Expand your business, not your size!
27 June 2021/ Small but packed with fun: a turn-key park by SBF-VISA Group opens in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina /
You don’t need a lot of footprint to make an amusement park, you just need to know how to pack all the rides you want in the space you have. And who can do that better than the ride manufacturers themselves, who know the ins and outs of each of their rides and know how to fit them together as if in a game of Tetris? That’s the idea that Italian ride manufacturer SBF-VISA Group is offering: a 1,600sqm turn-key mechanical park project fitted with the best distribution of the groups’ best rides. On May 21st, the first park of this kind, the Funplex at Myrtle Beach, was officially opened, so we can now take stock of how this idea works in practice.
Myrtle Beach, in South Carolina, is a tourist spot and as such real estate is hard to get, but at the same time the city has had quite a number of amusement parks and offers over the years, so any new venture needs to measure up. Michael Baumann, the Funplex’s General Manager, was up for the challenge and found the right partner in SBF-VISA Group. “Every inch of this park has been planned as strategically as possible and we made the most of what we had to work with,” said Baumann. Leaning on SBF-VISA Group’s expertise, the park includes 7 rides, chosen to appeal to different visitor targets, plus a restaurant called Off the Coast (because the Funplex is really just off the coast of the Atlantic Ocean).
For thrill lovers, the new park packs Up & Overboard (a 32-seat and over-18m-tall Space Gun) and Sky Velocity (a 20m-tall, 12-seat Drop-n-Twist freefall tower), plus 2 more family-oriented thrill rides: Mach Fun, a 15m-tall Tower Planes, an interactive ride that is a hybrid between a plane ride and a free-fall tower, and the first one of its kind in the USA; and Hook & Slice (a Reverse Time model). For children and family rides, there are Sunny Day Swing, a 20-seat, 4.6m-diameter swing ride based on the Toy Swing model, and the 12-seat teacup ride Hang 10 Silly Cups (a Cups model with a diameter of 5.8m). Of course a theme park would not be a theme park without a roller coaster: the Fun in the Sun is a Hamster Wheel Coaster featuring 3 traditional spinning cars as well as 2 circular vertical-spinning cars (the ‘hamster wheels’) on a 150m-long track, the longest version of this coaster produced to date. And how does such a coaster fit into the small footprint? “We planned the track at height, and its turns and hills run along the perimeter of the whole park,” explained Michele and Tommaso Frison, SBF-VISA Group’s sales managers.
With 6 full-time staff and approximately 100 seasonal team members, The Funplex at Myrtle Beach is open every day and…
Continue reading Games & Parks Industry June 2021, page 12
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