Hartford Business Journal

16 HARTFORDBUSINESS.COM | MAY 19, 2025 Great Wolf Lodge in Mashantucket features a 91,000-square-foot indoor water park. CONTRIBUTED PHOTO Water Wars With Great Wolf Lodge's debut, CT's growing theme/water park industry sees new competition Connecticut was home to nine amusement and theme parks in 2023, led by Lake Compounce and Quassy, up from six a year earlier and only four in 2019, federal data shows. More entertainment Hemphill has been managing Lake Compounce for a year, after he was hired by Palace Entertainment. But he will soon have a new boss. Palace's Spanish parent company, Parques Reunidos, announced in March that it will sell its U.S. parks, including Lake Compounce, to Herschend, one of the world's largest family-owned themed attractions companies. The deal is expected to close later this year. In the meantime, Lake Compounce — a historic park founded in the 1840s and that markets itself as "America's first amusement park" — has already been changing to keep up with the times. "Over the last year or so, we've really determined that we have to add … an entertainment element," said Hemphill. "Our clientele are primarily families with children 3 to 14, and we really need to embrace that." That means this year the park is leaning into live entertainment shows and character appearances to supplement its traditional rides and water park. That will include a DJ and mascots on the entry plaza as guests arrive, as well as visits by Peppa Pig, Daniel Tiger and the Power Rangers. In August, there will be a pirate stunt comedy show on the floating stage in Crocodile Cove called "Splash Bucklers," and in the fall the park will host a drone show. Alongside the new, the park also has to maintain tradition, which it has done in the past two years by re-tracking its historic wooden roller coasters, Wildcat and Boulder Dash. Lake Compounce doesn't release its visitor numbers, but Hemphill says the park has recovered to where it was before the pandemic. The business is also benefiting from the large amount of data it can now gather about guests and their spending habits. "When guests come into the park, where they're going in the park, what they're buying, whether it be in a gift shop or at a restaurant, we can use all of that (data) to frame our planning for the future," he said. That input helps the company to calibrate things like ride capac- ities, queuing space and retail square footage. The cost of a day trip is also a factor the park closely calculates. This year, with talk of a recession on the horizon, Hemphill is confident a park like Lake Compounce can sell itself to visitors as a good deal. "There may be some pressure on prices of raw goods and the materials that we're monitoring, because obvi- ously we do have margins that we strive for," he said. "But, I also think that we have to keep things reason- able so that guests have a great perceived value for what we offer." The Splash Away Bay Waterpark at Quassy in Middlefield. CONTRIBUTED PHOTO By Harriet Jones hjones@hartfordbusiness.com G reat Wolf Lodge may have debuted its first Connecticut location — a $300 million development on the campus of Foxwoods Resort Casino with a 91,000-square-foot indoor water park and 61,000-square-foot family entertainment center — but its more traditional local competitors aren't daunted. "As any good coach will say, competition is sometimes good. It keeps you sharp, it keeps you motivated," said George Frantzis, the owner of Quassy Amusement and Waterpark. The 20-acre Middlebury park has seen a lot in its 117-year-old history — all of those years owned and managed by the same family. Frantzis, the grandson of one of the original owners, says he has much respect for Great Wolf Lodge, but there's room for both, even in a small state. "Even though we're both fruit in some certain respects, we're apples and oranges," he said. "They're inside — let's start with that. They're at a casino, so we know where the focus is there, who they're marketing to and what they want." Doug Hemphill, general manager of Bristol-based amuse- ment and water park Lake Compounce, has a similar take. "They have a niche. They're very good at it," said Hemphill, referring to Great Wolf's water-park-and- lodging model. "We've got a broader spectrum of offerings in a single day that we're targeting. But they do a very good job at what they do, and we're happy to have them in the area." The new competition arrives as the state's amusement and water park industry experiences a post-pandemic resurgence in economic activity. The sector generated $102.6 million in valued-added economic activity in Connecticut in 2023, up 27.3% from a year earlier and nearly double the activity recorded in the pre-pandemic year of 2019 ($54.6 million), according to the latest available data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Nationally, the amusement/ water park industry produced $19.2 billion in value-added economic activity in 2023, up only 1.53% from a year earlier, and 36% from 2019, BEA data shows. Doug Hemphill George Frantzis

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