🔒With Great Wolf Lodge’s debut, CT’s growing theme/water park industry sees new competition

Great 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 amusement 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.

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 capacities, 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 obviously we do have margins that we strive for,” he said. “But, I also think that we have to keep things reasonable so that guests have a great perceived value for what we offer.”

Quaint image

That value proposition is also something that’s motivating Quassy’s Frantzis.

“With all the scare of tariffs and cost of goods, that’s going to hold well for us in the sense that our claim is always that we’ve been affordable family fun,” he said.

Quassy has also been investing in its infrastructure, and this season is debuting two new rides, the Crazy 8 Family Roller Coaster and Aladdin Wave Swinger. But Quassy also takes pride in its quaint and intimate image, and with its small size, there’s a limit to how much the park can innovate.

“Given our footprint, even if we wanted to change, I don’t think we could,” he said. “I think people understand who we are, and I think that’s also part of our charm. The water park is something where we’ve seen significant growth in the last 10, 15 years. And that’s been probably one of the biggest factors for this park’s success.”

Frantzis did not disclose Quassy’s visitor numbers, but said they have made a recovery to pre-pandemic levels, “if not better.” He says the park mainly aims to draw from a two-hour driving radius.

“We are seeing a much stronger influx of New York plates coming through our gate, some from Massachusetts, a little bit more than we have in the past,” he said, “but we’re strong through the valley as well.”

Capital investment

For the new kid on the block, Great Wolf Lodge, a key differentiator is its 549-room hotel, which turns it into a potentially multiday destination for visitors, particularly with the synergy of being next to the casino.

The Mashantucket location is the company’s 23rd resort in North America and third in the Northeastern U.S., with the closest being in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.

“We’ve opened five new projects in the last two years — we’ve been very active,” said Great Wolf Lodge CEO John Murphy, speaking at the official May 6 opening of the Mashantucket location. “This is really a capstone event for us, where we’ve invested quite a lot of capital trying to grow the brand.”

The company is projecting 500,000 annual visitors in Connecticut, and says it’s seen encouraging signs through its early, soft opening period.

“We target a three-hour drive,” said the park’s General Manager Henry Tessman. “We’re already seeing great results through the whole 95 corridor, all the way into New York and also that 395 corridor going up towards Massachusetts.”

Great Wolf Lodge is majority owned by asset manager Blackstone, which formed a joint venture with Centerbridge Partners to acquire the resort chain in 2019. The company had been in negotiations with the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation for several years over the Connecticut development.

“As a testament to the strength of this partnership, we weathered many, many fits and starts,” Tribal Chairman Rodney Butler said during the park’s opening ceremony. “It’s a strategic investment in our long-term prosperity.”

The property has hired 500 employees, about half of them full time, and says employment will expand during the summer. That makes it a smaller affair — at least during the warm months — than Lake Compounce, which was targeting 1,000 seasonal employees this year.

“Obviously, there’s competition in markets, but the markets are large enough to really handle all of the different opportunities that guests have, and the choices they have out there,” said Lake Compounce’s Hemphill. “When other entities come in and they’re successful, really we all become successful.”

Frantzis, too, thinks Great Wolf Lodge might be a rising tide for his water park.

“I mean, obviously, we’re all vying for a discretionary dollar, but at the end of the day, the more they market, the more they advertise, the bigger they get for us,” he said. “It’s bringing attention to our industry.”