Tick-It! Trak Pro Case Study

Super Splash Water Park Super Splash Water Park
1616 Longoria Road
Edinburg, TX 78539
 

Super Splash Vital Stats:

Capacity 'Limitless' General Admission
Typical Season Late Spring, Summer and Early Fall
Special POS Needs Ticketing, Validation, Concessions and Gift Shop Sales

A Brief History of the Park
Super Splash Water Park first opened in July of 1998 as a municipally run facility.  After failing to meet projected attendance and revenue projections, the park was closed after the 2000 season.  It remained closed for nearly two years, re-opening in mid season of 2002.  (The park was closed from September, 2000 until June 29, 2002)

After being dormant for this span, the park was resurrected by Team Pro Parks, a San Diego, California based firm that specializes in rehabilitating under-performing amusement parks.

With a shortened 2002 season, and a very tight start-up budget, the original ProTix entry system was deemed too expensive to reactivate.  Super Splash Water Park turned to New Concepts Software, Inc for cost effective and innovative to restart ticketing operations using existing equipment.  With less than a $100 software purchase, the park was able to resume printing tickets with the park logo on their stable of rugged Boca thermal printers.  (That's not a typo, we mean one hundred dollars)  However, ticket sales, entry control and counting still had to be done by hand, as there was no budget for automating these procedures for 2002.  Happily, with belts tightened, the park managed to turn a modest profit for the 2002 season.

Mammoth River at Super Splash

New System for 2003

NCS Tick-It! Trak Pro

For the 2003 season, Super Splash Water Park agreed to become a Beta Test Site for NCS's new system, Tick-It! Trak Pro.  The Trak Pro system provided a Point Of Sale (POS) for serialized ticketed entry, ticket validation and redemption, census head counting and transaction reporting.  Even for Beta Software, the system was a big improvement over the manual counting system required in 2002, and it was deployed at a significant savings over reactivating the ProTix system.  Super Splash Water Park was able to re-use the existing Ticket Printers, Receipt Printers and Cash Drawers left over from the previous system.  The park's performance improved, labor-hours for ticket sales and reconciliation were reduced, and profits for 2003 were the best in the park's history.

Planned improvements for the 2004 season are:

  • Restoring communication with the Perey Turnstiles to fully automate gate entry and head counting.
  • Possible Internet Ticketing
  • More Detailed reporting and control of cashier transactions
  • More Detailed reporting for Marketing and Accounting usage
  • Weather Condition Logging for tracking Park Attendance vs. Temp / Rain / Etc.
  • Specialized Interface for the batch of leftover CCD Barcode scanners from the previous POS system.
  • Recording and Tracking Souvenir and Concession Sales with Tick-It! Trak Pro
  • Improved Wiring and Communications of POS Equipment throughout the park

Epilogue:

Sadly, the Super Splash Water Park is no longer in operation.  Team Pro Parks sold the facility and its equipment to the area's largest water park competitor, Schlitterbahn, a far larger and nationally known amusement park.  Schlitterbahn then dismantled Super Splash, cannibalizing rides and equipment for their park on South Padre Island.

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