, joining other visitor attractions including the Top Secret spy museum, Aqua Park, Tree 2 Tree climbing experience, Big Air skydiving simulator and, until recently, CentrO Park. The latter, an 8.5-hectare amusement park founded alongside the mall in 1996, was acquired by the showman Oscar Bruch Jnr in 2001 and picked up by Merlin following Bruch’s departure in 2010/11. And now it has reopened as Sea Life Abenteuer Park, an annexe to the Sea Life aquarium a short walk away, featuring a themed log flume as its headline attraction. Merlin has also opened a Legoland Discovery Centre (LDC) in a new building directly adjacent to the park, featuring the contents of what was in fact the first LDC outlet worldwide in the nearby city of Duisburg. The
European attraction giant is known to favour “clustering” its attraction brands together on one site, and the enlarged operation in Oberhausen is viewed as preferential to having a separate site in Duisburg. CentrO visitors now have the choice of a Sea Life ticket for €23 (€18 online), an LDC ticket for €17/12 or, and it is hoped many guests will choose this option, a “Kombi-Ticket” for €30/25. It is no longer possible to visit the Sea Life aquarium on its own without also paying for Abenteuer Park, although a cheap evening ticket was available this summer to those booking online. Penguins? They’re the hot ticket right now at a handful of parks in Europe and the USA. Since Merlin opened the Polar X-Plorer rollercoaster last season at Legoland Billund in Demark, featuring a colony of Gentoo penguins, SeaWorld Orlando has gone on to launch its multi-million dollar Antarctica: Empire of the Penguin attraction in Florida. And now its is the turn of Oberhausen to offer a home to some of the black and white birds.
Lego at Sea Life – Merlin never misses an opportunity for cross promotion!
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Sea Life Park or Legoand Discovery Centre? Take your pick!
Which way is Sea Life? SEPTEMBER 2013
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