Theme Park Holidays

The Theme park has become a major factor in many different people’s holidays’ plans and itineraries. They give you a chance to go and lose yourself in a world of entertainment, thrills and attractions for a day or more.

The humble beginning of the Theme Park can be traced back to 1946 with the opening of Santa Claus Land in Indiana but amusement parks go back even further than that and can trace the movement towards the origin of a theme park. This can be seen with Blackpool as a major amusement park player from the UK with Coney Island coming from the states in the 1800’s.

The era of the early 1900’s was accustomed to the golden age in park history. American’s were becoming more affluent and not having to work every hour under the sun to earn an honest day’s wage, they had a need to be entertained in a fantasy world. Kiddie Parks were introduced to the industry; roller coaster development became a top priority and the future looked good.

Of course, this boom became a decline during the war periods as money was less available, people had moved out of cities to the country and couldn’t move around easily leaving the void to be filled by television. Once out of the war era though, we see the giant leap forward to what we know as a theme park today. One of the major game changing philosophies of parks was the move from pay as you go to an all-inclusive entrance fee. There are arguments from both sides as to which is better but generally the consensus is to have the one price fits all system, this was for reasons including the parks saving money on hiring ticket takers on the rides and actually investing in development of the rides.

Disney is still the biggest player in the market with its parks in the states counting for over half of the annual revenue for theme parks with over 50 million visitors to its parks base in the states alone. Not surprisingly it was the theme parks in California that was the market changer, Disneyland theme park made history to allow a park to encompass and create many different themes in one park.

Today one just has to put the word theme park into a search engine on the internet and you are presented with literally hundreds of choices of parks, worlds and lands worldwide. The one certainty in the market is it is forever game plan changing and adapting to the more demanding needs of citizens of the world. As long as that need for fantasy remains, they are here to stay.