Toverland, an amusement park in the Netherlands, is expanding its magical Avalon area to offer four new family-friendly attractions. In 2023, Toverland will open a drop tower, carousel, pendulum ride and ‘Garden Tour’ attraction. The new additions will cost €10 million.
Jean Gelissen Jr, general manager of Toverland, and son of the founder, spoke with blooloop about the park, its history and ethos, and expansion strategy. Toverland, he says, “started as a wild idea of my father’s.”
His father, also Jean Gelissen, owned a successful construction company. He then decided he would like to diversify and open a business in the entertainment and attraction space.
“He developed the idea of an indoor theme park,” Gelissen says. “Back then, it was the largest indoor theme park in Western Europe: a really cool playground, with some quite decent mechanical attractions inside. That was in 1995. He hired my aunt, Caroline Kortooms, to help him with that.”
Creating Toverland
Together, they started developing the plans for Toverland.
“It took them five years, opening in May 2001. From the first day onward, it was a huge success, unlike anything people had ever seen. It was really large and high-quality, with an indoor rollercoaster.”
Caroline Kortooms was CEO of Toverland from 2001 until 2019. But they soon realised they needed to build on the park’s initial success:
“After that first summer, they started to develop their second phase along quite similar lines. The success of that first season brought a bigger budget, which meant more and bigger attractions could be added, along with more – and bigger – food and beverage facilities.”
A sizeable outdoor space with playgrounds was a further addition:
“They opened that in 2004. Back then, it was called The Magic Forest; nowadays, we call that area the Wunderwald.”
The second phase, like the first, was a great success:
“However, they realized that if the summers were really hot, they would have to move away from the concept of an indoor-focused park, and develop ideas to do outside. This was the inspiration for the third phase.”
Themed lands and new coasters
It was always, he explains, a dream to possess a wooden rollercoaster:
“That was a significant ingredient for the third phase. By this time, they had travelled the world and understood the importance of heavy theming. With those ingredients, they developed the plans.”
Having bought the rollercoaster, they built the Troy area:
“The Troy rollercoaster is, nowadays, still one of the best. It’s still the highest and fastest wooden rollercoaster in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. If you’re a rollercoaster enthusiast, one day you’ll have to ride Troy.”
The Troy area was themed:
“They created an environment modelled on Ancient Greece, mostly with the use of nice plants, colours, and themed buildings.” This, again, was a success:
“In 2007 and 2008, we had great visitor numbers. Having experienced, firsthand, the importance of theming, they started to develop the Magical Valley, which opened in 2013. It was also during this phase that we started to hire our own Imagineering team.”
Toverland’s original IP
At around this point, Peter van Holsteijn, still Toverland’s lead designer, joined the team:
“They started to design and to develop the Magical Valley, a completely themed area,” Gelissen says. “It had animatronics, it had special effects, and altogether more focus on the dwell time, more focus on the overall themed experience of which the rides are a part, but not so much on the rides themselves.”
The park is unusually striking aesthetically.
“It’s really good to look at,” he comments. “Our USP would be that we have really easily distinguished themed areas. They are, especially in terms of the themed landscaping and the design of the buildings, clearly separate. Every area has its own unique theming.”
Toverland has always created its own IP for the park, and, as part of the expansion, will be introducing two new characters: the mischievous unicorn Juna and the dragon Sparky.
“Our skills in how to create, design and maintain characters have grown and improved over the years. We’ve put all that knowledge and expertise into creating Sparky and Juna,” Gelissen says:
“We will formally introduce them before summer next year, when the area opens.”
Avalon and Port Laguna
The Avalon area opened in 2018, along with Port Laguna:
“Avalon is the most heavily-themed area in the park,” he says. “Port Laguna is our entrance area, where we do shows, and where we have a lot of food and beverage. It’s a really cool environment to be in. Avalon is themed around Merlin and the Middle Ages. It has a boat ride, Merlin’s Quest, which is really accessible, low profile, and an easy ride, and it has Fēnix, a B&M Wing Coaster, which is quite tough.”
