Park Update
www.parkworld-online.com
It should never have happened, but it did
OK Corral is the biggest wild west theme park in the south of France with its own Indian holiday village, live wild west shows and more than 30 amusement rides. Opened in 1966 it is the oldest and one of the most popular, theme parks in Provence. 2021 has been an exciting year for the family run park, not least because of its brand-new area Mexico. Featuring six rides, new restrooms and a variety of midway games, owner Mathijs Bembom tells Park World how despite all the odds, it came to be.
D We set out to
build a new area with the smallest impact as possible on the environment.
52
uring the summer of 2020 we decided that we would not purchase a big attraction for the park’s 55th anniversary in 2021, as initially planned. The global health crisis and its impact on visitor numbers made large investments risky. A more modest approach had been decided.
In October 2020 when the second wave of Covid
hit France and forced the park to close early and miss-out on the largest days of any regular season, we chose not to cancel our plans but rather change our order of priorities. It was also the deciding factor for the new developments; we knew we would have a longer winter period to develop the new area without affecting the overall customer experience. Instead of closing at the end of December and reopening for Easter, we believed that we would have 7 to 8 months of closure - doubling our usual closure time. We hurriedly set out to develop a new game plan: we had time to build, we did not want to put our staff
on furlough where they would lose money and we wanted to surprise our guests with something new when lockdown would eventually end.
Mexico pushed to the front of the queue Several areas of the park had been earmarked for future development with specific theming, but discussions kept coming back to what experience we wanted to provide. In these “dark” covid times, we knew we needed to bring something fun to the table with lots of colour. Our logic was simple: for many people cowboys and Indians imply the use of wood, secondly wood is brown and greys over time and thirdly those colours are less fun. Mexican culture on the other hand fits perfectly in OK Corral’s theming but it also provides an opportunity to explore different materials and colours.
Rides became a major subject of debate: how do you get at short notice rides that we want and that
IAAPA EXPO EUROPE EDITION
Mathijs Bembom
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