“We are now going to fill up the whole range in between, as we expand Avalon. There will be a lot of animatronic show effects, and all sorts of dynamic stuff that will make the themed area come alive even more, as well as a water playground and a toddler’s playground next to the Flaming Feather restaurant.”
The ten-million-euro expansion, which will improve the variety of attractions for a larger audience and increase dwell time, consists of four new main rides.
Pixarus: Flight School of Magic is a pendulum ride located in the middle of the helix of the Fénix coaster, while Dragon Watch is a drop tower ‘for all dragons large and small’, where guests will fall from a height of 17 metres. The Garden Tour takes visitors on a tour of Merlin’s garden, which is full of magical flowers and plants, travelling in carts pulled by giant bees, and Jumping Juna is a carousel attraction in which unicorn Juna and dragon Sparky are having a costume party.
Toverland’s visitors
In terms of demographics, Gelissen says, visitors come mostly from Holland, Germany, and Belgium:
“It’s around 60% from Holland, 25% from Germany, and 15% from Belgium. The focus is very much on being a family park. That’s how we want to be.”
In the long term, he says:
“We want to be a short-term destination resort. That’s our vision. We have purchased a lot of land next to Toverland. So, we have the space to expand on a large scale. We have a good location next to the highway, and we are in the process of obtaining all the licenses and permissions that we need to use the land for a theme park, and, for example, hotel or camping purposes. We are right in the middle of the planning permission process.”
He has been busy engaging with this process for the last two years:
“It takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, and a lot of research to do such things,” he comments:
“That is our long-term vision, and the first phase of that is the expansion of Avalon. Then, gradually, over the coming 20 years, we will grow into the short-term destination resort that we want to be.”
Surviving the pandemic
Reflecting on the challenges and the opportunities offered by the global pandemic, he says:
“COVID was quite tough. We had to close for six months in total over 2020 and 2021. 2020 was a particularly heavy year. We suffered financial losses, but we also lost people. It was an intense year because we had to find alternative work for a lot of people. It was hard.”
However, he adds:
“It also boosted our creativity and our energy levels. One thing that we did was to come up with the idea of a pop-up camp, which was such a huge success that we repeated it in 2021 and 2022, and are planning to do it next year, too.”
Future plans for Toverland
In the future, he envisages that theme parks will split into two distinct types:
“There will be the attraction parts that will focus on having the biggest, tallest, and fastest rollercoasters, but which will be much less focused on theming. Those are relatively easy to develop.”
“Then there is the type of park that we want to be, with the focus on the high quality of the experience itself, which allows people to enjoy the company they’re with, and to form authentic, happy memories.
“While the first category will focus on investing in the newest, fastest, biggest, and best rides, the second will continue to evolve, creating a better, more complex and immersive themed experience, that is cohesive in all its variables – the rides, good food and beverage, theming, the shops, the landscaping, the effects.
“It’s the interplay of all the aspects that makes a park a success.”
What makes the park unique
He finishes by highlighting one specific element that he feels really distinguishes Toverland from other parks:
“It’s our entrepreneurship. We are a family-owned business, we are ambitious, creative and imaginative. We come up with great ideas and are efficient in making those ideas a really high-quality reality. The new expansion, of course, is an example of this, but so is the way we run the park every day.
“Within the boundaries of the park, we create a completely different atmosphere during different phases of the year. In summer, we have the concept we call Summer Feelings. There is a lot of extra entertainment, a lot of extra shows, and expanded opening times. The whole park has a celebratory summer atmosphere.”
“At Halloween, we have immersive Halloween theming, and five really high-quality different experiences. It grows every year. Now, we are right at the start of our new winter concept, Winter Feelings. It’s an idea that we had about a year ago, and it has already become a reality with huge ice tracks, a lot of extra shops, a tubing course, and a curling course.
“The way we transform the park from one setting to another for different times of the year is really cool: it sets us apart, and is very good, of course, for, our visitor numbers, because it creates a sense of urgency, and people want to come to us several times a year.”
